Reignite Your Relationship: Esther Perel On Desire, Intimacy, Sex, & Long-Term Love

Esther Perel is a renowned psychotherapist, bestselling author, and host of the groundbreaking podcast “Where Should We Begin?” This conversation explores the vicissitudes of modern love and Esther’s non-judgmental approach to relationships, emphasizing the tension between our need for security and our yearning for freedom. Through her uniquely multicultural lens, she highlights how our increasingly atomized world impacts intimacy, desire, and human connection. Along the way, Esther expertly deconstructs my own marriage dynamics, offering insights that left me questioning my paradigms around love and partnership. Esther’s work is vital. Our exchange might just change how you think about connection. Enjoy! Special Note: If this resonates, check out her newly launched The Desire Bundle—and use code RICH15 for 15% off through December. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Bon Charge: Use code RICHROLL to save 15% OFF 👉 boncharge.com AG1: Black Friday deals & more 👉drinkAG1.com/richroll On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style 👉on.com/richroll Eight Sleep: Use code RICHROLL to get $600 OFF Pod 4 Ultra 👉eightsleep.com/richroll This episode is brought to you by Better Help: Listeners get 10% off their first month 👉BetterHelp.com/RICHROLL Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:06Speaker 01

  A lot of conversations about sexuality, especially in the United States, is either smut or sanctimony. It's rarely just a natural conversation, an amazing window into the self. You can ask a couple, "Do you still have sex?" That's not the same as, "What is the role of sex in your life?"

• 1:24Rich Roll?

  My guest today is Esther Perel, a psychotherapist, a bestselling author, and one of the most prominent and original authorities on relationships and sexuality. Esther is fluent in nine languages. Her TED Talks have amassed over 40 million views. Her mega bestselling books have been translated into 30 languages, and her podcast, Where Should We Begin?, is a fly-on-the-wall immersion into her doctor-patient experience.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  In a long-term relationship, everything that is spontaneous already happened.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  If you keep doing the things you are comfortable with and you enjoy and they are familiar, you strengthen the friendship dimension of a relationship. But if you say, "I want to feel alive in my relationship," then you need to do something different than just the familiar and the cozy.

• 2:13Rich Roll?

  This is a conversation about modern love. In candid terms, we discuss sexuality, dating, navigating conflict, and how to maintain or resuscitate sexual desire in long-term relationships, a topic, let's just say, demands a certain level of vulnerability on my part. Before we dig in, Esther was kind enough to offer all of you a discount on her newly-launched course called The Desire Bundle. Enter code RICH15 when you sign up at esterperel.com and save 15% now through December 2024. Esther is amazing, and I think you'll find this conversation is packed with priceless, actionable insights.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Sexuality is a window into a person and into a relationship. People think of sex as that something you do. You have sex, rather than it's an experience. Where do you go in sex? Tell me how you were loved, and I will tell you how you make love.

• 3:11Rich Roll?

  Esther, it's a delight to meet you. Thank you for doing this today. I'm excited to talk to you.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  I'm pleased to be here.

• 3:17Rich Roll?

  How was your event the other night? You had a big Los Angeles live event as part of this ongoing tour that you're on.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. So I'm on my first US tour. It's an immersive experience with thousands of people. And now I'm starting the West Coast. And I've been very used for so many years to be in my office behind closed doors and four walls in a very quiet, confidential space. And then I decided I wanted to open the door and lower the walls to my office and invite people to actually come into the office and hear what are the stories and the transformations and the challenges that people experience there, because most people have no idea what's really happening in the lives of others.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  And then I thought, how about if I take the office outside and take it with me onto a stage and I recreate a communal experience?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Of people about relationships. And so that's what it is. And here we were, you know, almost 5,000 people. And the most beautiful compliment I can receive is when people said, "It felt like we were in the office with you." And I just thought, okay, that's exactly what I wanted to do. And so it's very moving.

• 4:40Rich Roll?

  That's no small feat to be able to create something intimate in a room that large with that many people. Like, how do you even approach that to make it interactive in a way where everybody feels like you're talking to them and you're part of just, you know, some version of that one-on-one experience?

• 4:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I would want to say you should come to know. I mean, unfortunately, it's totally sold out. But it's about creating interactions in the audience. It's about finding out who are the people who came by themselves and know no one there. And then making sure that the people who are next to them introduce themselves. And you create connection in the here and now rather than just talking about connection. You make it happen. It's about finding out who was dragged there and kind of showed up as a plus one, but knows nothing about my work and is wondering where the heck did I land? And just acknowledging them, because I have a tremendous amount of respect for skeptics and for people who are in this space

• 5:43Speaker 01

  who this is really not their natural vocabulary. It's about asking people if they are in a relationship or if they would like to be in a relationship or if they would like to be out of the relationship that they are in, or at least on occasion. Which I am too. And I think that kind of establishes a level of honesty. We're not just here to talk about perfection. We're here to talk about the real-life experience of something that we all share. We are all born in relationships. And we all have legacies. And we all want to find ways to connect with ourselves and with the other. And I create a host of different interactions. I make people talk to strangers.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  I play the card game with the audience. I do a very long Q and A. It's half the talk, half the evening. And the Q and A is not just a question answer. It's really a way of weaving together the most important concerns that are available that evening.

• 6:46Rich Roll?

  You take all the questions sort of in a row, right?

• 6:48Speaker 01

  I take about seven or eight.

• 6:49Rich Roll?

  And then you kind of find ways to tie them all together into some kind of unifying principle.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Yes. I think that unifying principle or the communality, sometimes this question is formulated very differently, but it actually goes at the same thing as that question, which was asked from a completely different point of view or starting point. And in fact, both questions are aiming at something that is shared. And when you recognize that, you also create connections between people who didn't even know that they were thinking about the same thing. So you're weaving not just the questions together, but you're creating a community of questions.

• 7:29Rich Roll?

  How do you describe what it is that you do as a psychoanalyst? And perhaps, what do you think it is about your approach to this world that makes you unique and different?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  I think it's two different questions. You know, I'm not a psychoanalyst. I'm actually a systemically trained family therapist. I have had a predilection for working with couples, even though I see families and individuals. And so I more and more define myself that I primarily do relationship therapy. The world of psychotherapy is vast, and this is one area that I'm very much interested in. I think that I follow the trajectory of colleagues and teachers who all look at relationships in context. So we're looking at the socio-cultural dimensions of the relationship. We're looking at the family legacies that influence the relationships.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  We're looking at the interpersonal dynamics inside the couple. And we're looking at the intrapsychic or the intrapersonal aspects into the individuals. It's four levels. It's multi-level. Michel Schenck, M. Salim Fano Manu, I mean, people who really were major influences on me. So it's not a very narrow lens. It's a very layered, you know, lens. And that's something that I prefer to ask people. Why do you choose me? Why do you listen to me? Or what inspires in what I say? Or in what way did I change the way that you dissolved your relationship? Or the way you allowed yourself to stay in your relationship? I mean, I think it's difficult to identify oneself. You know, what I hear people tell me.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  I think I have a very multicultural perspective. I speak nine languages and that probably have been around the world. I work globally. I understand that you don't look at relationships dogmatically, but you really look at them contextually. I think I am a rather non-judgmental person. I think I like to look at a question underneath the question. I think I bring humor and creativity and curiosity to my work. I see psychotherapy as an art. I continue to practice. I practice two days a week. I think it's very important to stay close to the craft itself and challenged, because it's not an easy work.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  I think that I have a capacity to connect the dots of what I think is happening in society and how that influences what's happening inside your sheets, underneath your sheets. I mean, it's kind of macro, micro.

• 10:08Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. I think that that last piece is... Yeah, no, I think that last piece is, for me, what makes your work so palpable. I mean, I think there is a certain kind of non-judgmental joie de vivre that you bring to it and a playfulness also to this landscape that is very inviting, because it's intimidating and it's scary. And we're all, you know, consumed by guilt and shame and fear and all these things that are barriers to even beginning the discussion or the conversation around these topics. And you create like a permissiveness around that, where it feels like a welcome mat as opposed to like a danger Will Robinson sort of sign. But all of it pivots around this idea of kind of navigating

• 10:51Rich Roll?

  the vicissitudes and the landmines of modern love. And the word "modern," I think, is very important in there. So, you know, how do you think about modern love as opposed to kind of love how we've always sort of conventionally or traditionally understood it? Like, what's different about this moment or these times that make love perhaps a little bit trickier and more complicated to navigate? At least, and I guess I'm speaking to a predominantly Western audience?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Yes, but the romantic ideal has penetrated every small corner of the world.

• 11:26Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  So even though, that's what's quite interesting. Literally, as you're asking the question, I have like four different answers that...

• 11:35Rich Roll?

  Maybe I could do like your live event and ask you like 10 questions and then you figure out how to synthesize it all.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  I would start, actually, with highlighting what I think is a very important change that occurred around the realm of relationships, period. For most of history, relationships are organized, and when I say "for most of history," it's in comparison to here. For most of history, and still today in many parts of the world, and as I say in my audience, and probably a lot of you sitting right here, relationships are organized around loyalty and community, around duty and obligation.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  There's a lot of structure, there's hierarchy that describes to you what are the roles, the expectations, the gender roles, and there's a lot of certainty and very little freedom and very little personal expression. And relationships are tight knots from which you don't extricate yourself very easily. And we move to a model where structure is replaced by network, and the relationships become loose threads that you can fluidly go in and out of. And we have unprecedented choices and options. And now, at the heart of relationship is the individual. And this individual is in search of community.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Previously, there was in search of personal freedom. And at the heart of this individual are his or are their feelings. And the dominant feeling is the feeling of authenticity. And authenticity is being true to myself. And in the name of being true to myself, today, we forego relationships. To not betray me, I will leave you. And we have never been more free, and we have never been more alone, and we have never had more uncertainty and more self-doubt. So that's the ground

• 13:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  of modern love.

• 13:44Rich Roll?

  Does that make you reflect on past paradigms of relationships with a sort of rose-colored glasses?

• 13:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 13:54Rich Roll?

  Like, was it better?

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 13:56Rich Roll?

  I mean, obviously, we're talking about, to drill down on it, it's like, okay, in the past, relationships were about class structure, they were about power and security, arranged marriages, et cetera. You know, they were political and the furthest thing from, you know, kind of freely chosen or about romance and love, right?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Well, romance and love existed. Passion has always existed.

• 14:20Rich Roll?

  Sure. But that wasn't the reason to get married.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  But it took place outside. No. But, no, I don't at all. I think I certainly wouldn't want to go back to the situation of my grandmother. So that is, it's very simple. No, I think we have, when I say unprecedented choices, I cherish them, I value them, but I'm also aware that they come with a set of consequences. Modern love exists against a backdrop of emotional capitalism, where we are constantly urged to maximize and optimize our choices, where we end up sometimes evaluating ourselves as products, where we have to deal with comparison as the thief of joy, and where we partake

• 15:03Speaker 01

  in a frenzy of romantic consumerism, where we sometimes are afraid to commit to the good for fear of missing out on the perfect. And we want to find a soulmate on an app. This is modern love. And this soulmate, by the way, which has always been God, until now, is now a person. And with this person, I want to experience wholeness, and belonging, and meaning, and ecstasy, and transcendence, all stuff that we used to look for in the realm of the divine. And all of this is changing the definition of modern intimacy. Modern intimacy is no longer about "I come to you with my diary and my herd." Modern intimacy is "I come to me with my interior life." And I'm going to communicate with you.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  It's a communicative experience. And I'm going to open up and share with you my fears, my vulnerabilities, my aspirations, and you are going to reflect back and validate me, and momentarily help me transcend my existential aloneness. So, modern intimacy is "into me, see."

• 16:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's a lot. The degree of difficulty is insanely high.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:12Rich Roll?

  And the level of pressure that is shouldered by

• 16:15Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 16:16Rich Roll?

  not only the seeker, but, you know, the sought, is equally insane. And this is all set against a backdrop in which our culture is increasingly secular.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 16:26Rich Roll?

  We don't have our religious traditions to look for the divine anymore, so we look for it in other individuals, and, you know, particularly or acutely...

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Individuals and psychedelics.

• 16:35Rich Roll?

  Yes, that's a newer thing. There's something acutely American also about the individual, like, sort of, reigning supreme, right? It's all about me, what I need, what my needs are, and my individual happiness. And there's a lot that gets then projected on the sort of romantic candidate to fulfill a number of categories, to be kind of worthy of playing that role.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  You want the list?

• 17:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, let's hear it.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  So, I want all the things that I have always wanted, that we have always wanted in traditional relationships: companionship, economic support, family life, social status. But I want you to also be my best friend, my trusted confidant, my intellectual equal, my efficient co-parent, my fitness buddy, my professional coach, and my personal development guru.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  And on top of all of that, I want you to be my passionate lover to boot.

• 17:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  For the long haul, by the way, and that long haul keeps on getting longer.

• 17:39Rich Roll?

  It's amazing that any relationship survives this, you know, list of requirements.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  But many of them are crumbling under the weight of the expectations. I mean, this is an overburdened system with an under-resourced reality since the traditional support systems are not in place. And this is one of the challenges of modern love.

• 18:00Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Point.

• 18:01Rich Roll?

  So, I mean, that's like, how to even begin with that, right? Like, so how does one who comes to you, who is in a relationship dilemma? I realize this is very general, but.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  What's the first thing I say about this?

• 18:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like, okay, so here's all the things. Here's all the expectations that each person has on each side. There's no possible way that two people coming together are going to be able to meet that for each other. So with the understanding of that landscape, how does one figure out how to reframe that or come up with a different paradigm that's going to be functional and healthy?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  I think one of the first questions I often ask is, who else is in your system? Who is part of this social system? A relationship exists in an ecology. It's an ecosystem. Who else is here? Who's there from the family of origin? Or from a chosen family? Or among friends? Or mentors? Or teachers? Who's supporting you? You know, when I officiate at weddings, which I happen to do sometimes, I say to them, you know, this is not just about we're coming to celebrate couple such and such.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  This is about you're offering your support as the witnesses to this couple for the rest of their life. Because every person at this wedding is thinking about their own relationship while you're listening to these lofty vows. So that's the first thing, is to help people to not think about their relationship as a story of two. That's a concept. That's a paradigm shift.

• 19:42Rich Roll?

  Thinking of it more broadly as.

• 19:46Rich Roll?

  A communal dynamic in which there are... It's a multiplayer game.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 19:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I never thought of it that way.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  And you may have all these needs. There's not... You know, people always say, "So after these long lists, are we asking for too much?" I say, "No, we're not." I think it's beautiful what we are asking for, but we shouldn't ask it from one person.

• 20:05Rich Roll?

  What about the people that are part of the relationship in shadow only? You know, the people that live in our interior lives, who might not actually be present.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Because they're no longer alive.

• 20:16Rich Roll?

  The residue of past experiences with these people tend to show up and impact relationships in ways that maybe we don't fully appreciate or understand.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Positive or negative?

• 20:27Rich Roll?

  Both.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  I think that is reality. Right? Everybody has had people who took care of them or raised them, or did not and should have. People have had people who have hurt them in the course of their life, and others who have inspired them, others who believed in them, even before they believed in themselves. Exes, lost children. I mean, we have a legacy, a relationship with loads of people who live inside of us. So they appear in different ways. Sometimes they appear with an acute sense of loss. "I wish my mother was here to see this." Sometimes they appear as a sense of hypervigilance. "I let my ex get away with that.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  I'm not going through this again." Sometimes they appear as a deep sense of longing. "Ah, I want to feel that freedom again that I used to have as a kid." So they're associated with situations, emotions, and often yearnings. Or yearnings to not repeat, or yearnings to experience some of that once again. And the most important thing about it is to be aware of it. I think the shadow people is our human existence. But sometimes we don't realize that there are shadow people. And we think that the way I'm responding to you is because of what you are doing to me.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  When in fact, I'm projecting onto you something that someone else did to me.

• 21:58Rich Roll?

  Right, of course. We all have those shadow people. And I think, I mean, that was very well said. My sense is that a lot of relationship difficulties could be avoided with adequate self-awareness on both sides of what you just said. And then also, being able to talk that through. Because both parties are bringing all of that to this equation. And unless the other side doesn't really understand all of that with their partner, that stuff's gonna come up and derail their relationship or create conflict where it's not even clear like why this conflict is occurring or what the way out of it is.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. But I think that, you know, I was answering it kind of as you were asking your question. I also think that one of the most important things that often is missing is a sense of humor, a perspective. Humor is a form of reinterpretation of what's happening. That's the perspective. And it creates a certain distance from it. It's a rewriting, giving meaning to something that is completely different than the literal meaning. And I think that what happens when people get into stalemates, gridlocks, impasses, conflicts, escalations, then you name it, they often become extremely concrete and

• 23:23Speaker 01

  literal and serious. And that seriousness is what leads them to interpret their stories and to hold on so tenaciously to their stories as if it is the truth. Relationships have stories.

• 23:40Rich Roll?

  Sure, but when you're in that reactive mode or that cycle of conflict and resolution, it's hard to hold on to levity and humor. Like, humor feels like a far distant thing that can at times seem impossible.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Yes, because you need to start much sooner. You don't do humor when you're already in the dark pit. You do humor when you say, "Oh, we've been there. We've been there so many." No, we're not going there. Come on.

• 24:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  You know, you want to do number 63 again?

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Number 63 is really a good one for us, no? And you join. You don't do sarcasm. You don't belittle. You don't degrade. You just say, "Oh, we are more important than just this. We're gonna do what, the toothbrush? We're gonna do this one, this fight, you know? Another one, every year the holidays come back and every year we have the same fight." And it's a kind of a, "Let's not go there." It's meant to be a self. It's not a diffusing. And it's meant to say, "We control the narrative" rather than the narrative controls us. When people come stuck, which is mostly when they come to me, the story rules them. They're no longer altering their own story.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  It just plays itself out in a split second. They hate where they are. They have no idea why they devolved there. What the hell is going on? You know, but they don't know how to get out of it.

• 25:10Rich Roll?

  The stories we tell ourselves about who we are and conversely, the stories we tell about who we think our partner is become so all-powerful, right? Like, "I'm this way because of this and here's what's important to me." Or whatever it is, it doesn't matter what it is. We all have that story.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 25:29Rich Roll?

  And those then become predictors of behavior and rationalizations and excuses and the like. We can point to our past and say, "Well, I did this because of this." Or, you know, "Here's my wound and you need to understand that." And a lot of these things get weaponized and projected onto our partners and become inflammatory rather than a roadmap out of it. Like, we become entrenched in these stories and then we just repeat these patterns that ultimately lead to the destruction of relationships in a way that... For many people, like, they don't even know how they got there.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  I mean, I often say, you know, that when I see people are stuck, stuck is made up of often two elements. One is trapped in increasingly rapid cycles of escalation of blame and defense, which means reactivity rather than curiosity and reflection.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  And number two is the story that people tell, which is that the story becomes very rigid and we hold on to it. And the story is made up of two cognitive distortions often when it gets that fixed. The first one is that we get caught in confirmation bias. Yeah, confirmation bias is that once I have decided that you don't care, or you're selfish, or you're a slob, or you really didn't mean when you apologized, or you don't value me, or whatever of those things, now this becomes the lens through which I see you. And I seek evidence that reinforces my belief

• 27:12Speaker 01

  and I discard evidence that challenges it. I have a whole course on conflict that I produced, and this one is a very, very big one, is to track yourself. What did I pay attention to? Sometimes I just tell people, I want you in the course of the next few days. I know what you focus on, I know what you see. I know that you also engage vividly in what we call fundamental attribution error, which means that I am complex and you are much more simple. If I'm in a bad mood, it's because, you know, something happened along the way and it really kind of influenced my mood today. But if you are in a bad mood, it's because you're just a nasty person.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  You know, mine is circumstantial, yours is characterological. And so then I give the framework. And then I say, now go out for the next few days and I would like to just for you pay attention and write down every little thing that you notice that your partner is doing for the good of the community, for the good of the relationship.

• 28:20Rich Roll?

  As a way of breaking that denial.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  That self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling idea, you know? Because it's tenacious, the way that the story wants to hold on. And so it keeps looking, you know? I mean, you never do this, you know? And this never means I would like you to do more. But when you present it as a fact, it's a pseudo-factual thing. And it's okay to say, I would like you to do more of X, Y, Z. But that's not the same as, you never do this. And if I tell you, you never do this, I promise you, you will find the one example to refute my argument, to prove to me that that's not true. Because what about six months ago when you did this?

• 29:03Rich Roll?

  There was a comedian, I can't remember who it was, but he had this great joke. It's something like, "My love language is my list of all the ways that you've wronged me." We hold on to that so tightly, you know? And we seek out evidence to support it whenever we can.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  That is confirmation bias, exactly. But you know, the interesting thing is that at the same time as people do that, they yearn for it to be different. But they don't know how they themselves are contributing sometimes to making it not change, not change.

• 29:51Rich Roll?

  I'm a long time in recovery. And as you know, one of the key tools in 12-step is performing the inventory, right? Which is basically like looking at your part in every equation and getting out of blame. And that is a very powerful tool in many contexts, not the least of which is this, like being able to step back and in a place of equanimity, like really get honest with yourself about the ways in which you're contributing to the unhealthy dynamic, to kind of disabuse yourself of that cognitive bias.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  But you know why it's so important? Porque una pieza es: "Tengo responsabilidad, soy responsable". Está bien, así que me he comprobado y aquí están las formas en las que creo que he hecho cosas que no son necesariamente útiles para nosotros, y aquí están cosas que creo que realmente quiero hacer o estoy haciendo que creo que son para el bien de nosotros. Perel más allá de eso, creo que lo que es tan poderoso sobre el inventario o la responsabilidad en su conjunto es que realmente es la base de la autoestima y de la confianza.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Porque dice, como dice mi amigo Terry Williams siempre dice: "Soy flaca, pero todavía puedo mantenerme en alto valor". Para tomar responsabilidad, no puedes sentirte culpable: "Soy un pedazo de mierda, soy una persona tan sucia". Tienes que respetar a ti mismo y tener dignidad, pero al mismo tiempo sabes que eres capaz de cosas asquerosas, perjudiciales, destructivas, crueles.

• 31:36Rich Roll?

  El espectro completo.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Y eso es lo que pasa cuando haces los inventarios, porque si solo dices: "Soy una mierda tan fea", entonces sientes tan mal por ti mismo que ya no tienes razón para estar enojada conmigo.

• 31:51Rich Roll?

  Correcto, pero también hay un tipo de narcisismo indulgente con eso. Exacto. Puedes ir diciendo eso a la gente y hay un aspecto de deshonesto de la actuación. Dices eso como si fuera algo sobre reafirmar cualquier visión de ti mismo como una forma de mantener a la gente a distancia o jugando a la víctima.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Básicamente, realmente no estás viendo al otro, todavía estás en el centro del universo.

• 32:20Rich Roll?

  Correcto, lo estás haciendo sobre ti mismo.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Es sobre ti, y es por eso que cuando realmente lo haces sobre el otro y lo tienes realmente, entonces la propiedad es libertad. Eso es lo que quiero decir con "Soy flaca, pero estoy alto y lo tengo, y al tenerlo..."

• 32:42Speaker 01

  I'm free. It's a very important concept. People think that by owning it, I'm the blame and I'm the bad person. No.

• 32:51Rich Roll?

  The way into that for me is to do my best to not get defensive, particularly in the heat of the moment. Like if I can just hear it out and take a beat and then reflect on it and say, oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I should look at that or let me look at that or tell me more about why you feel that way. Like from, you know, a 10,000-foot view, like if you can really extract yourself out of the emotionality, like the heightened emotionality. That seems to have served me well in those circumstances.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 33:24Rich Roll?

  Because our instinct is to just defend ourselves and get defensive and lash out and be aggressive. And of course, that just creates a downward spiral.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  But sometimes we come with a predisposition, a propensity for defensiveness. But sometimes we are defensive because someone is attacking us. And instead of them saying, you know, this for example, I wish you did more of this or less of that or acknowledged here or saw me there, we basically say, you never do, you never see, you never say. Nobody wants to be defined by someone else. It's a kind of a thing we want to have proprietary rights about is me. You don't tell me who I am. Stay out of that zone. And that's what triggers an instant defensiveness as well. So it's sometimes internal.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  I'm defensive because I instantly can feel bruised and criticized and et cetera, et cetera, and vilified and victim. And sometimes the defensiveness is relational.

• 34:24Rich Roll?

  Hmm. Isn't everything relational, though? Isn't this one of your big things? We are relationship animals. And although we reflect on ourselves and our own kind of like trajectory through life, we are who we are because of our relationship with other people.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  I do tend to think like that, yes. I think we are who we are because our relationship with other people also influences how we see ourselves. I mean, I do think that in the presence of the other, we discover ourselves. I think in dialectic terms. I don't think you can know happiness without having known suffering. I don't think you can, you know, know beauty without knowing, you know, or good without evil. I mean, these things are interdynamically connected, and the same thing is true relationally. I can't know others if I don't really know myself, and I can't know myself if I'm just standing in front of my own mirror.

• 35:25Rich Roll?

  Right, so the monk who's been meditating alone in a cave for many years is one thing, but the true test of that person's, you know, sort of spiritual mettle is when they go out into the world, right? Or in the AA context, it's like, if you really want to get confronted with your character defects, get into a relationship, right? Because that's the engine for growth in many ways. Like, you can only do so much by yourself.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Alone, yes.

• 35:51Rich Roll?

  It's only in your connections with other human beings that you learn what needs to change and how to grow.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Correct. But some people choose to live more in relationship to nature. Some people choose to live more in relationship to the divine. I mean, so the monk may be less preoccupied with their relationship to other humans if they're living in a more insular way. I study people who are in relationships, with parents and children, with friends. I'm very interested in friendship these days. Colleagues, co-founders, creative pairs, all kinds of dyads. And that's my, that's the field of study for me.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  So, yes, we are relational, but we may choose to actually live in a different relationship, which is to be beyond humans.

• 36:47Rich Roll?

  What is the biggest relationship issue that you find yourself contending with the most, with your patients and the people that you see?

• 36:57Speaker 01

  I think that they're various different things, and they also are generational and they're cultural. I never think there's just one thing. I mean, yes, people often, if they are in relationships, come to say, "We don't communicate." But that is a line that opens up an entire portal, you know, to a host of issues. So these days, people are way too much living in a contactless world in which they don't really need to leave their house for a lot of things: to get food, to work, to exercise, to meet people. I mean, and they are more and more isolated and they become more and more disembodied and they lose a sense of attunement

• 37:41Speaker 01

  and physical attunement to others and they lose the capacity for nuance and negotiation because they also are influenced by algorithmic perfections, which give them very polished answers so that you can bifurcate all the inconveniences of life and all the frictions and then they find themselves rather stumped when they have to deal with conflict or friction or differences. So they polarize and they cut off. That's one narrative.

• 38:11Rich Roll?

  Is that part of why you're so interested in friendships right now?

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Yes. Because, I mean, also, you know, you get questions and then the questions sent to me begin to tell me of a concern that is growing in the society: friendship breakup. I don't remember 20 years ago having this question at my door as frequently. That doesn't mean that there were not breakups among friends and certainly among brothers and relatives. But this is a very important piece because this is how tensions in the culture and the political systems at large are literally fracturing relationships between people who once cared about each other deeply. I think this description that I just gave you is quite generational.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  But of a great concern to me. It's more and more interesting. I see more and more people in my office who carry over the expectations for perfections, that the algorithmic perfections are giving them, and those become their expectations for relationship. It shouldn't be hard. It shouldn't be. It shouldn't be this. It shouldn't be that. So that's why I create courses on conflict and on sexuality, because it is. It doesn't... Maybe it shouldn't, but it is. It's part of relationships. It's intrinsic to relationships. I think that contempt is a major issue. You know, the Gottmans have what they call the four horses of apocalypse. I agree. I think indifference, criticism, defensiveness,

• 39:43Speaker 01

  and contempt are major breakdowns of relationship. So they don't call it that. They call it "we don't communicate." But underneath the "we don't communicate" are these four...

• 39:56Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. And once you reach that stage of contempt, it becomes very difficult to walk it back.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Contempt is often seen as the hardest of the moment.

• 40:06Rich Roll?

  Well, we're in a very deranging time.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Loneliness is another big issue. Inside relationships. This is another piece.

• 40:18Rich Roll?

  Say more about that.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not like people haven't been lonely in their marriages, okay? And but they had communities they went to, neighborhood associations, churches, synagogues, temples, you know, workplaces where they spent a lot of time. So that they... Support groups of all sorts that were not designated as support groups, but that's what they offered. So you could spend a lot of time in relationships with other people rather than just have to confront your partner all the time. But now, it's a thing that I've come to call ambiguous loss. Have you ever heard that term? Ambiguous loss is actually a term that was coined by a psychologist, Pauline Bost.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  And she originally created it to describe situations of unresolved mourning, when you don't know if the person is still there or not there. So you can have somebody who's physically sitting right next to you, but they are emotionally or psychologically completely gone, like Alzheimer or dementia.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  They don't remember your name, they don't know they exist. But you can also have situations where the person is physically gone, but they are emotionally or psychologically completely vivid. Deployment, disappearance, hostage-taking. And in both situations, you don't know if the person is there or not there.

• 41:43Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  And these days, you find two people sitting at home on their sofas, watching television, scrolling on their phones, trying to say something to each other, where the other person basically says, "Uh-huh, uh-huh." And you know that they're not really listening, and that that personal thing you just shared kind of evaporated in midair. And you experience that incoherent sense of aloneness next to somebody. That ambiguous loss is, I think, one of the very interesting things. I look at these people, I say, "And you came to talk to me about not having sex? I mean, should we talk about sex, or should we talk about this situation first?"

• 42:29Rich Roll?

  Being alone in a relationship.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and doing things that are by their very nature keeping people not just separate, but immersed in other worlds while they're sitting on their couch together. Now, you could say then, "What's different if two people are sitting and reading a novel?" Certain things are not that different. They are in a fantasy world, they're elsewhere, et cetera. But this thing on an everyday basis, where people sit at their dinner tables, and their faces are in their screens, and their communication is on WhatsApp, there is something that is fraying at the edges.

• 43:12Rich Roll?

  Sure. Yeah, we're running this gigantic social experiment that I think at this point we know is not in our best interest, that is uniquely deranging for a whole variety of reasons. One of which is, these devices that we're all holding are all bespoke to us and us alone. Like, what we're seeing is completely unique, and we could be in partnership with someone else, and they're looking at their phone, but what they're looking at is, you know, like... You're moving apart from each other because you're immersing yourselves in worlds that might not overlap entirely until one day you wake up and you don't know who that person is. Meanwhile, all our interactions socially are through the device, and it gives us this

• 43:53Rich Roll?

  illusion of being connected when in fact it's creating more and more loneliness. And layer on top of that, the increased suburbanization of the world and work from home and all of these things where the opportunities and the occasions for being with other people in real life are fewer and far between. And of course, there's going to be a decline or a denigration in our skill, our emotional intelligence, our ability to navigate conflict, to be in social situations. And the less we do it, the more intimidating it becomes, the more fearful it is. And you know, I see this with young people and my younger children, and they just, they don't want to text, they don't want to get on the phone, they don't want to talk, like, they don't know how to talk to somebody. And it's like, you have to learn these things, right?

• 44:38Rich Roll?

  It's almost like I have to push them into the world in order to, you know, make sure that they're developing those skills.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  And everybody's talking.

• 44:45Rich Roll?

  But all their friends are doing it, and it's like, what is this going to reap for this generation?

• 44:49Speaker 01

  It's called the rise of artificial intimacy.

• 44:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Everybody talks about artificial intelligence.

• 44:55Rich Roll?

  And then when the Her devices happen, and it's like, yeah, it's not, it's not headed in a good direction.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  I mean, it's headed somewhere that I cannot imagine and predict, but what I do know is this thing about artificial intimacy, it's changing our expectations. And I hear very often people who are very, very moved that someone sends them birthday wishes on a text rather than a DM, and that that means that they were really paying attention to them. And I'm thinking, they couldn't pick up the phone and sing a song? And, I mean, you really don't ask for much, isn't it? You can have a thousand virtual friends and no one to feed your cat. And modern loneliness masks as hyper-connectivity.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  And then nobody to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy. And then we confuse friends with friendship. That's part of why I was also interested in friendship these days. It's like, what is friendship? And how do people cultivate that? Do people know how to cultivate friends, supposedly? But it's two different things.

• 46:02Rich Roll?

  Hmm. Talk a little bit more about that.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  This is such a rich topic. I would, I would, one day I'll just do, talk about friendship alone. But friends accompany you through phases of life or through your entire life. Good friends hold you accountable. They reckon with you. They hold you when you're about to collapse. It's like they have their hands underneath you so that before you hit the ground, you're in their hands and they won't let you fall. Friends believe in you when you're, you know, fretting. Friends are there also to tell you when you should get out of a relationship that seems to really not be very good for you.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Friends basically sometimes say, "Stop acting like a jerk." Friends play with you. Friends discover the world with you, explore, travel, are curious. I mean, friends are erotic experiences and they are the only mutually chosen. I mean, you cannot be friends with someone who is not friends with you. You can love someone who doesn't love you back. But that level of mutuality is, of friendship and reciprocity is absolutely unique. Friends is the first relationship that you choose as a child, as, that is a free choice.

• 47:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I've never thought of it that way. But certainly, it's, it's a dynamic that requires effort and work, right? There's a difference between somebody you call your friend because you text each other on the internet occasionally versus the person who's gonna show up in your moments of need. Arthur Brooks calls it the difference between deal friends and real friends. We're chatting, you know, via text with a bunch of people, but that's very different qualitatively from a real friend.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Look, I think it's a piece of it that is also very cultural. I mean, English does not have many middle words. It has acquaintance, friends, good friend, best friend. French has a few words in between.

• 48:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  You know, but I do remember that, you know, when I arrived to the United States, I had to learn that people often say, "I have a friend." But that would be someone they hadn't seen in 10 years. And I just thought, "That's such a, that doesn't exist."

• 48:24Rich Roll?

  What is the French word for that?

• 48:26Speaker 01

  "I know someone."

• 48:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  I met someone, I know someone, you know, I used to have a friend. And this is because of mobility. This is because people move here a lot. You know, I'll tell you one thing that is very interesting about friends. And I don't know how it is today, but it was a thing I experienced as a mother. When my child, my youngest child, was in kindergarten, he had a very close friend. And we thought it was a beautiful relationship, these two boys. And it was obvious that they should be together in the same classroom in first grade. And the school basically told us, no. What's important is that they learn to make new friends, that they be agile,

• 49:14Speaker 01

  adept at new relationships, because they're about to move around anyway for the rest of their life here. They better know how to create new friends each time. This was the opposite culturally of the way that we had learned about it in Belgium. When you had a good friend, you made sure to have the kids stay with their best friend, because it meant that they were entering into this new phase of life, first grade, with building support. And that you looked at friendship as how do you reinforce continuity, rather than how you reinforce replicability.

• 49:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that seems like a violent act, to like engineer a friendship breakup under the idea of like instilling resilience or something.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Yes, but it was that idea.

• 49:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Back to the AI thing. I'm imagining a not-too-distant future in which there is like a herd device and people can engage with an artificial intelligence that sounds and feels very human and says all the things that you want them to say and you feel seen and heard and understood. But that... Artificial intelligence is just that. It lacks a soul. It lacks a consciousness. And it's a dynamic that's one-sided because it's engineered specifically to meet your needs. And so what it's teaching you is that you don't have to worry about your partner's needs because this is a computer, right?

• 50:43Rich Roll?

  And so when that person goes out into the world, they're being programmed into this mentality that they don't need to worry about meeting another person's needs. And any successful relationship is a balancing of meeting each other's needs.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Correct. And then we're going to get artificially engineered partners.

• 51:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Who will provide exactly that kind of...

• 51:09Rich Roll?

  And you're going to have to open up a new part of your practice to like deal with these people and all the dilemmas that they're going to experience.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  I think that it is a central question. I mean, Sherry Turkle's work on artificial intimacy is really studying that thing. It's like, relationships are I and Dao. Relationships are not just about how the individual gets their needs met in a rather narcissistic way, which means all with the arrow turned toward me. Relationship involves reciprocity, mutuality, attunement, empathy. Those are all experiences that have the arrow pointed towards the other. And in the machine, you get an other that doesn't have a subjectivity. That other doesn't have a reaction to what you do, even though that will become programmed at some level.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  And this is a big, big debate, is what kind of lessons for relationship is this development producing? You talk with people in AI or people who are very techno-optimistic and they always, not always, but they often answer you, "Not yet, it will happen," you know? And if you question that, you know, you're often seen as not necessarily going with progress, so to speak. I think... Look, I'll give you another, an example of the opposite of this, of this AI thing, right? I ask a question in the tour, just really one of these simple questions, but it tells me so much.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  How many of you grew up playing freely on the street? Did you?

• 52:46Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Any of your kids? Do they play freely on the street? Did they?

• 52:51Rich Roll?

  Uh, no, because we live on a, a busy sort of road where it's not safe to just go out and run down the street, which is something I've thought a lot about.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  So, last night, you asked me about the show here in L.A. I asked these thousands of people, and the hands were high up when I said, "Did you grow up?" And when I said, "How many of you have children or no children that are playing freely on the street?", it was a trickle. What does that mean? It means that play, which is such an important ground for experimentation and learning and development, free play used to be this ground for social negotiation, where kids learned to make friends, to make peace, to have enemies, to make wars, to broker agreements, to make rules, to break rules.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  And this whole ground for unprompted, unmonitored, unscripted negotiation is gone. And that, to me, is an essential piece of what we are talking about here, when you're talking about the AI that only has one direction. You are programmed to say what I want to hear. It's not a relationship. It's a pacifier.

• 54:16Rich Roll?

  It's inevitable also.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  I mean, I live with the developments, you know, but it's not, at this moment, I do meet people who enjoy, you know, even I, sometimes think my robots are far more reliable than my husband. You know?

• 54:33Speaker 01

  I mean, but I also-

• 54:35Rich Roll?

  These are all problems born of, I guess, at some point, good intentions. Like, you know, the idea that-

• 54:40Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna be a-

• 54:41Rich Roll?

  Kids don't go out and play, what?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  No, I was gonna say, I'm not gonna be- AI is extremely important, it's doing a ton of great things, but in the realm of relationships. Of what?

• 54:52Rich Roll?

  Oh, it's terrible. We could say it.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  That's the place in which I am looking.

• 54:56Rich Roll?

  I'm in total agreement with you. I was thinking back to kids and play, like, the idea that we need to protect our kids came about at some point where we were all meant to be very afraid of the world and we're putting helmets on kids for everything and kneepads and are kind of projecting a fear onto them, that the world is a very dangerous place, that has put a damper on, you know, this kind of free-range idea of kids being out in the world. And as a result, we've sacrificed not only what you mentioned, but kind of the awe and wonder of going on adventures and, you know, sort of stretching your own independence, which are, of course, also important skills that you need in the world. And, you know, how does that translate into what kind of adults these people become?

• 55:41Rich Roll?

  When they internalize that fear and approach the world from that place of thinking that we should all hermetically seal ourselves from it, rather than embrace it and welcome it and skin our knees and have those experiences, which create that resilience and that ability to navigate conflict and difficulty and deal with obstacles as they come.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 56:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I've been with my wife for a long time. Twenty-five years, or something like that. So I would be remiss in not, you know, exploring what you might be able to share with me that might be helpful in my own marriage. And I would say that I have a very successful marriage and I still, we love each other very much, and I think we're really good at- Communication and navigating conflict. We have four kids and they're on the older side now. But I think like a lot of couples who've been together for a long time, relationships are a constantly evolving thing and we go through phases with it.

• 56:45Rich Roll?

  And now with the kids older, it's sort of like, okay, who are you now? And like, where are we with this whole thing? And how can we get back to, you know, some more of the intimacy that was so integral to our relationship in the earlier years? And do it from a perspective of playfulness, right? And so we're in this process of finding our way back to that place. Like it's an exploratory phase. And it's fucking hard, man. You know, like it's, this is not an easy thing. And it brings up like so much stuff. And, you know, it's hard to talk about this stuff when you've been with somebody for so long.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Stuff means what?

• 57:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, good question. Stuff, what does stuff mean? Having to confront the ways in which old patterns continue to resurface and lead to conflict. Ways in which old traumas continue to rear their heads and create conflict, I suppose. And also, everything's good, right? Like, we can just continue on our way. And we're both kind of fulfilled and happy in what we do. And it's easy to kind of perpetuate that and not acknowledge like, hey, we could be more together than we are currently. And how do we find our way back there? So stuff, what is the stuff?

• 58:10Rich Roll?

  I guess there's a lot of stuff. But one would be just allowing things to continue as they always have.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Complacency.

• 58:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, complacency, that was the word I was looking for. I can easily.

• 58:22Rich Roll?

  Fall into the illusion that it's a static thing, when of course it's not. It's an always evolving dynamic.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Are all the children out of the house? So you still have some living with you?

• 58:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so we have a 17 year old daughter and a 20 year old daughter, and they're both out of the house. One is in boarding school and one is in college. And then we have a 29 and a 28 year old. And they moved out before the pandemic. And they were living on the other side of town, doing their thing. And then when COVID happened, they moved back and they're still at home. But they're like, they have their own lives. Like, they live at home, but like, you know, it's not like I have to worry about picking them up or where they are on a day to day basis. So it's not quite an empty nest situation in that traditional sense. But it is a moment in which we're attempting to kind of reconnect with each other in a more meaningful way.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a lot to say about this, but I tend to think, I like this is a framework that I have often found helpful, is that most of us today in the West will have two or three adult relationships or marriages in our lifetime. Some of us are going to do it with the same person.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  So this is your transition. Are you going to have another relationship with each other? And that often involves a lot of ritual. I find ritual is an extremely important and undervalued experience in relationships. And the ritual sometimes is about saying goodbye to your first marriage. And having the opportunity to create a second marriage. It may involve writing new vows. It may involve having a ceremony with friends. It may involve having a ceremony alone. But it involves a ritual, something that is symbolic, that declares the intention, that puts in the investment, that articulates it, that throws things in the ocean, in the

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  water, you know, burns it on the mountain, whatever it is. But the beauty of elevate, you know, this ritual, it's a routine that is infused with creativity and intention. And what you're talking about is how do you break the routine?

• 1:00:38Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Well, by turning it into a ritual. So that's first thing.

• 1:00:42Rich Roll?

  My wife is all about ritual. Like, this is the conversation that we've had.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:46Rich Roll?

  And she's somebody, just for context, like, very much lives in that kind of heart-centered space where I get lost in my mind and sometimes we miscommunicate because we're speaking different languages and that's a result of many things.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  So just invite her to take here...

• 1:01:03Rich Roll?

  She's all about that.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Well, just tell her, "Take me." I mean, because the "take me" is, I'm curious, I'm open, I'm receptive to something new. I know my ways. I know I can be complacent, I can be lazy. You know, I can mire myself in routine. Number two is this. This is the research of Eli Finkel that is very useful. If you keep doing the things you are comfortable with and you enjoy and they are cozy and they are familiar, you strengthen the friendship dimension of a relationship, which is huge.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  But if you say, "I don't just want to survive, I want to feel alive in my relationship. I want to infuse that erotic energy." Erotic as in aliveness, vibrancy, vitality, curiosity, playfulness, that. Then you need to do something different than just the familiar and the cozy. And that means new experiences. It's like generate new cells. New experiences that involve risk, an active engagement with the unknown and the novel,

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  curiosity, playfulness, all of that. For some people, that's travel. For some people, that's getting into a thing together that they never did. For some people, it's what is the thing that you've always wanted to do and never got to? For some people, it's... Journeys together for some, I mean, it's different things, but they involve a meeting with yourself and with the other in a new context that reveals new things about yourselves and about each other. And that means risk. Playfulness is when risk and uncertainty are fun. What long-term relationships need to be willing to let go of

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  is the illusion of safety and certainty, as if it can continue forever. Because there is a difference, this is so important, between surviving and thriving.

• 1:03:12Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  And some people don't need to do the thriving. It's not for everyone, but for those who say, "I want to feel that energy, that connection, that vitality." That, again, it doesn't happen on its own. A culture that becomes invisible dies. A relationship that doesn't do the things that maintain its aliveness and freshness becomes cozy and familiar, and familiar. And that is beautiful. But that is not going to give you the prickled that you say you would like to feel on occasion.

• 1:03:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And the risk and...

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  There's no risk. There's no risk to the relationship.

• 1:03:56Rich Roll?

  Sure, sure, sure. But that's premised on a foundation of trust. Like, you have to have trust in order to take the risk.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  So that is a major debate in the trust research field.

• 1:04:12Rich Roll?

  Tell me more.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Do you need to trust in order to take risks? Or is risk-taking what builds trust?

• 1:04:20Rich Roll?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  This is the big debate in the trust research field. And trust is when, I mean, Rachel Buttsman says it beautifully. Trust is an active engagement with the unknown. It's a leap of faith, trust. If you need assurance upfront, then you're not trusting.

• 1:04:41Rich Roll?

  Then it's not trust. Right, right. That's a bit of a mindfuck.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  No, it's just a different way of looking at it. No, when I say risk...

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  It means that that risk-taking will in and of itself, I mean, is meant to strengthen the trust and develop a different kind of intimacy. It's an intimacy of adults. It's an intimacy that doesn't go straight through the role of parent. It's a different level of engagement, where two people get to rediscover each other and themselves at a different stage of their relationship. Sometimes it's new friends. Sometimes it's new horizons. Sometimes it's a new house. Sometimes it's a new job. The word "new" stands in front of everything.

• 1:05:45Rich Roll?

  I think what my wife is looking for most is intimacy and feeling like she's truly being seen. And I think my predisposition or my preset is to lose myself in my own mind and go out into the world and pursue achievements as a proxy for love. Like, I think part of my wounding or my wiring is around love being a transactional thing and my worthiness or my deservedness for love

• 1:06:28Rich Roll?

  being a function of how I show up in the world and do things, like, under this idea of specialness. And so I'm doing those things, thinking that that's the path to love.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  How many years have you been saying this?

• 1:06:41Rich Roll?

  Well, many years. This is a story.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  So that's a story.

• 1:06:44Rich Roll?

  And this gets to the stories that we tell ourselves about our childhood trauma, or whatever it is, and what aspects of that are informative in terms of self-awareness, so that you can heal them and move forward. And where do we get stuck in them as a story and just get into a whole drama around it?

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Yes, it's like, how helpful is this story?

• 1:07:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  I mean, you begin telling-

• 1:07:08Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's good for self-awareness. And then when I do something, I'm like, oh, maybe I can make sense of why I'm doing this. But it doesn't help me in terms of resolving it.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  No, the minute you start telling it to me, I'm thinking, man, this is his can story.

• 1:07:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  He's so used to that story. It's so, like, it just pulls it out of his, uh... And that doesn't mean it's not true. That doesn't mean it doesn't have tremendous validity. But it is utterly stale.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  And it doesn't justify anything at this moment in your life. At this moment in your life, keep your story. But if you say, "I want to make sure that my relationship gets a new trust of energy, of breath, of expansion," then go do the things that you know will make a difference. To just say, "She wants this, and I'm more than, I'm a dinner..." It's self-serving, and it's a little stale, if you allow me.

• 1:08:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's good.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  So, you know, um, she wants to be seen. Boy, I'm sure by now, after 25 years, you have a certain idea of which way she likes that.

• 1:08:17Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  And decide, "I'm going to put her in the center of my..." Go for, think of five days, three days, you don't know, this is the... But I'm gonna once, fully, fully, fully satiate this wish of hers. I'm gonna be there, complete. Don't even take my phone with me, nothing. I want her, one time, to be radiating in the center of my universe.

• 1:08:46Rich Roll?

  What else should I do?

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Okay, what else?

• 1:08:49Rich Roll?

  I'll start with that, that's good.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  Then, the second thing you do is, I mean, that's not in order, but when you were talking, I thought- I couldn't see you write a letter. I'm very big on letter writing because I think that writing gives you a chance of being with yourself while you talk to the other. And reading a letter is being with the other while being with yourself. And I think you should write her a letter and just say, you know, I was talking to this woman on the podcast and I found myself saying, this is what you would like. And I just answered in the same usual defensive, tried-out story of why I won't do something that would just probably be a risk for me

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  and something unfamiliar and something that is not my comfort zone. And I realized how often I must have told you that story and how much that story is kind of holding me back. And here we are after 25 years. And I'm thinking, man, at whatever age I am, I'm still telling the same thing. How true is this now? And how much does it serve me to actually not make changes? And I just thought that you should know that I know. I'm not impervious to this.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  And I know that that story has probably kept me away from you many times. And it also makes me lazy and it also, etc., etc. And just own that. That's where we started our conversation with responsibility. I think when people get that letter, there's suddenly a real sense of shared reality. What I've been trying to tell him is not delusional. I get it. I see it. I know it. I feel it. And when he confirms it, we're in a shared reality. This may be true in other directions for other things, you know? And from there, you make a commitment to something, a commitment to the fact that, you know,

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  every system straddles stability and change, continuity and innovation, security and freedom. Every living organism, every relationship as well. So when you raise kids and you stay together, you emphasize the stability, the predictability, the reliability, the security, the anchoring dimensions of life.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  But at the stage that you're entering, or are have entered, if you want that relationship to not just be a scaffolding, but really a relationship, then you want to bring back the playfulness, the vitality, the risk-taking, the novelty, the engagement with the unknown, curiosity. Replace comfortable with curious. To feel seen, she need to feel your curiosity.

• 1:11:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, she's satisfied.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Okay, tell her that I never met her, but we have somehow.

• 1:12:00Rich Roll?

  Can I report back to you?

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  You absolutely can. I love that.

• 1:12:04Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's so doable, that's the thing. Like, I can do that, you know? I can do that. Like, what has held me back from that? I mean, the good news is, I'm in. Like, I'm not like, I want to have

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  But you can be in without.

• 1:12:17Rich Roll?

  That richness of experience. Like, you know, I don't want to have just a normal thing, and I don't want out of the marriage. Like, I want it to be the best that it can be.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  But that means.

• 1:12:26Rich Roll?

  And I am willing to do what that takes.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  That means being in is nice, but you don't want to be in with minimum effort. You don't tell your children to do minimum effort. You probably tell them a lot of things about how to go for things. And the same thing is true in... So there's something about that coasting.

• 1:12:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  And that, you know, the thing holds on its own without nurturing. You know, when you talk about performance and work and this and that, it's like, I see a lot of people who bring the best of themselves to work and the leftovers home.

• 1:13:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  The attention you're paying me in this conversation here, where you're focused on everything I say, do you have that focus when she talks?

• 1:13:10Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Or do you come home and you say, "I'm done working, and I can kind of put my attention on the coat rack"?

• 1:13:17Rich Roll?

  It's interesting. And also, the, just the human mind's capacity to delude ourselves around the static nature of things, like, whether it's a relationship or anything else. Like, in AA, it's sort of like, everything you do is moving you towards a drink or away from a drink. There is no... Coasting in sobriety, there's no coasting in relationships. And yet, we tell ourselves like this is a static locked in thing. Maybe we do that because it feeds our need to feel like we have control over our lives in a world in which we actually have no control. Like, I don't know why we do that, but I'm constantly having to remind myself that things are not static.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  It's a contrived illusion of safety.

• 1:14:03Rich Roll?

  Because if we're not in control, then we're not safe.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  For some of us, yes, for most of us.

• 1:14:11Rich Roll?

  Talk a little bit more about your definition of...

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  You do know that when you just said this, you swallowed.

• 1:14:17Rich Roll?

  What does that mean?

• 1:14:21Rich Roll?

  Come on!

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  It means that it's a sentence that means a lot to you.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  And what it means is not for here.

• 1:14:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right, I'm gonna reflect on that.

• 1:14:34Rich Roll?

  I want to talk about sexuality a little bit. You mentioned the word erotic, and you have a very specific definition of that that's different from sex. So can you elaborate a little bit more on what you were talking about earlier?

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Sexuality is the instinct, it's nature, it's the base. But eroticism is sexuality that is transformed by the human imagination. It's what gives sex meaning. And we are creatures of meaning. Modernity has brought these two together as if erotic means sexual, turn on, arousal, this, that. But eroticism exists in every spiritual tradition, and it is really about a quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of vitality, and engagement with serendipity and the unknown, curiosity, imagination, creativity. Those are the essential ingredients of the erotic.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  You can have a lot of sex and feel absolutely nothing. Women have done that for centuries, by the way. But in the erotic, you can do very, very little. And feel a tremendous amount. Because the central agent of the erotic mind is the imagination. And I think it's a very important distinction. Because when people come to me and they say, they often want more sex, but they always want better sex. And this better is in the quality of engagement, in the attention, in the intimacy, in the freedom, in the surrender, in what is being communicated by these bodies.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  So I'm very interested in the erotic because I'm interested in not just having relationships survive and not die. I'm interested in relationships feeling alive. And that's the opposite of what you call the status quo.

• 1:16:39Rich Roll?

  It can be really hard to talk about this. For cultural reasons or just the way that we were raised, where these are verboten subjects. And then as adults, we don't have the vocabulary or we're so captured by guilt and shame around our own innate sexuality that it creates challenges in terms of communication between partners around this terrain.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  You know, I wrote "Mating in Captivity" almost 20 years ago. And I have had conversations with thousands of people all over the world about the very thing that they had never spoken about. And I began to think, beyond just coming to my office, how do I provide people with exercises, language, vocabulary, perspectives, tools, to actually have these conversations? It's one of the things that I'm most interested in, is helping people have difficult conversations. Conflict is a difficult conversation. Sexuality is a difficult conversation.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  And I just, I'm creating, it's releasing next week, but it's a...

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Course bundle, it's called the Esther Perel Desire Bundle. And it's two courses on sexuality. One for people who are really stuck and just wanna even talk about it and not derail each time. And one for people who really want the flicker to just ignite a little bit more into a flame. And it's called Playing with Desire, the second one. And it's all that. It's very concrete tools to help you have, A, understand your own sexuality and understand how I think about sexuality, which I'll say in a moment. And then how to play, how to have conversations. And my card game does the same.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  It's a, I've looked for multiple ways to give people ease, comfort, fluidity, playfulness, to talk about these things without going, oh, you know, all icky and tense.

• 1:18:52Rich Roll?

  Right, cuz like in a card game, it's all, it's all fun. Like the stakes are lowered, right?

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  That's right. But you can reveal a lot. You know, play is when risk is fun. So you can reveal a lot of things cuz you're in the midst of play. You know, a lot of sexual conversations about sexuality, especially in the United States, is either smut or sanctimony. It's rarely just a natural conversation, an amazing window into the self. Sexuality is a window into a person and into a relationship. The traditional, the common way people think of sex is that something you do. You have sex, rather than it's an experience. Where do you go in sex? What kind of place do you enter? Is it a space for, for deep connection, for naughtiness, for playfulness, for mischief,

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  for spiritual union, to surrender, to be taken care of, to be safely powerful, to be vulnerable, to finally abdicate all responsibility of good citizenship? I mean, what's the space you enter? What parts of yourself are you connecting with? Which sense is most alive in the erotic experience for you? If you really understand sexuality and you know that it's a coded language for our deepest emotional needs, not for what turns you on.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  That what turns you on and what you experience there is actually, you know, what are the deep needs, wishes, wounds, fears that you bring, you know, from your emotional life into your sexual life? And your fantasy life is the ultimate secret code. You know, your prevalent fantasies reveal your deepest needs because a fantasy, a good fantasy, states the problem and offers the solution.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  You understand? That's a Michael Bader line. You know, it's a good fantasy is to subvert the fears and the inhibitions that roll inside of you and turn them into, you know, play. And so, once you enter sexuality from that point of view, once you understand that people have erotic blueprints and that they're, how they were loved, how they connected, how they learned to experience pleasure, how they learned to receive, I, you know, that all these emotional experiences translate in the physicality of sex. Tell me how you were loved and I will tell you how you make love.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  That's the blueprint. And so, you give people a set of questions and they begin to answer them. And I know, I mean, I know because I've done it a thousand times and now we're doing it through the course and I hear people just saying, "We never talked about any of this." It's like I'm discovering this person or I never thought about that for myself. And this opening up, this unlocking of that conversation, because people often can do sex but can't talk about it and certainly not with the person they're having sex with. They'll talk with anybody.

• 1:21:53Rich Roll?

  And why is that? Like, what's at the crux of that?

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  A lot of different things, you know. I mean, one is, this is a subject that we learn to be silent and secretive about. In the past, you had to feel ashamed if you had sex. Now you have to feel ashamed if you don't have sex. Men typically lie by exaggerating. Women have typically learned to lie by underrepresenting. When I say men, women, I mean, it's also men identified and women identified, but the structures that are in place is that male sexuality is rather fixed. Men are always interested, they always want it. They're, you know, in perpetual motion in search of an outlet. It's spontaneous, unprompted, they don't need any help. It just, you know, they come ready.

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  And women's sexuality is more diffuse, more subjective, more rising on a lattice of emotion, more contextual. And there's a tremendous amount of myth and wrong ideas that are just filling people's heads. And the beginning of the course is really to demystify a whole bunch of things that are utterly not the case. I mean, it is clear that male sexuality is no less influenced by the internal life. A guy who's depressed, or who is anxious, or insecure, if you think that doesn't influence their sexuality, in one way or another, but it does.

• 1:23:13Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  It's not true that men just exist in their, you know, groins. And that women, actually, it may be all about the supposed idea that they have less interest sexually, but in fact, maybe women are getting bored with monogamy much sooner than men. And what keeps them interested is a lot more. Risky activity, creativity, interest, being seen and all of that. And that's why they're not interested. It's not they're not interested in sex, it's that they're not interested in the sex they can have.

• 1:23:42Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  At least with many men.

• 1:23:45Rich Roll?

  Right. So for somebody who's listening to this or watching this, who has struggled with initiating this type of conversation, I mean, they can take your course and we'll put links to all of that in the show notes, and there's the board game, et cetera. What would be like a tool to, to, you know, kind of confront that fear and take on that risk and take that leap and ask that first question, or create an environment where that conversation can take place, maybe for the first time?

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  It's either you just go straight up and you just say, I listened to this conversation, or shall we? I mean, what is a podcast doing? What does my podcast do? You listen to couples having those sessions, where they do exactly what you just asked me. And as you listen to it together, you just turn to your partner in the car and you say, have you ever thought of that? Is that ever been a question that you ask? Is that something you've ever wanted? That's basically how a podcast becomes a transitional object. And we're talking about the podcast, but in fact, we're talking about ourselves. So much of where should we begin has been about that.

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  It's people listen to another couple. The more intensely they listen to these other relationships, the more they see themselves and the more it gives them the words and the courage to have the conversations that they want to have. So I have done it through my podcast. I have done it through my card game and I am doing it through the courses because those are three entry doors that I think one of them you will find accessible. If I say to you, go talk to your wife like that, not really. But if I say, you know, there's an episode, I think that it would really be interesting. It's also a couple that's been together, the kids are leaving, they want to reconnect. Then you listen to the story. It's like watching a movie, reading a book.

• 1:25:42Rich Roll?

  You're soft pedaling your way into it.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  Okay, if I say a group of friends come, you don't necessarily start playing with your partner alone. And you say, I got this card game, you know, and I actually saw this woman or this people.

• 1:25:55Rich Roll?

  It's a Trojan horse of a card game.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  But you don't start with the most difficult questions. You put two cards underneath everybody's plate and you don't do the whole game and you just say, thought we should have, you know. I have yet to ever see people have the courage, the guts to just simply say, I want to do something else tonight. I saw this card game and I want to try it out on ourselves and I think we know each other enough to do so. And then they realize that, man, this is so much more interesting than most of the chit chat they ever always have. I mean, I have literally yet to see someone who says this was a complete flop. You know, sometimes it takes a bit of time till it gets going, but when the stories become interesting, you're like, I thought I knew you dude. When did that, you know, it's interesting.

• 1:26:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  You know, I just did it with 5,000 people, so I can tell you. I take a few of the questions that are gentle, don't start with sex questions per se. Begin with questions, a risk I took that changed my life, a message I fantasize receiving, if I could whisper something in the ears of my younger self, a guilty pleasure I savor is. Stuff like that.

• 1:27:05Rich Roll?

  Right, and then you sort of slowly tiptoe into.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  No, then you go afterwards, they leave your friends, and then you go with your partner, and then you say, I have a few other questions I thought we could try. And then you say, you know, we never talk about this stuff. And it's weird, it's like, why not? I mean, what are we talking about? You know, death, sex, and money. It's three subjects we never talk about, and yet they're present in everyone's life.

• 1:27:31Rich Roll?

  The podcast is so great because you're truly a fly on the wall, getting to eavesdrop into the way you work with couples who are going through problems that we can all relate to. And I think its power is in, you know, kind of modeling what those conversations look like and what they can be, especially for somebody who has no previous experience in a therapeutic modality. It's really empowering. And they're almost, like, they have three-act structures to them, like, there's a beginning, middle, and an end. Like, you're on a journey with these people as you hear their, you know, innermost thoughts.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  It's couples and individuals. It's a, and there is a whole series on work. The idea in my head was, as you listen, you will find the tools and the language needed for the conversations that you need to have. That is the idea. Because these days, your best friend can come and tell you that they're breaking up and you never saw it coming. People don't really know the truth of other people. It's happening in a therapist's office, you know, confidentially. And that leaves a lot of people wondering, is this only happening to me? Am I the only one who can't talk about this with my partner? Everything I do is about cultivating relational intelligence, helping people have difficult conversations,

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  finding the vocabulary, understanding what certain things mean to them first, creating exercises and structures that give them a way to start, you know? How do I think about this? Before I even know how I talk about it, how do I think about it? What does it mean to think about sexuality? And, you know, what's different to, oh, you can ask a couple, do you still have sex? That's not the same as, what is the role of sex in your life? What do you like to experience in sex? How do you connect? You know, what's the sense with which you experience sensuality the most? And how so?

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  I have 150 of those questions, not like it's only five or six, but it's like, wow, this is what you talk about. You know, in our pornographic world, those things have kind of vanished. You know, and so to make this actually a very rich, intriguing, you suddenly see people being like, you know, you think you know the person next to you and you don't. And because you don't, they actually remain interesting. That is a part of what keeps a relationship alive.

• 1:30:05Rich Roll?

  Right, the mystery.

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  You know, the presumption that you know the other person right next to you and that there's nothing left to discover is really boring and precludes, in my opinion, a certain kind of hopefulness. If you can never be surprised anymore and you think the other person is like the inside of your pocket, that's the contrived illusion of safety. Don't give me novelty in a place where I want to think that I already, no surprises can happen to me. And then you complain of boredom. Well, you can't have it both ways.

• 1:30:39Rich Roll?

  It's so true how this subject is divided in this binary way between the salacious and the puritan. And when I think of my own education, my own sex education, it was, there was basically nothing and you're just sort of trying to figure it out as a teenager yourself. And then the younger generation with just the level of access to porn everywhere and the lack of sex education and the lack of anybody like yourself who is helping young people develop a vocabulary and a confidence to have these kinds of conversations. This is not a healthy dynamic for, you know,

• 1:31:21Rich Roll?

  how to kind of emerge into the world and be able to have, you know, healthy sexual relations.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  Non.

• 1:31:29Rich Roll?

  We need to like change the whole system around this.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  There's a lot of ignorance, there's a lot of myth, there's a lot of misunderstandings.

• 1:31:38Rich Roll?

  And perfectionist ideals because of the algorithms and the social media.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  Yes, or even romantic ideals that have been propagated through movies in which everybody is always just instantly ready, exploding, you know, throwing themselves at another person. Nobody sees maintenance sex in a movie, you know. You only see passionate sex, while maintenance sex is extremely important in erotic couples. You know, not everything is always a big production. Not every meal is a four-course meal. Some meals are just very simple, home-cooked food, but they're no less pleasurable. And so what we see is just creating a set of rather unrealistic expectations.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  Not everybody starts sex after 18 years together just from being desirous and aroused and turned on. Sometimes you start from being willing and just open, and we'll see what happens. You're not always eating because you're hungry. Not everybody runs to the gym because they can't wait. But I've never seen somebody come back from the gym and regret.

• 1:32:47Rich Roll?

  And sex is no different.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  And sex is no different. And we have a kind of an exceptionalism around sex, as Marty Klein says, that is really problematic.

• 1:32:57Rich Roll?

  An exceptionalism because of just the imagery that we're exposed to?

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  No, because it was so forbidden for so long. Sexuality was primarily for procreation. Sexuality was a woman's marital duty. You needed to have 10 children, for which you needed to have 12 because two were not going to survive. So you had a kind of an intrinsic motivation. Children had a very different meaning in the family than they have today. And we switched gradually from the sexuality that had a goal and that was sanctioned religiously around that goal, to a sexuality that went from duty to desire.

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  We took sexuality out of the realm of nature and we socialized it. Sexuality became an element of our identity, not just an element of our condition. It's not just what we do, it's who we are. And we completely gave a new definition to sexuality, to its meaning culturally, relationally, socially. And we freed it. And once we freed it, we said, "It's natural." And once we said, "It's natural," we began to think that it just would pop up at 11:30 at night after you finished cleaning up the whole house, out of nowhere. And that is kind of one of the evolutions. It's like, it may be more natural than what we thought,

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  but that doesn't mean it is just there, ready to burst, you know, spontaneously. In a long-term relationship, everything that is spontaneous already happened.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  If you want it to happen... I mean, committed sex is premeditated, willful, conscious, creative sex. And then people say, "Oh, but that means you have to schedule it and plan it." I said, "You don't schedule birthdays, you don't schedule your tennis game, you don't..." Of course, do you think that it takes something away from your tennis game because you scheduled it? No, nobody thinks that. But somehow, this sex, God forbid, should have to be thought about. And that myth of spontaneity is actually revealing how uncomfortable people are with sex. They want it to just happen, so they don't have to actually claim it, own it.

• 1:35:23Rich Roll?

  That's a revelatory point, because there is this stigma that if you're scheduling it, that it isn't actually real sex, because it didn't spontaneously emerge.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is such a minefield. Seriously, the spontaneous myth is a subterfuge for people's challenges to actually openly, willfully acknowledge that this is important to them, and they are going to make sure it happens, that they give value to it.

• 1:35:55Rich Roll?

  Right, and to show up for that appointment as scheduled, whether you're in the mood or not, is confronting, right? Because if you have to then channel yourself, or get yourself into a state of receptivity and giving, when you're not just spontaneously feeling it, that's part of what it means to tend to this important thing between two people.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  Do you ever book a nice restaurant to go for dinner?

• 1:36:24Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  Okay. Do you ever, that whole day, not think about the restaurant because you have a whole bunch of things to do? Then you come home and you start to gradually think about the fact that you have this reservation. Then you take a shower, you change, you dress up, maybe because you think it's kind of nice to be dressed up to go to this place. Then you're still somewhat in a rush, thinking about all the things that you need to finish, but you don't cancel your reservation, because you're actually, on some level, looking forward to finally sit down. And does all that preparation make you feel like you shouldn't go to the restaurant? No, au contraire.

• 1:37:01Rich Roll?

  Or that the experience that you just had was less worthy, because you put it on the calendar?

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  That's right. When you think about what you're saying about how sex is supposed to happen, we're not surprised that it doesn't happen nearly as often and as well as people would like. This being in the mood, the mood comes. The mood is something you cultivate.

• 1:37:25Speaker 01

  The mood comes with the attention, with the focus, with the presence, with being available. The mood is not, you know, "Don't always eat because you're hungry." But suddenly, it smelled good, and then you said, "Oh, wow! What is that?" Then you tasted. Then you took a little plate. Then you even ate more than you cared for. Then you really enjoyed it. And then you said, "But I wasn't hungry." Surprising. You know? That's what happens with sex too. This being in the mood, this notion that desire precedes everything and comes out of nowhere is a complete misunderstanding of how we connect sexually, for sure in long-term relationships.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  Let me put it this way: Sex is never spontaneous. It's just that when you are in the beginning or when you're single, you prepare yourself alone first. In your mind, "Where are we going to go? What are we going to eat? What music? What this?" You know? You always build the plot. And nobody thinks at that moment that this is work that you shouldn't have to do. When a painter starts to paint and they prepare their materials, they're not busy thinking, "Oh, boring!" No, they're thinking as they're preparing the colors. Or they're not thinking. They're actually trying to not think, whichever process they're engaged in. But everyone understands ritual, to prepare a site

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  or to go and put your skis or your whatever, your golf clubs or your tennis racket or your baseball mitt. I mean, there is... You dress a certain way. You put your accoutrements. You bring your tools, your accessoires. And nobody thinks this takes away from the experience. Everybody understands that that's what... That is the ritual of going to this activity.

• 1:39:17Rich Roll?

  That's beautifully put.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  From hikers to bikers, everybody has a set of rituals, tools. And nobody says, "Oh, bike toys."

• 1:39:30Rich Roll?

  Right, I think we

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  But sex toys!

• 1:39:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah. We have this, when you say ritualize or ritual, like, we have a reductive notion of what that is. It's candles and fireplaces and things like that. But it can be, it doesn't necessarily have to be that, but it is a way of marking it and readying yourself and honoring it.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  That's correct. It's mindfulness.

• 1:39:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  And in fact, it's, I'm putting my mind, my attention, onto this thing because I am creating anticipation. And anticipation is the mortar of desire.

• 1:40:05Rich Roll?

  Anticipation is the mortar of desire.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  If I'm about to travel to Paris, I'm anticipating this trip. I bought a ticket, I have a suitcase ready, I've prepared certain clothes that I can imagine wearing there. I'm looking up for places I want to visit. I'm anticipating. It's an imaginary experience with which I'm projecting myself in Paris.

• 1:40:31Rich Roll?

  And sex is no different.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  And sex is exactly the same. If sex is a foregone conclusion and you know in advance what you're gonna get, why would you be interested all the time? Some of us are, but many of us are not.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  It's the curiosity. It's the whatever's gonna happen.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  And then if I go to Paris, it's not a foregone conclusion, even if I've been 10 times.

• 1:40:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. Or you could go and be disappointed.

• 1:40:59Speaker 01

  You can do that too. But people don't come to get my help for disappointment.

• 1:41:06Rich Roll?

  Can we talk about dating a little bit? My lens on dating as somebody who's been married for a long time is through the adventures and misadventures of my boys. It's through my friends and peers who are divorced and now on the apps. And it's through friends of my wife. And the narratives go something like this, at least.

• 1:41:31Rich Roll?

  With respect to young men, it's, this is a game that's stacked against us. Unless you're rich and powerful or unbelievably handsome, there's no incentive for any of these women to take a chance or commit to me. Like, that's one story. For the divorced men, it's a similar story. For the women, it's like, where are all the good guys? Like, I've been on these apps. I've been on a million terrible dates, and I just can't find like, just a decent person that I feel like investing my time and energy with.

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:42:09Rich Roll?

  Those are stories you must hear quite a bit.

• 1:42:11Speaker 01

  Yes, I echo your stories. I have two sons, too. I have a long-term relationship. I hear the same, the same things. I think, I don't know that I have really original things to say about it, in the sense that we're in the midst of this. We're watching this. At first, updating allowed people to meet who would otherwise never meet. Updating is really very, very helpful to affinity groups. But something began to happen around the apps that became a complete commodification of people. You know, the kind of ubiquitous ghosting that can take place.

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  And, and people stopped being caring and careful of the feelings, the hearts, the brittle responses of other people. It's, it's rough. It's rough out there. If I don't have to look at you in the eyes when I say, "I don't think we're gonna continue," or "I'm not sure I'm interested," or "I met somebody else," or "I really wish you well, but I would rather be friends," or, you know, it's, it's easy to just disappear.

• 1:43:24Rich Roll?

  Or when the courage to be vulnerable with someone is met with the wrong reaction or disappointment.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  So I have a lot of questions about how many times, you know, how much time I always find out, how long have you been writing before you meet, did you call or did you see each other before you met, what did you do on your first date? A lot of first dates are often kind of akin to job interviews. It's put it this way, I suggest to people to do something very different than to go and sit in a noisy place or and ask each other questions. I think that is not the way you meet. And then while you ask questions, you wait to see if you're experiencing any butterflies. You know, I think what often happens is that people go on the dates, if they go on the

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  dates, and they live their life. Ah, I can't see you tonight, they say to their friends, because I have a date. I have a date Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week. I have dates. And they live their life to go on those dates, and those dates don't materialize into anything, and then they have to go back to their friends to say, nothing happened, and they feel this kind of emptiness in their stomach. The thing is set up that I date, I meet you, maybe we continue, and after a few months, when we, I know we're steady, then I introduce you to my community. Something about this feels off to me. You have a date? You have plans with your friend? Bring your dates to the friends.

• 1:44:58Rich Roll?

  Right, let's figure it out in some hermetically sealed vacuum.

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  In context.

• 1:45:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And meanwhile, you're, when you're, when you're outside of your life and you're in that artificial world, you're both projecting idealized versions of yourself onto each other, and you're running a checklist in your mind on that, on that list that you kind of opened with, like, is this person going to satisfy all of these requirements that I have? And then you compare that to this perfectionism ideal that you see on social media, and it's a setup for disaster predominantly, is it not? Like, how, how can anyone survive that?

• 1:45:35Speaker 01

  I mean, basically, people get into it. They do it for a few months. They either meet someone and then that goes into one direction. Or they don't meet, they get exhausted. They feel degraded. They feel flattened out. And then they stop. They get off the app. And then they go for a few months in their life. And then they kind of get the courage to go back on the app. And it's this revolve. And then they see the same people sometimes that they had seen months back. I think that don't live your life to go date. That's my first advice to a lot of people. Bring the dates to your life. Ah, but I don't want to have to tell that it didn't work. I just say, I just met somebody. First time I'm seeing them, I'm bringing someone along. They're your friends. You know, they will have a lot to say.

• 1:46:20Speaker 01

  And you will have a ton of data points. If I'm seeing this person interact with your people in your life, you know, integrate it so that you don't cut off from your life to go, you know, put yourself in the Petri dish. So that's one thing. The second thing is don't sit and interview and ask questions. Go do something you enjoy doing. And bring that person along. So that you, it's in multiple ways. I'm thinking, how do we integrate this thing? Something is off in the, in the complete cut off. It's like isolation tanks in which, in which these dates take place. And asking questions isn't going to tell you much. So there's a whole new generation now of people who are,

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  they're off the apps and they're going speed dating.

• 1:47:06Rich Roll?

  How do you feel about that? Is that a good thing?

• 1:47:08Speaker 01

  I think we need to try a lot of different things. People are often starved. They want to connect. They don't meet enough people. The workplace is somehow no longer a place where you, they don't go to work many times. They spend a whole day at home. So, you know, this is this contactless life. So, any situation where you are in person with people, and not just you sit in lines, you know, facing people two minutes, two minutes. You create activities. Some people use my card game. They do questions. There's an engagement. There's an experience that is created. And you will leave with someone whom you're talking, and you will maybe even see that person again.

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  And that person may become a friend or may become a date or may introduce you to someone else. There is something dynamic about it and 3D and embodied. Embodied, I think that that's the real thing here. I have yet to hear people who've gone to the speed dating and say it's a horrible experience.

• 1:48:12Rich Roll?

  It's interesting. Because it sounds to me like, it sounds like a nightmare to me.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  Because you're thinking of it as being in a supermarket and having to look at a shelf and decide which box you want to take off the shelf.

• 1:48:23Rich Roll?

  It sounds like the ultimate sort of job interview type dynamic.

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  But it's not done like that. People come in little groups. They have a question. They're playing a game. I'm talking about the ones I've heard that are done tastefully, but they're springing up all over the place.

• 1:48:36Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's interesting. It's almost like it's an antidote to the apps on some level. They're like, create collisions, create a dynamic in which people have to like, interact with each other. That's so interesting.

• 1:48:48Speaker 01

  And all the ones who are there say the same thing. I wanted to meet in person, but I wanted to have a context for it, a framework. I don't want to be alone. There's also a thing about a lot, there's a lot of people in movies.

• 1:49:01Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. Which kind of lowers the stakes a little bit, I guess. One of the things that I see in older people who have had, you know, many relationships, maybe multiple marriages, et cetera, is the older you get, you know yourself better. You also know what you like and you don't like.

• 1:49:18Speaker 01

  You're less flexible?

• 1:49:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're inflexible. You're like, this is the way I like my life. And I want to have a relationship, but I'm really not interested in anybody who's going to challenge that way of living that I like and that I'm so accustomed to. And so, you're sort of dead out of the gate, right? Especially if you're going to be dating somebody who's in your age bracket, because they're probably coming to it similarly, right? And so, somehow, these people need to, you know, kind of embrace a little more flexibility around that kind of thing if a relationship is going to have a shot.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, basically, sometimes people will say: "I would like to be in a relationship, but I prefer the one I have with myself." Okay, then stay with yourself. It's okay. I mean, you don't go to be with somebody else to stay unchanged. Part of what you experience by being with someone else, not just in a romantic relationship, is to actually discover yourselves anew, differently, things about that you didn't know you may like. So if it's to stay static, and you kind of say it upfront: "Don't move me, don't budge me, don't shake me,

• 1:50:34Speaker 01

  don't intrude on me," then you kind of want to ask, "What happened? What made that become such a prerogative for you? Did you feel like you lost yourself too much in the previous relationship? Is this a way of holding on to the previous relationship? What is the meaning of this static quality that you seem to claim, you know? What is it that you may be afraid of? What is it that you're defending against even before the whole thing even started? And who tells you that someone is gonna... You know, that that's what people come to do. You're not a renovation project. They've already done their homes. So what are we talking about?

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  And that's my conversation when I hear that dialogue. But I think the first question often is: How have you been in your previous relationships? I think that we don't pay enough attention to how relationships end. And I think that when they end, we tend to think that they failed, when in fact longevity is not the only marker of success. And I think that some relationships were very good for what they were meant to be. And if people could understand that the ending doesn't mean they failed, then they could take with them a very different story about what they bring to the next relationship.

• 1:52:01Speaker 01

  Because we come with our accumulated memories and lessons of the relationships we've been in.

• 1:52:09Rich Roll?

  Yes, some relationships run their course and were successful for what they were, but are no longer viable. And that's not a failure. That's a success, right? For a certain stage of life.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  You grew up together. You build homes together. You took care of your aging parents. You have been there to help each other begin your professional lives. Or you've raised kids together. You've done a lot of things. These are not small things. These are not failed relationships. Maybe at this moment, developmentally, you need, there is something else. This is why I say we will have two or three relationships. And some of us will do it with the same person. And some of us will need another person to create something new. Some people can reinvent on location and reimagine themselves. And some of us will leave. We live twice as long. And that means that longevity means something very different.

• 1:53:07Speaker 01

  And at different stages, you know, you will see these developmental tasks of family life for many is no longer at the center. So what do you have together? And some relationships will stay because there's a real deep connection between the two people. And the quality of the relationship is what really holds them. And for some people, they will stay together because it's a very powerful scaffolding. It gives them access to all kinds of things in the world. That is what the relationship provides them. And it's a lifestyle and resources and people. And that is the meaning of the relationship. Nothing wrong with that.

• 1:53:50Rich Roll?

  And it's up to the people in the relationship to make up those rules and what that contract looks like. It doesn't have to adhere to our conventional understanding of what a relationship needs to look like.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  I also think that it's okay to want other relationships. Romantic relationship is not the only one for us to stay connected. There are people who are wonderful siblings, friends, bosses, mentors, and they do not shine in the romantic sphere. But they are the friends you dearly wanna have. And we have so attached the word love and intimacy to the romantic relationship, when in fact, there is deep love and intimacy in friendships, for example. And there's a tremendous pressure about that romantic relationship.

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  But maybe for some people, that same person that says, "I like my habits and I... Be my guest, you know, maybe have some sexual partners, maybe have close friends, maybe have people with whom you like to travel, maybe have people with whom you enjoy being together, but you don't wanna merge homes and you wanna be a lot or living apart together." We either accept that there's a multiplicity of models and there isn't a one size fits all. But that being connected and having intimacy and meaningful relationship is essential to our survival and to our well-being. And not to put all of it into one type of relationship.

• 1:55:25Speaker 01

  I think that that's the more important piece, is we need connection. We're socially wired. When relational health is essential to physical health, to our overall sense of well-being. But it doesn't just have to take place in the romantic relationship.

• 1:55:43Rich Roll?

  I could talk to you for hours and hours more, but we have to bring this to a conclusion. Thank you for coming here today. I really appreciate it. I think your work is vital and I applaud and salute you for the way that you show up in the world and how helpful you have been to millions of people. Because relationships is a universal thing. We all have our struggles and challenges with it. And you have been just a wealth of information and inspiration and education in that regard. So, thank you.

• 1:56:16Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:56:17Rich Roll?

  You have a couple of courses that are going live soon, Playing with Desire and Bringing Desire Back, which I believe are dropping on September 17th.

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:56:28Rich Roll?

  Which is very exciting. And as a gift to our audience, you are offering a reduced price on that. If you use the code RICH15 at checkout, you get 15% off. And for people who want to learn more about those courses, where should they go?

• 1:56:44Speaker 01

  EstherPorel.com.

• 1:56:45Rich Roll?

  It's that simple. All right, thank you. I hope you'll come back and explore more. I had tons more I wanted to talk to you about, but this was a real treat, so thank you.

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  With pleasure, yes.

• 1:56:55Rich Roll?

  Peace. Thanks.

• 1:57:11Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors,

• 1:57:54Rich Roll?

  who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, The Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiello. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Currie. With assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. And thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management.

• 1:58:39Rich Roll?

  And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Blanks.

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  Namaste.