Hey, podcast listeners. Happy New Year. I'm on maternity leave, but I recorded a few interviews before the holidays that I'm excited for you to hear. We'll be playing them throughout the month of January. First up, my conversation with Esther Perel. Enjoy.
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This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, a renowned couples therapist on how to figure out what you're actually fighting about.
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Esther Perel is the most well-known couples therapist in the world. She's written bestselling books about relationships and infidelity. She's given TED Talks with tens of millions of views. And she has a podcast, "Where Should We Begin?," where you get to hear her sitting down with real couples, helping them work through their issues.
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He thinks he's been the one saying to you always, things will be all right. I'll take care of it. If you want to bring back the mature adult woman you just met, mediated by the affair, you need to tell him, let me take care of you.
Yeah, and even if you don't ask, now I have more material to see what's going on. I can make that step without me waiting for you to ask.
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Part of what makes Esther so good, so talented, is that she's got this almost surgical precision in being able to identify what's really driving a fight.
I'm not so interested in what you're fighting about. Kids, money, sex, in-laws, work. But I am very interested in what you're fighting for.
And she says what you're fighting for is often not visible.
It's underneath. I feel like I'm in the sand and I'm digging underneath, but not just for the sake of digging, but for the sake of change.
It's this skill of hers that makes listening to her work so engaging. It almost doesn't matter what the topic is in any particular session. You'll end up hearing some lesson, some takeaway, that relates to your own life and your own relationships, romantic or otherwise. Season six of "Where Should We Begin? With Esther Perel" is out now, with a new subscription through Apple Podcasts that gives you access to exclusive content.
In my conversation with Esther, we talked about how she approaches her work, what she sees as particularly challenging about relationships today, and her tips for working through disagreements. And be sure to stick around to the end of our conversation when you'll hear Esther give me some advice about my relationship.
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I'm a narratively inclined therapist and so for me, I am very much focused on relationships and relationships are stories. When you pick a partner, that partner comes with a history, comes with a cast of characters, comes with a plot, comes with a crisis, comes with all the elements of a story. And sometimes the story is a Greek tragedy, and sometimes the story is a tragicomedy, and [CHUCKLES] there's different types of stories. And sometimes they're stuck in the story.
They are trapped in the dominance of the singular narrative, the singular story. And when you help people experience something new, behave differently, change, relate differently, you're changing the story. One move. It's like in a movie, one move, "Sliding Doors," one move, and the story unfolds completely differently. So how do we rewrite a different story? How do you want to edit the story? How do you want to make that your own story? And so I think in these terms, and they're evocative.
Mm. You know, there's something else that I've heard you comment on, and that's this idea that our expectations of our partners today are perhaps just too unrealistic. That we all set this was very high bar, especially this is kind of Western society mostly that I'm talking about, but that the idea that your partner needs to be everything, needs to be everything to you. Can you talk about this idea and how you think so many people have arrived here?
Here's what I think happened in a very short amount of time. For a long time, coupledom, marriage, which was primarily to create family, was a production economy. We will have children, we will have companionship, family life, economic support. And then from a production economy, our relationships became a service economy. We will have also love and affection and belonging and trust. And that service economy was the rise of romanticism and the rise of individualism.
And then we began to go even further and we created the identity economy. Now I'm going to meet one person to help me become the best version of myself. And I'm going to find a soulmate, the one and only. And what you find is that we want one person to give us companionship, economic support, co-parenting, intellectual equal, best friend, confidant, passionate lover, and we also hope to find that person on an app. And the unprecedented expectations come also with unprecedented disappointments.
So the best relationships of today, says Eli Finkel in his book, "The All or Nothing Marriage," the best relationships of today are often much better than the relationships in history, because it's fantastic to be on top of Mount Olympus. But not everybody gets there. And so that's where people become very disappointed. And that unprecedented set of expectation, one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide, gets met with another ideology, which is the right to happiness.
Which happiness used to be for the afterlife. And now it's not just an option, it's a mandate. I deserve to be happy. And so if I deserve to be happy, I don't make so many concessions around the expectations that are not met. And then added the next thing is that we lack the skills. We lack the skills to actually help us climb this beautiful mountain of modern love.
Well, so how do you… when you recognize that that is maybe the dynamic at play when you're speaking with couples, how do you coach them? How do you guide them through recognizing that that might be an idea they're holding in their heads? And what is the idea that you try and move them toward?
A question that I like to ask is basically mining for the origin story. How did you meet?
Yeah, I've noticed you do this a lot. Usually at the very beginning, usually right off the bat.
It tells me a lot. Of all people, why her? Why them? You know, what was it that drew you to them? And in what way do you see your partner completing you? What is it that your partner brings to you that is their proclivity that matches your vulnerability? Because I am very much a thinker of complementarity in relationships. Not of difference, but of complementarity.
The differences, when they work well together, they create a tremendous sense of complementarity and interdependence rather than a standoff. So that's a question that often helps me in writing the story. What did you see?
And often you have the themes of complementarity, a very common one is one person is experienced as solid, one person brings structure, stability, reliability, predictability, and the other person is more of the person who is fluid, exploratory, discovery, maybe risk-taking, and adventurous. And these two basically represent the two fundamental sets of human need, security and freedom. And so they often are represented by the characters in the relationship.
And that often leads you to notice that there is one person that is often more afraid of losing the other, and one person that is often more afraid of losing themselves. One person more in touch with the fear of abandonment, and one person often more in touch with the fear of suffocation. And so how do they play around that difference? What is the complementarity? It's a major theme of exploration for my work.
What kinds of scenarios or types of conflicts do you find personally most challenging to work with?
It's not the type of conflict. It's the way that the couple is organized around the conflict. It's the transaction around it. It's not the topic itself. I mean, look, there are three main dances in conflicts in couples, right? There is fight-fight, fight-flight, and flight-flight.
When you have the fight-fight and you have escalating couples that in a split second, you have 20 years of their relationship thrown into the sentences and everything that one person says makes the other person say something bigger and nastier or more demeaning, and at the end, you have two people who sit there at their extremes, completely polarized with a huge polluted space in between, it's a challenge.
It's a challenge because they fight like they have nothing to lose when they have everything to lose. But they're dissociated even from what is important to them, for example. So those kinds of situations you have to be very clear, very proximal, very involved and really be an orchestra conductor. And you stop-- You have a baton and [CHUCKLES] you gently save people from themselves, from destroying themselves, from destroying whatever is good between them.
Those types of situations can be really difficult. But so are the ones on the other side, where you have two people, and they raise an eyebrow, and you see the contempt, and they have that smirk, and you see the dismissal. And contempt is a bad one.
It's flight-flight. Yeah. People who are just facing opposite sides.
Yes, yes. And they look at each other and say, "You continue, you want to talk, you talk. I have nothing to say. I really don't see the point. [CHUCKLES] I'm so long gone." You know, it's the invisible divorce that lives in the room as Megan Fleming calls it. So those are challenging too. You know, it's challenging when people are so defensive that they're really not able to take any accountability.
Like, I'll say nine things, and then you'll basically pick the one thing that you can have an argument with the one thing you disagree with. Why don't we start with the one thing you actually think I have a point? You know, why don't we look for something that we connect on?
Is that one of your tools, that you look for something… you try to start by pointing out a point of agreement?
Yeah, in this situation, if I say to you everything, I tell you everything that happened, and then you say, "No, it wasn't Wednesday."
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Does it really matter? "No, it was Thursday." Does it really make a difference? Like, what are we talking about? So, you know, then I just say, it's fantastic. Your partner said A, B, C, they came home, they tried to engage with you. There was no acknowledgement. And the only thing you find to say is that they have their dates wrong. It's so interesting. So, you try to-- yes, you create a bridge.
I mean, basically, when people are disconnected and ruptured and in a state of breach, you look at what is the bridge that you can create, where potentially each one will go and look what's on the other side of the bank.
Well, let's talk about some of the specific stories that we hear in season six of the podcast. There's an episode that I listen to called "Tell Me I'm Not Alone," where you speak with a heterosexual couple. They have a 10 year age gap. The woman in this couple had an affair. And the way that she describes it, hearing her talk about it, she describes it as a way that she was able to think about herself in a different way, establish her independence in a different way.
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But I think it changed me by making me be more in myself, in a way. I don't know if that makes sense.
Yes, it does. And who is the woman that's come home?
Now? I think it's a woman who knows how to be [CHUCKLING] a woman.
Say more.
It's a process, so I know it's like the beginning of the road, but there's a confidence and a kind of assertiveness and a more presence as an individual in the relationship and not just the mother of or the wife of.
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And you say that that's pretty common in affairs, that you have this person who feels good about what they've learned about themselves through the transgression, and also feels terrible about how it hurt their partner. Can you talk a little bit about how those two things can exist at the same time?
A sentence that I began to hear a lot when I wrote "The State of Affairs," which was the culmination of a ten-year exploration of infidelity, is that people would say to me, "It's not that I wanted to leave my partner. It's that I wanted to leave who I had become. It's not that I was looking for another person, but I was looking for lost parts of myself." Which meant that the relationship, the extramarital relationship, was not a reaction to the couple, but an internal yearning and longing.
And I began to understand that some affairs, because there's many different types of affairs, are often about that yearning and that longing. And that that does not preclude at all, at the heart of affairs, you find often yearning and longing, but you also have betrayal and violation of trust and a breach and hurt. And these two are existing at the nexus of this very, very complicated thing called affairs and infidelity.
People, if they have the capacity to say, you know, what it meant to me is this but what it did to you is something completely different, and I get it. You know, it also offers a much better avenue for repair. So it's very important.
One of the most important diagnostics for couples recovering from affair is the ability of the person who transgressed to be able to express guilt and remorse for hurting the other person, even if their relationship on the outside made sense to them or was important to them, or was revelatory to them, irrelevant of that. Inside this relationship, it destroyed something so fundamental. Can you attend to that? And the ability to do that is one of the most important things in the repair experience.
I'm guessing that a lot of the reasons why infidelity might be one of the stated reason why people have arrived in front of you to talk about something, probably they're there because of the infidelity, but because they want to work through it. They intend to keep the relationship going and they want some advice and help and how to do that. But I imagine that there is a lot of different endings to an infidelity story.
Do you ever find yourself arriving at a different conclusion than the couple sitting in front of you about what the best ending might be for them?
Yes, you know, people come to the therapist sometimes because they want to work on their relationship, sometimes because they want to tell you that they went to a therapist to work on their relationship but they actually were on their way to the lawyers. So what people say isn't necessarily what they do, and what people do isn't necessarily what they say. So that's the sleuth work of a therapist is to find out why are you here? Why are you really here?
And what is it that you really want me to do? You know, a lot of couples therapy is often a drop-off center. It's one person brings the other and says we have a problem and my problem is my partner so fix it and I'll help you because I'm an expert on what's wrong with my partner.
And what people think they're coming to work on isn't necessarily what they're going to end up doing because you may have an understanding that actually what is holding them back, what is standing in the way, what is hurting them both, what is the source of conflict is not exactly what they see.
And this is where maybe another line you have heard me say, because it is also a guiding principle for me, is that when I see people and they come in with a story, my goal is that they leave with a different story. And that means that I infuse hope. I infuse possibilities. I make them see this completely different of what they thought it was because they're so certain, and certainty is the enemy of change. And it's a host of elements that you put together to decide where is this couple going.
And some people will stay together and bite on a bitter bone till the end, but they can't be together, but they can't be apart either. They never trust each other again. They live in a marital cell and the crisis and the breach lives at the heart of their relationship and they have no capacity to forgive or to take responsibility or to work it through, to resolve it, to just make a decision about it.
Other groups, you know, they decide that they want to put this whole thing behind them and they want life to go on and they want to regain their stability as fast as they can. And for other people, they understand that the crisis is also an opportunity, they say, this resets the whole scorecard of the relationship. Many times you will see today in the West that we will have two or three relationships in our adult life. And some of us will do it with the same person.
But your first marriage is over. Or your first relationship is over. And those people use the steam of this crisis to redefine themselves, to decide what is the effect of the affair on the relationship, but what will the relationship do with the affair? And what importance it will give it, and what meaning it will give it in the long history of two people.
Let's talk about another episode, another story that we hear about. This one, the episode was called "Donor Daddy." You speak with a heterosexual couple where the man donated sperm to a friend who ended up having twins. And he not only didn't tell his wife about it, he lied about it when she asked him about it. And the couple had had a very happy relationship before this happened.
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Our relationship, it's been fantastic. It's been great. Two weeks before, a week before, the mom had texted to reveal this, we were having the discussion laying in bed, like, are we really this lucky to have this good of a life?
We would say that probably every other month. We would have a moment of "I love you so much. We're so lucky." Which is part of the confusion for me to realize I was being lied to all of that time when I was so emotionally intimate with him. That moment felt so pure and perhaps it was. But if this huge weight was on his shoulders and now he's feeling such relief, that makes me believe that it must have still been on his shoulders when he was pretending like everything was great.
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Tell me a little bit more about what you were thinking about how to help this couple think through this.
It's a very, very special session and very moving. And she's… I mean, they're wonderful people, but she's phenomenal in her ability to hold multiple parts. Secrets come in many forms. This is 12 or 13 years later. This is not like a few months after. And you have your life and you say, we have an incredible life together. And at the same time you ask yourself, who is this man that I love so much?
And she has a degenerative illness at this moment and he's taking beautiful care of her so she depends on him as well. She doesn't have the same freedom to make decisions that she would have had a few years before. And so she tells him, who are you? What can I believe? What other bomb are you going to throw at me? And how do I combine that with the fact that we have a very beautiful, rich, loving life? And without my having to second guess myself.
Yeah.
Now, the reason I say the secret is like a mushroom is because when I hide something from you, and I don't want to tell you where I was between four and six, then it becomes more difficult for me to tell you where I was between two and four. So I start to delete more pieces and more pieces. And the more you live with secrecy, the more the secret grows in the space and takes room in the relationship. And secrets are a host of-- It's a huge topic in relationships.
It's a huge topic in families. It's intergenerational. It's a whole legacy of what secrets do to people, all kinds of secrets. Secrets make people doubt their sense of reality on the other side. Secrets breed conflict, and secrets when they are revealed, who says who to what, when and how and for what. [CHUCKLES] So they have a life of their own and they are one of the most important ingredients of relationships and conflict in relationships.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, another thing that you said, though, i in this particular episode, you talk about how the ability to hold these contradictory feelings about a person is a sign of maturity. It's a sign of mature love, of healthy love, even. Can you say more about that?
Yes. Because we do, we inhabit multiples and contradictions. We love somebody for something and we can't stand that same person for something very different because in a relationship, intimacy lives side by side with closeness and distance, with disgust and attraction, with excitement and boredom. And you live in these dualities with anger and connection, with rupture and repair, with aggression and softness.
I mean, the layers of a relationship is our ability to fully experience those contradictions rather than to shut each time one out to kind of living with a cancel culture inside ourselves. If I have this, I can't have that. How can I feel this and that at the same time? Because that's what it is, "both and" rather than "either or."
Yeah, that is to be human, right? [CHUCKLES] Is to have all these contradictory thoughts and feelings at the same time. Well, I would really kick myself if I had this chance to speak with you, Esther Perel, and not ask you for some advice personally.
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So I want to tell you about something going on in my life.
I've been feeling it the whole conversation. [CHUCKLES]
I'm pregnant with my first child. So my husband and I are just a few… We're very close to becoming parents for the first time. As we've gotten closer and closer to the due date, we've heard so many stories, and I would say a lot of warnings, from totally well-meaning friends, couple friends of ours, about how having a baby means that the relationship is gonna be rocky for a little bit. It's a very challenging time for a couple.
So I wanted to ask you, what advice do you have for me and my partner, for couples like us, right when they become parents for the first time?
Yes. Having a child is a redistribution of resources, time, money, attention, touch, sensuality, you name it. And in the beginning, it is absolutely normal that all that attention will be drawn away and onto the child and shared, the pleasure will be shared. So it's true that there is a statement that individual happiness often increases and relational happiness plummets. And it demands a lot of attention. It demands real, careful, deliberate attention to not let the couple die on the vine.
Especially given that today the survival of the family depends on the happiness of the couple.
Yeah, yeah.
So the couple that gives everything they have to their kids and leaves nothing for themselves puts the family at risk, not just the couple. That's something I tell lots of people because there is an unprecedented child centrality at this moment that really demands for the people to abdicate of themselves at a level that has reached an apex of folly. Now you know what I think.
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And so to do that, to have the couple maintain itself, the most important thing I can say is find a community.
Find a community?
Find a community. Don't go at it alone. This was one of the most depleting things that you see around you is that many people, when they have a child, they become isolated.
Yes.
When in fact this is the time when they need the most support, other adults, other conversations and all that. So find a community of a few other families, begin raising your kids together and share childcare and share different responsibilities. And if you can be in proximity geographically, share food stuff and weekend activities and all of that. I can't tell you how much of a difference it makes.
Hmm. Oh, this is such different advice than what I've heard. I've heard so many people focus on very literally this idea of you're keeping your coupledom strong. So like, take date nights and things like that. I've heard a lot of that kind of advice, but I haven't heard people frame it as much around just greater community, the need to find a larger community.
I can't emphasize it enough. It is an experience that you go through with others. And by doing and having the multiple, you get anchored, you get a reality check, you get support, you get people who are sharing some of these transitions together with you, and you get adult time, and you get a sense that other people care about your kids. That you're not the only ones who have to be there responsible and with your love and your attention. And that liberates you
when you know that they have other people. I don't know what kind of extended family you have around you, but if you do, involve them, and if you don't, create a family of choice.
Mm, mm. Oh, that's such great advice. Thank you so much.
You're welcome.
I wonder if as a couples therapist, you ever feel the pressure of speaking to people at what feels like a very high emotion, critical point in their relationship, and they might be feeling, and I don't know if you feel this as well, that you really hold their futures in your hands. How do you think about the responsibility that comes with your work?
I think you have a lot of responsibility. It's a both end actually here too. On the one hand, people will do whatever they want to do. Whatever you say to them, they'll do what they want. On the other end, don't ever underestimate the power of what you say. Don't underestimate it and be aware of how sometimes people come in a real state of fragility. And a slight blow can make them go in this direction or in that direction. So it's very important to take a moment to listen, to listen, to listen.
To listen for what's said and to listen for what is not said. I'll lead you and I'll lead you to take responsibility and I'll lead you to experience as much freedom as you can so that you can make a choice. But I have very, very clear that I don't live with the consequences of the decision. Only you will. Physically, you will. I can be next to you, but you're the one who will. And for that, you sometimes sit with people for years until they make certain decisions.
But what I can is offer you a witness, a caring, deliberate, attuned witness.
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Thank you so much for this entire conversation. It was really a pleasure to speak with you.
Same for me. Thank you so much.
You can listen to "Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel" on Apple Podcasts. You can find a link to it on our show notes page. And if you're enjoying this show, "Apple News in Conversation," please take a moment to follow us on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review. Thanks.
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