Esther Perel || Love, Eros, and Infidelity

modern relationships. In this episode, I talked to Astaire about love and relationships, especially in the age of a global pandemic. Astaire also offers her perspective on how to keep passion alive during your marriage, as well as affairs getting to the root cause of why people cheat. We also tackle the essence of the words arrows and freedom, and we touch on the topics of soulmates, affairs, masculinity, and Estaire's

practice as a cross cultural therapist. I've been looking forward to this conversation with this Stare for years, and I'm delighted to finally be able to bring it to you all. So, without further ado, I bring you a Stare Perrell. Start It's so great to chalt you today. I've been looking forward to this for years. Actually, it's pleasure to be here. You patient. You've been very patient. I have been, and you know, my mom told me patience often pays off.

So I'm very excited to chat with you. Why is woman? I remember at the American Psychological Association conference, we were also captivated by your keynote. We were at the front row, and we we came up to you afterwards this couple of years. I don't know if you remember this, and we're so we you know, we didn't expect, you know, you'd actually show up, but we're like, oh, we just wanted to invite you to our our division ten social, you know, for our arts thing. And then you came in.

I think with your you believe that you're you're you came in with your husband, and we're like, oh my god, is there to our to our social You You made our lives. So I just want to thank you so much for your great viciousness over the years. I'm very happy when I make the right decisions at a certain point and someone reminds me and it was just like a small thing to do that other people remember so I like when I thought, well, yeah, I really really

made our lives, so thank you. So I want to start off by asking, you know, really, how are you? You know, how are you during this pandemic? How's it affected you as a therapist, as a human? I think the best way I can answer you is to tell you that when I was looking for the topic of our annual Sessions Live Virtual Training conference, which is our fifth and I was thinking what is on the mind

of therapists today, mine and everybody else. I'm a practitioner, I'm you know, I am leaving the parallel experience that a lot of my clients are experiencing. And I really thought, here it is the great adaptability. How can we stay grounded when the ground is moving? And the way is how can therapists and clients stay grounded when the ground is moving? Because I was feeling well, okay, fine, but unmoored. I felt like the structure of my life has so

fundamentally changed and it ain't going back. I felt that by not being able to go home for two years to Europe, you know, so many things have happened. I felt that parts of me that come alive in those other languages when I am in the other parts of my life have been completely dormant, and I thought, what

is my adaptability? You know, how do It's no longer coping just coping and waiting and adjusting to the It's really what is adaptability going to look like for me and for my field and for all people working in the field of relationships and well being for that matter. So that's how I'm doing. I'm thinking about adaptability. I'm thinking about mass mutual reliance. Who have I reached out to, who has been a part of my circle? And what has happened to so many that I have not been

in touch with? And I'm thinking about the concept of post traumatic growth. At what point we do? What do we learn from here? And how will it actually strengthen me and strengthen my children, my partner, you know. So that's how I am doing. It's a I translate often what is happening to me, and then I look, am I alone? Or is this actually quite reflective what many many friends and colleagues are going through? And then I name it in my professional life, but in fact it's

a reflection of my own internal life as well. Yeah, wonderful, you know. My author Jordan Feigel and I wrange a book on those traumatic growth right now, we're going to transcend. We're actually we're actually undercut, you know about transit. We're actually have a contract to write a workbook which will be out next year on the post pandemic growth. That's a follow up. And so this topic is right on fresh in my mind, and well it's on the stress

on everyone's minds right now. And you know, I'm just wondering from a therapy perspective, you know, do you with relationships and working with couples, have you how's the nature of some of your ideas you talked about in the past kind of need to be adapted for pandemic eraror where couples are together so much that it's hard to get that mystery that you talk about in your in your books, you know, that excitement, that unpredictability. So what

do we have right now? Right? I mean, I'm going to continue it in the framework of the conference because I literally had to articulate it for myself, that very question that you're asking me. Right, So, social connection at

this moment, it's three parts. I'm thinking about intimate relationships because that is the essence of my work, the relationship between the client and the provider, the practitioner, the therapist of all sorts, and the relationship of the therapists in their own personal life with their partners, with their romantic partners, or with their friends, family, etc. So it is a

triad going on. You know, there's eighteen months of prolonged uncertainty, mixed with grief, mixed with loss, mixed with a fundamental shift that we have to make away from silo driven lives approaches and therapy for that matter too, to a collective perspective, to a pluralistic perspective, and pandemics, like all disasters, are relationship accelerators. They basically put you in touch with mortality. They put you in touch with an existential fragidity, the

fact that life can change at any moment. Your house can burn, your land can be flooded. Here you know, your health can be destroyed overnight. And when you are in touch with mortality, you say life is short. And when you say life is short, you say what is important to me? What do I want? And what do

I no longer want to live with? To endure, to tolerate, to do in my life, etc. And so that's what happens to relationships at the same time as people have spent more time with their families and partners than they ever have in decades. And at the same time that I say that you cannot ask one person to give you what an entire village should provide, that's exactly what happened. People go home with one person that was supposed to

replace everybody. And there is a lot of upheaval going on in relationships at this point, for those who have been together the retrofit and for those who are just starting out and trying to understand. So it's a very

interesting thing. At the same time as we have this enormous uncertainty and overlapping global crisis, we also have glimmers of clarity about what really matters for us in life at this point and what we need to do to protect our relationships, to invest and replenish our relationships, and to stay connected. It is what occupies me on a

personal level at this moment. It's what occupies me with sessions live at this moment kind of in the thralls of this because I think that is so much going on relationally speaking, in light of what we are going through Yeah, for sure. And I really like this that you mentioned that our priorities have shifted in a lot of cases. You know, in your book Meeting in Captivity, you ask the question can we desire what we already have?

And it seems like this question takes a different little bit of a different flavor during the pandemic, because we might have a lot more gratitude for what we have in a way that we never had before. Maybe we realized we took for granted our relationships right in some ways. So the second part of that sentence in Mating in Captivity was to say, you never have your partner. It's an illusion to think that they belong to you. At best, they are on loan with an option to renew if

you act towards your partner. You know. So in this moment, some people are more grateful and realize, you know, you're here today. I want to savor I want to savor us, my family, what we have created together, et cetera. And in some other situations it is there is a deadness that and languishing the name that the word that Adam grants so put back in the public space here that

I can no longer tolerate that. There's what I call the death of ros, the death of the energy that fuels us with the liveness and vibrancy and vitality and life force that it has to do with playfulness and curiosity and imagination and meaning and the poetry that comes in our relationship. When that whole thing is gone and people start to feel like I'm just a function, what do we have together? I don't exist for you as

a person. There's a lack of care, there's a lack of fundamental interest in who I am, and vice versa. So you have both things going on in this moment. It's not just I'm grateful for what I have, it's also I realize what I don't have and what I no longer can want to live without. Sure both are possible, even simultaneously. Yes, yeah, yeah, you've got a push pull and you know, like I love you, but I also missing out on all those other stuff. So you've mentioned

that the erotic is the antidote to death. That's a really profound statement that I want to unpack a little bit, especially in the pandemic kind of situation. What is the erotic mean? First of all, you know, I get a sense. You know, you're using it in a sense that's broader than just penetrative sex. You know, there's a there's a's a whole spirit, it's a whole way of being, in a kind of humanistic psychology or from sort of era kind of way. So I'd love to hear some of

your thoughts that so. I you know, when I think of my definition or not my definition, when I think about the way I define the erotic, I think about the Zohar, the Jewish Kabbalah, I think about the mystic sense of the word. I think about Audrey Lord and her writings about what it means to reclaim, a process of reclamation of one's ability to experience pleasure and dignity and connection and control. I am really not talking about it in the most narrow sexual sense that modernity has

given the word. It's a word that really needs to be resuscitated in its full meaning. Heros is life force. Heros is what makes you feel alive. You know, if you want to look at it from the sexual point of view, people can have sex and feel nothing. Doing it doesn't tell you anything about the experience, but the quality of the experience. The poetics that you're attached to it. That is what makes it erotic, that aliveness, that feeling touched,

you know. So this is true in marriage too. You can have a marriage that isn't dead, and you can have a marriage or a relationship that is alive. And that aliveness has to do with how people preserve a touch, a contact with curiosity, exploration. It is the antidote to death because when you are curious and exploratory and discovering and playful and imaginative, you feel like there is still so much to learn, to discover and to live. That makes it the antidote to death. Death is when there

is nothing more. Heros makes you feel like there's still so much to live, to breed, to connect with people, et cetera. The notion that the eros is an antidote to death or deadness is that you feel in touch with the erotic when you experience whatever it is that you do with what is called flourishing or flow or aliveness or radiance. All these words you know, and they have to and they come with power and dignity and self love and connection to others. They are quite all encompassing.

And so that's what I talk about when I talk about how do we connect to the erotic? How do you take a routine and turn it into a ritual. How do you take a touch that is just a touch and you turn it into a touch that comes with pleasure and joy, that is a switch from ordinary to erotic. Yeah, I love this. I love the way you say situated within the idea of vitality, but also imagination,

the human imagination. This is an area of mutual interest of ourns and I really loves the humanistic psychotherapist role mains work. In his book Love and Love and Will You Know, he talks about errors in Love and will is the human imaginations, such as a part as part and parcel of it. You know that we can kind of you know, sex, he said, pulls us but imagine,

but erros allows us to think more forward looking. We're the ones that are kind of moving looking forward and with hope and vitality, whereas sex and lust is we often feel like we're being driven by it, you know. So I just always really resonate with that kind of distinction. Have your past. The Mexican essayst also says, you know, sex is the pivot, It's the natural instinct. But Eroticism is sexuality that is socialized and transformed by the human imagination.

Now you ask about this in relation to the pandemic, I would say this freedom in confinement comes through our imagination. When you see little children play during this pandemic, and at some point they take out big boxes of Amazon and these boxes become hots, and then they take books, and these books becomes rocks in the river. And now they're going and their playing, their imagination has taken them out of the lockdown. When you can't leave physically, you

can leave with your mind. This is what I learned from my own parents, who spend years in concentration camps during the Holocaust, and I understood that idea that you lift yourself out, you liberate yourself through your imagination. You know, poetry is to prose the way that eroticism is to sex. I love that well. I find a lot of your writings is very poetic, even just in the kind of cadence and upon which you write. It's it's beautiful. Thank you. Yeah.

Can we can we double click on the word freedom. This is a very interesting word because I think a lot of things that people in relationships think will bring them freedom once they try these things, they actually they wonder why am I not free? Why do I not Why do I not feel free? You know? So some people with like avoidant attachment style, for instance, may fear a relationship or fear anything that makes them feel like they're boxed in in any sort of way, because they'll

say it'll, you know, takes away my freedom. But you know, often a lot of people the avoidant attachment style feel report feeling lonely, and and some not always and I was in the case, but sometimes they report feeling lowly and report feeling well, you know that I still don't feel free, you know, I still don't feel completely free. So what are some misconceptions about this idea of freedom

and relationship? Like, you know a lot of people have these kind of misconceptions that you know, you're you're only free if you know you can sleep around with as many people as possible, or you're only free of xyz. What are some kind of misconceptions about that. It's a

complex question, you know. I think that the best way I can answer this is to go back to the spine of the book Mating in Captivity, because when it really looked at and I borrowed it from loads of people, but in particular I was very much influenced by the writings of Steven Mitchell. Can love Lass, but so as rolland Bacht, so you know a few others. But we have two fundamental sets of human needs all of us.

We have a need for grounding, and we have a need for travel or we have a need for security, safety, predictability, and we have a need for exploration, novelty, change, curiosity, freedom. All of us have both. But some of us come out of our childhood wanting more protection and more commitment, and some of us come out of our childhood wanting

more space and more freedom. We tend to partner with somebody whose proclivities match our vulnerabilities, so that the solid will often meet the liquid, the structured, the ground that the anchored, you know, will be drawn by the curious, the traveler, the ulysses and you know, and then the ulysses will find that there is something very reassuring being with someone who is structured, who is reliable, responsible, et cetera. And when this works in a complementarity, it's a beautiful fit.

Often it becomes challenging as well in many relationships, so freedom is, you know, the dance between autonomy and togetherness, between separateness and connection. You need both. You needed to feel a modicum of groundedness and something to come back to the safe harbor in order to be able to leave and to feel free. But the freedom is not the leaving. The freedom and this is the important freedom in the realm of sexuality and desire that I was

trying to articulate. The freedom is that while I'm away, I'm not busy worrying about you, being anxious for you, constantly fretting about how you're going to be when I come back. It's not hard to leave physically while you take inside of you an entire worry machine. You know. The freedom is to know that you are okay while I am doing my thing. That's a freedom in relationship that I don't have to give up chunks of me in order to reassure you, because my freedom is your insecurity.

What happens a lot these days in our field is the focus went from the humanistic work after the war that was very much focused on looking at freedom. Freedom in the existential sense of the word that came with responsibility. That you know, freedom was never a carelessness. And then we went and we put an entire focus on the attachment, and the notion was that a secure attachment will create

the ability to experience separateness. But separateness is what will create the ability to experience an ability to surrender to one's desire. The interesting thing is that you cannot. It's a real contradiction. How at the same time freedom implies responsibility, and at the same time, a certain kind of freedom implies a read them and a release of the responsibility.

It's both. And yeah, that's it's really true. And just you know, bringing this idea of this idea that this romantic notion that love should not should not require work, that if it's if it's meant to be, it shouldn't require work. Well, I think role Made did a good job just spelling that. And and love and will that the human will does is an important part of it.

And you know, I read somewhere that you said you've been married for thirty years and or at this point it's more than thirty years, and and and it's it's it's still has taken a lot of work, right, I Mean, there's been moments where you know you have to you know, you show, you have to reveal that. You know, there's

the imperfections of each other. I mean there's you know, and and I think what I really liked about when Rol we talked about is he said, well, that's you know, you need in order for errs to happen, you need to give it time for those those things to be resolved, for there to be an unveiling, a real revealing of each other's real self or else, you know, errors doesn't develop. And I just want to know Clorf on that idea a little bit. If you want to play piano, you

will continue to practice playing piano. You can call it practicing rather than working at it. You know, the English American English is often talking about the word work because it's very Protestant influenced in that sense. It's work. You could call it creative work. You could call it active engagement. You can call it investment. You can call it pruning, caring, watering. You know, basically, it's paying attention, it's nurturing it, it's

feeding it. It's not letting it just die there and agonize, you know, in a complete dry land or in a pool, you know, in a cesspool, one or the other. So it's there is not another area in life where people don't think that. In order to stay nimble at some it the man's paying attention, bringing new things, refresh, renew, reset, you know, except in love, because this notion of which it just should happen, it's part. You know. There are two main approaches that Justin lie Miller was talking to

me about. One is the destiny model of relationship. It's meant to be. It's kind of falling from the heavens, you know, divine intervention. It just is, I don't have anything to do with it. It's so. But then when it doesn't go well, then you say, just the opposite, It wasn't meant to be. It's fate. It's destiny. That's very different from the growth model. The growth model is I make it happen. We make it happen, and sometimes we fuck up, and sometimes we just let it become

lazy and complacent and we forget about each other. And every relationship is going to go through dips at some point the only difference is that some of us kind of get in gear and start to resuscitate, to infuse it back with life, with joy, with laughter, with attention,

you know, with good food, good relational food. So it's very very interesting, and it goes together this idea about it doesn't it shouldn't be work, it should just be and errors should just flow from the heavens, you know, while you know, like like while you're folding the laundry for that matter, right, goes hand in hand with the search today of what we call the soul meat. Your partner in many circles today is seen as a soul meat, a saltmate that you find, of course on an app

And what's so fascinating about that? The young analyst Robert Johnson talks about it very beautifully, says, there is a kind of a confluence between the religious and the relational. Today. We look in relationships for ecstasy, transcendence, wholeness, meaning that we used to look for in the realm of the divine. A soulmate used to be God, not a living human being, you know, And so we're looking to relationships what we

usually used to look for in religious life. And once you have that relationship with a soul mad, you think that it should that sort maid knows you inside out. You don't have to explain anything, you know, that's all made is an extension of you is you know, spiritually connected to you, and you know that is not what goes on in most relationships. That's just a fiction. So why do people in happy marriages? Why are people still cheat? Why do people in relationships that are deeply nurturing and

satisfying continue to long for other things? If you change the word for a moment, you see, you know it is what they do to the relationship and to their partner. If you talk about what they do for themselves, they will talk about at the heart of infidelity, you will find lying, duplicity, betrayal, cheating. But you will also find in those relationships that you just mentioned, specifically in what we call the happy marriages, longing and loss and yearning.

And I think that the best sentence I could come up with when I talked with so many people who said I love my partner. This is ten years of research with people who kept saying I love my partner, that I am very happy here, I don't want to

go anywhere else. But and now came the second part is that they didn't want to leave the person that they were with, but what they really yearned for was to leave the person that they had themselves become wow, and that it wasn't that they were looking for another person as much as they were looking for another self or or other parts of themselves that they had completely left aside for decades. The majority of these people have been faithful for twenty years easily. So these are not cheaters.

These are people who cross the line that sometimes they themselves never thought they would cross. And so then you ask for a glimmer of what, why would you risk losing everything that is so dear to you for what? And what? And that is back to your question about heros Is that the most common answer I get people write to me from all over the world, And this is not to promote or to justify or to minimize

the effects of infidelity on a relationship. I want to be really clear, but I had to understand why people did this. It's not just to understand what it does to the people who are hurt by it. I felt alive, I felt alive, I felt un aliveness I hadn't felt in years. I didn't know this still could happen to me, and it had had not much to do with sex. They may have been sex involved, but sometimes there was no sex involved at all, there was a sense of

a liveness of touching the essence of things. It was a real existential quest. Actually, it had very little to do with the partner and very little to do with the relationship. This is one particular type of affairs that is very different from the multitude of others. But if you ask me about affairs in happy relationships, this is probably one of the one of the more accurate descriptions

I have gleaned from my conversations. Kind of keeps our roads, keep going back to errors there and the vitality in what ways do you think an affair can be good for a marriage? Maybe by helping people reclaim their sense of errors. I mean, it's not the affair itself. Sometimes it's the affair itself. A person suddenly is woken up again and just you know, come and brings that energy into the relationship. But that doesn't happen always or often

for that matter. It's the aftermath, you know. It's an affair is not good for a relationship, But good can come out of an affair. Let's put it this way, okay, And what it does is it topples the scorecard in the relationship because basically, an affair is a resounding no, I don't want to go on like this, this for the rest of my life, this for another twenty five years, no more. And sometimes it relieves the other person to say I want more too. You think I'm just happy

like this with the life we live. I think I didn't want to re experience ABCD, you know. So it topples the scorecard and it allows people to do a

massive reset. It allows people very very often that I can say is often to have conversations with the level of truth and honesty that they haven't had in years because the whole thing that they were trying to protect has fallen apart anyway, so now they can finally dig It allows people to reconnect with their sense of desire and they're real wanting to connect with the other person

rather than complacency. It jolts them out of their complacency and they realize what they can lose and that they're going to have to really become much more active participants if they want this thing to remain alive. So all of that, it allows people to change fundamental roles and inequities in the relationship that we're no longer tolerable. It allows a reset of the power dynamic, because it's not just that the person who hasn't cheated is the good

partner just because they haven't cheated. There's a lot of other relational betrayals in relationships. I think we have to really not just look at this as you know, this is the good person and this is the cruel, wrong,

liar cheater. You know, that is a version, but the majority of the time in most relationships, there are there is resentment, there is contempt, there is neglect, there is violence, There is a lot of other relational betrayals that non cheater you know does can't really claim moral superiority because of that if we are really honest, when you are in the muck of things and you talk with thousands of couples who are grappling with this infidelity, so what

other goods can come out of it? You know, I've been trying to tell you something for a long time, and this is the first time you're actually listening. Because it's often easy for us to say to the person, why didn't you talk about them this? Why didn't you bring it up? You think people haven't brought things up for decades, But the other person wasn't interested in changing. I thought you were scolding me. Tell me, I'm channeling

every conversation that I've heard. You know, it's like and I hear it's like you know, no, I did try to tell you and this. It took this for you to actually listen. You know, you haven't touched me in fifteen years. I'm not talking having sex. You haven't touched me. Put your hands in my hair, stroked me, caressed me, held my hand, gently kissed me, looked at me in

the eyes. You know. Now, you may be a very nice person, and you may be a responsible provider, and you may, but I am dying inside and I just couldn't believe that I would live for another twenty years and never be touched again. You don't see me. I walk around you in every attire possible. You don't see me. And there is no orientation and no gender who can claim priority on this one. These are collective statements. So it's that kind of yearning. And those people don't necessarily

want a divorce. It's you know, it's easy to just say why don't you leave them? They don't want to leave because there are other parts in the relationship as well. But someday this part comes out and says, I can't,

I can't continue like this. So when these conversations come out and the other person can hear it, and when the person who has hurt can really show the remorse and take the responsibility and and reinvest in the relationship, there are the ones who have been able to really make good of it will tell you that their relationship is better than it was. They wish they didn't have to go through this, but they definitely feel like this took them to a place that they would otherwise not

have gone. Post traumatic growth. You know, we need to coin something post in fidelity growth there we just coin something. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, that's it's wonderful to hear you know, your own, your own stories and experiences people. And then you also have this podcast where people can listen in to live sessions. Boy, that is such a great idea. Where did you get

that idea? My mentor, Salvador Minuccin said to me there is no better theater than couple's therapy, and he wanted to try to write plays about couples and it didn't happen. In the end, he didn't write those plays, but I felt the same. I just thought, this is the truth behind closed doors. There's never been more expectations about romantic life than we have today. And couples have never been

more isolated than they are today. And your best friends can divorce and you never never saw it coming, and nobody and people wonder all the time, you know, am I alone? Is this happening to other people too? And talk about in fidelity? Nobody will talk about it and talk about sex and nobody will talk about it. So you never know what happens behind closed doors. And I just knew I couldn't work with patients. I could bring

patients to conferences, but I couldn't. So when Audible approached me, they originally wanted me to do a kind of a he said, She said, similar to the Showtime series The Affair that I had been a consultant for. And I said, but that's not how couple's therapy works, at least not in my office. It's not a hehi or a he he. It's not that binary like that. It's much more feedback loop. It's what one person says that that brings the other

person to do something that then makes them reacting. You know that Figure eight like that, and I said, I really would like you to watch, to watch, to listen, actually to a session, and you tell me, But I think that these are some of the most powerful stories one can tell. Relationships as stories. Part of my work is to help people write a new story together and

then to edit often what they are writing. And we did one episode and we are now and it became where should we begin live Coppos therapy one time three hour sessions with anonymous couples that will never be my patients. And we are now in production of season five and a number of these episodes do touch on the subject of infidelity, but not only it really covers a wide range. This week I'm doing my first episode on friends who

were estranged, so I'm interested in other pairs. And then I decided that I would do how It Work, which was the same model, but instead of just looking at romantic pairs, I would take colleagues, co workers, family members who work together, same model, intensive three hour, one time session. And it became, you know, it was the first of its kind and went all of it became a public

health campaign for relationships. It became a democratization of couple's therapy for people who can't afford, don't have access, and are in all kinds of parts of the world where none of this happens. And it became an educational technology on relationships of one model. You know, it's just this one therapist here doing her best. Yeah, well sounds Spotify, it's anywhere where people listen to podcasts, and it really

distigmatized therapy and especially couple's therapy as well. It really it created a conversation in the society at large, and then came, you know, with the pandemic and teletherapy. All of this now is then can the couple's therapy showtime series? Now is scenes of a marriage? I mean you can see that people are deeply interested in this unit called the couple that is meant to accomplished so much and

is often under resourced. And in the United States of America it also is meant to be a welfare state of too. Well, this is interesting. Let let's let's doublequick on this idea of monogamy for a second. You know, some people say it's just it's not natural. It's just you know, from an evolutionary point of view, and and a lot of people are experimenting with alternative things, open marriages, polyamory.

I'm you know, I'm personally I'm I'm a big believer in whatever works, you know, for a couple, if it works for both of them, or or more than a couple, whatever works for whatever number of people are in a polyamorous relationship. I'm just wondering, you know, some of your thoughts and some of these alternate marriage have you seen

them really work in great beautiful ways? Have where some challenges you've seen and people who are in these kinds of lifestyles that come to your practice these sorts of things. So maybe a place to start is to say that I don't think as in monogamous, and then non monogamous or polyamorous. Polyamorous is a whole range of different relational arrangements too, and monogamous are often proclaimed monogamy and clandestine adultery. So I think that we have to really unpack a

little bit. Marriage has changed throughout history. Marriage has always been an economic enterprise. It was primarily monogamy was an imposition on women so that the men would know who are the children that they need to feed and who will get the cows when they die, or the goats or the camels. You know, all over the world. Monogamy

had nothing to do with love. Monogamy was an economic arrangement and we didn't since we didn't often know paternity, it was a way to ensure no knowledge of paternity. Monogamy has always been one person for life, and today monogamy is one person at a time. So the word monogamous has fundamentally changed meaning too. I think that when we bring a more socio cultural understanding to these words, it changes the way we practice. So, you know, so we ask people what is your arrangement? How do you

define loyalty and how do you define fidelity? Because you can be loyal and not faithful, You can be loyal, faithful and non exclusive. So what have been your definitions around these words. In the past, they were defined by the constructs of primarily religious institutions. Now people need to

define these by themselves, so it demands a conversation. Unfortunately, in many couples, particularly in heterosexual couples, monogamy is discussed only as there has been a big crisis monogamy has defined as sexual exclusivity because monogamy can be defined in various other ways too. So when you say alternative. It's alternative to what This invites a lot of assumptions about very defined concepts. We are today exploring multiple new models

of relationships. We have not eight to ten children, we have one to three to none. That is a very new relationship. You know, when you are farmers with eight kids for which you needed to have ten because students survive, that made for a very different marriage. When we have contraception, that makes for a very different marriage. When we make for women who work outside the house and are also material providers, that changes the gender roles. When we have

queer marriages who can also have children. So I look at the whole question of boundaries and sexual boundaries and emotional commitment inside marriages as part of this greater exploration in which people want commitment and they want freedom. This is the fundamental thing that has happened today is that we want both. We want the stability of committed relationships, the continuity, the sense of belonging, the rootedness, the loyalty,

the reliability. And we also have redefined sexuality that is no longer for many people just a pro creative model of sexuality, but it is sexuality as a property of the self as an expression of lifestyle and forms of connection, and from that place one wants to negotiate that sexuality is not just going to take place with one person, or even that love is going to be more communal, and we are going to create new forms of extended

family and communal living that call polyamorous. When we look at it from that angle, we are much less judgmental, We are much more curious, and probably we are more helpful with many of our patients because it invites them to tell us the truth so that we can actually work with them. So when you ask me, can they work? Yes? But the interesting thing is one doesn't ask does monogamy work or do traditional marriages work? You know? Do they work so well? You know? And what do we mean

by work they lasted for thirty years? And does lasting just mean the only marker of success longevity or are we looking at the quality of the relationship. So what

makes relationships work is the same everywhere. Respect, dignity, the ability to listen to the other person, to value the other person, to feel valued in a relationship, to experience growth and hopefulness together, to be able to deal with the crisis and the losses of life together, and it has no difference if you are doing this within a context of monogamy or sexual excs u civity, or if you're doing it within the context of a long distance relationship,

a single parent family, an accordion family, a blended family, a queer family, or a polyamorous family. Excellent point. Excellent point. I have some friends in the polyamory community and they really wanted to please ask this question. Please ask this question because I'm not an advocate. I mean, it's gonna It's like when you say this, it means that you're pro or against or not. I'm just saying, you know,

in the there is no one size fits all. And if we are going to be therapists of the moment, and we're and therapy is meeting the moment, this great adaptability that we are talking about. You have this conference

that I'm planning that is now in November. It is you know, looking at what has happened to relationships when people had to really be you know, resources could bring in the grandparents, couldn't bring in childcare, couldn't bring in friends, couldn't bring in all the people you know, with in that context, let's talk about you know what makes for a good relationship, What makes it work? What made it work in this moment? What do we need at you know?

What will change? You know, I think that therapists sometimes would would it would be very good to be in conversation more with sociologists and anthropologists and theologians. M you know, you need to bring back the world into the conversation and not just you know, I'm going to stop here. I love what you're saying. You know, you have described yourself once as your therapy approach is akin to that of an anthropologists and explore, So it sort of is

how you see yourself. Can you kind of unpack why why both an anthropologists anthropologisan explore. I'm a systemically trend therapist, and I may have been I was strained psychodynamically as well, But I arrived in America in the heydays of systemic family therapy and kind of found myself there. If I had come years later, I may have been, you know, inducted into IFS or into EFT or any of the other schools that proliferated later. But what I do know

is I'm a cross cultural therapist. I mean, it's not just that I speak nine languages. I do different therapy in the different languages as well, I talk differently about the same topics. There are different values that people bring as they talk about relationships, parenting, children, death, money, illness, communication, closeness, transparency. All these words are culturally embedded. They have cultural resonance, and with culture comes class and race and history, et cetera.

And therapy that was systemic invited that like today, you cannot do therapy without thinking about the racial reckoning, about the public health crisis, about the climate despair, about the economic beheavors. I mean, if you just stick to the brain and you don't bring in the larger, overlapping global crises that are affecting people's life and sense of hopefulness. When we work these days, we are working a lot

about hopefulness and anxiety and despair. These things are not just happening because people inside are feeling low self esteem or just because they've had trauma. It's because the world they're living in is scary, and so that's the anthropological perspective. It's bringing back this is what you know. My whole training on sessions is about it's a salon. I bring sociologists clinicians, trauma experts, so that we have a conversation that is broad enough that it can help us meet

the moment, rather than coming from one particular approach. What I probably say when I do the anthropological view is to challenge the individualistic, silo driven therapeutic approaches. I think that that's where where today. Maybe it's very very important,

but we need the other view too. This is not that or that is that we need a therapy that encompasses, you know, the issues and if you work with refugees, and if you work with trauma victims, and you know, if you work with the large things that are entering our office at this moment, you need to have a cultural framework and an anthropological framework absolutely. I mean I was really interested to see that you started off in immigration,

studying immigration, very interested in identity, issues of identity. I was worrying how you brought some of that earlier expertise to the work you do today. I mean, you talked a little bit about that already, and glad you're so. I started out looking at cultural transition. What I was fascinated was how do people experience cultural transition? And I looked at the two groups that move the most these days,

refugees and internationals, forced migration and voluntary migration. And then I looked at mixed couples, interracial, intercultural, inter religious couples, and families of all orientations, you know, who also are in cultural transition, but it lives in their own living room.

And then I looked at technology, and that is another cultural transition, relationships mediated with technology, and so I'm very interested in how that changes the way we think about ourselves, the way we think about how we connect to others, the way that we straddle the continuum between autonomy and interdependent dance, between self reliance and loyalty, between an an individual oralistic orientation and a more collective orientation and more

interdependent which is what we really are looking at right now. We have a whole day at a conference that's about mass mutual reliance. How do you make that shift? And that shift has to take place in therapy as well. When people talk about resilience, they have to be able to talk about what is collective resilience, what is collective trauma that mandates collective resilience that goes along with mass

mutual reliance. That's a real different paradigm shift than the way that we have developed, you know, and these two conversations are happening side by side in our field at this moment. So I have been a translator. I have often thought that when I would write about a subject, I should start to go and see how do other disciplines write about it. When I do supervision groups, I have people from every discipline are multidisciplinary groups, so that

we continuously have one case five approaches. And that has to do with the cultural transition. It's really to know that there is never just one way. Once you've traveled one time to another place, you know that there is another way to do things everything. There's another way to deal with the baby, is the food, the job. That multiplicity of perspectives is something that really came from looking at these cultural transitions and how we interact with them.

Why did you start working with couples? Like, when did that transition happen? I started with groups. I totally started with groups. I started with groups before I can to the United States. I was doing what at the time was called you know, inter racial groups into cultural groups, race relations, you know, political groups that came together, conflict resolution,

all of that. And then when I was. And then when I came here, I had looked at cultural, racial, and religious identity, and somebody said, would you like to come work at a ninety second Street. Why we have a whole program for mixed couples. Basically what they were saying, would you like to look at diversity in the bedroom? And it made it made total sense for me. So I was training in family therapy. Couples therapy at that time was not really central. It was a little bit

of stepchild of family therapy. And I began to be interested in couples because I began to see that couples was becoming the most important unit of the family. In the traditional world, the family is more important than the couple, which is, by the way, part of why infidelity does not necessarily become a leading cause of divorce, because preserving the family is more important than your individual response to

a couple's crisis. As the couple became more important, and as you can literally say that the survival of the family today in the West depends on the relative happiness of the couple, nothing else, not even the kids. Kids may delay, but that's it. Couple's therapy became like this is the central unit to work with, and it is very difficult and challenging and fascinating and endlessly renewing. I mean you, it keeps you very humble, It does absolutely.

Have you done any readings of Urban Yam's books and his stories, Yes, yes, yes, it's very close to my heart. He was on this podcast recently as well, and I see some commonalities and your informative books for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, both of your sort of this great gift. You have to tell stories and in ways that really resonate with the deep humanity and all of us. It's beautiful. There's another topic I wanted to talk about as we near

the end of our conversation. You've talked about masculinity, and there's misconceptions about what it means to be a man in a relationship, and I'm wondering if you could kind of dispel some of those misconceptions. You know, what do you sort of see the men that come into your practice and how that might differ from some of the cultural stereotypes that exists. Maybe it's a place to start with be to say that it's not just in my practice, I have actually had the privilege of being the only woman.

If I may say, or the only identified woman to join men's groups for quite a while, I've spent retreats of three days where I am like an anthropologist, I'm a guest, I'm a witness to men's groups. So it's much more than just you know, I do have a very heavily male practice, and have had for more than twenty years. I'm practicing twenty five. But it's the groups

where I really have been very, very interested in. And I did a whole conference with sessions live on masculinity a few years back because I, well, because me too, brought all of that, of course in the open and mandated us to once again really discuss this. But also because I think that the lives of women will not change until the men come along and are given some of the same opportunities to rethink their condition, their expectations,

et cetera. And because I often think that we put a lot of focus on male power, and that in fact, I think we have more to learn when we look at what happens with men's fear of powerlessness. We never have to hear women be losers. Losers doesn't exist in the feminine, neither does emasculated exist in the feminine. We never have to tell a woman be a woman, show me that you're a woman. We tell men all the

time to man up. I think that you know what strikes me at this time when everybody is talking about masculinity from pop culture to politics, and question what masculinity means and how it affects us, and what are the roots of masculinity and how does it shape individuals and cultures and how has it changed across generations. For me, there's five dimensions around masculinity that I've been interested in, identity, intimacy, sexuality, power,

and trauma. And you know, a colleague of mine once said, if the twentieth century is the century where women made major changes, the twenty first century will be the one where the men adapt to the changes that the women have made. So it's an interesting thing to know that the feminist literature is unified by its sense of moral outreach over historical subordination and exploitation of women by men, But the men's literature is unified by a sense of

a crisis and of ontological anxiety. So when I try to understand what really is the thing that I own in I would say this, probably historically people have never really questioned masculinity men was a given, you know. Women were seen as basically men with genitals on the inside until very late, you know. But what we do know is that masculine is often a goal and a duty and an objective in most societies for boys and adolescents. We talk about masculinity as a man date, as an imperative,

you know, be a man, man up. And you have rituals in every society for men to go and prove their manliness. And if we're constantly encouraging and exhorting men to demonstrate mandliness, then maybe it isn't as a natural as we that would like to think. You know, even in the absence of femininity, one doesn't doubt the identity of women. But that's not the case for men. Being a man requires an effort that doesn't necessarily translates to the life of women. Women rarely here be a woman,

you know. The female is seen as kind of natural and unavoidable, and masculinity is seen as something that is hard to develop and easy to lose. And so that's why I'm interested in the feeling of powerlessness, in the loss of identity, in the fragility of masculinity rather than just focusing in the obvious privilege and power of masculinity. That's such a good point, that's such I love it.

You know, this idea of impotence in men doesn't just exist in the bedroom, but you know, the feeling of impotence in one's a man's own personal life and the pressures they may have to succeed and dominate the competition. You know, not just in the bedroom, but you know, in terms of competition. I just love what you're saying. I love it so much, so important. Let me end this interview today with a question for you, a personal question.

If you were to imagine telling your own story of the Great Adaptation to your great great grandchildren, what would you share. Learning to live with uncertainty or accepting the uncertainty of life is something that I probably grew up with and that I think my kids may have true epigenetics really absorb, you know. I do come from a tradition, from a family history where we you know, where my family lost everything, everything and everyone from one day to

the next. And so the notion of entitlement of this is mine, of this is going to be here forever. I never grew up with those ideas. I always thought that whatever you have today can disappear any moment. On the one hand, I think it has given me a sense of dread and existential anguish that I've had to learn to live with. On the other end, it has

made me very adaptable. I am sure you know. I don't just speak the languages, many of them because I love languages, it's true, but also because in a way it allows me to enter different places and to blend and to be a part of even if I don't belong, I can be a part of. And I think that all these messages of the Great adaptation of how you look around you ground yourself in the context. You get a sensu as to what is the lay of the land. You don't stay focused on your siloed views of what

is normative. You think in plural terms. You become a bridge person. You see who you can say what too, and parts of you will live with different people and in different situations. I think that that's how I would describe the great adaptation. And with that, when you live with uncertainty, the fact is you can't do it alone.

That by definition, uncertainty mandates mass mutual reliance and interdependence and collective resilience, which are ideas that I live in my personal life, ideas that are part of my family life, They're part of my professional and intellectual interests, and they are very much at the core of this conference that I'm doing in November, because I think that this is not the first time. You should not pretend that this is the first time the world is in an upheaval

and we don't know where we're going. I think we were maybe a bit hubris the thing that we did know where we're going. I probably would say that my great adaptation is often building within uncertainty, that this is a given. It's a given in relationships, it's a given in life. Security is often an illusion. Now that is a worldview. You aspire to it, but you know that it fundamentally exists, but can also disappear. Yeah, we've seen that so clearly this past year and a half. So

delightful to chat with you. I'm so glad we finally got a chance to have you in the Psycholoic Pie, which want to wish you well with all the many exciting things you're doing. We didn't even talk about your game. I want to wish that well, your new game, your Sessions Live which we did talk a little bit about the conference, and your podcast, your book, and just want to thank you for your existence in this world. Thank you, Thank you so much, a pleasure. Thanks for listening to

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