Pod Insights Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel 20 Years Later, Esther Revisits Mating in Captivity About this episode This week, Esther invites you into a conversation about desire, disruption, and what it means to stay alive to one another in a rapidly changing world.
Recorded live at Sessions Live, Esther is joined by journalist and Head of Content at Esther Perel Global Media, Mary Alice Miller, for a look back on twenty years of Mating in Captivity and explore how our ideas about intimacy, desire, and relationships have evolved.
Also, just for you, inspired by the anniversary of Mating in Captivity, Esther has also curated a special playlist of Where Should We Begin podcast sessions exploring themes from the book: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4d1AeEj4uypRpUnrgv6dlm?si=cIw37dzLTMaoBeagQPi1Cw
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Today's episode of Where Should We Begin? is special. It was recorded live at Sessions Live, which is Astaire's annual gathering of therapists, mental health professionals, coaches, and people who are just curious about relationships and the way we connect. This year marked a series of milestones for Astaire. It's 20 years from the publication of her first book, Made in Captivity. It's 10 years of Sessions Live, and it's also nearly a decade of working with me on the podcast. And as you know, on Where Should We Begin?, there's this deliberate choice to focus on the session and the couple, and not much on Astaire as a person. But I feel like anniversaries sometimes create spaces for different kinds of conversation.
0:43 Speaker 00 So for this session, we're going to be joined by writer and journalist Mary Alice Miller, who is a colleague of mine at Esther Perel Global Media, where she is the head of content. And for this, she invited Astaire to talk about Made in Captivity and to reflect on the experiences and the influences that shaped her work, and also to revisit some of the ideas that have evolved in the 20 years since the publication of Made in Captivity, and all the questions that come with that. So here's Astaire in live conversation with Mary Alice Miller.
1:25 Speaker 01 How much more would you get done with a personal assistant in your pocket? Life's too short to be manually filing insurance claims and being on hold waiting for the lab tests that the doctor did. I don't know, I feel like it's allowing me to show up in ways that I've always wished I could show up. I just am so strapped for time.
1:43 Speaker 02 What we gain and give up when AI agents enter the picture. That's this week on Explain It to Me. Listen to new episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.
2:04 Speaker 03 It's 10 years since she started Sessions Live, and it is also almost a decade since you and Jessie Baker launched your podcast, Where She Would Begin, which features real one-time couples' therapy sessions. Congratulations again.
2:22 Speaker 03 I will never forget the first time I heard about the podcast. It was 2017 on The New Yorker Radio Hour, and I heard David Remnick interviewing you. And I was like, who is this woman with this beautiful accent? And then I heard clips from the podcast, and I was like, what is going on? How is this happening? Who are these people opening up the most private dimensions of their life to the public for our benefit, to learn and to feel a sense of recognition? And I remember thinking at the time, where was this podcast when this person, who I know really, really could have used this, where was it then? And I'm so, so glad that it's been almost 10 years of it being a relational resource for so many people.
3:06 Esther Perel? I call it a public health campaign for relationships.
3:11 Speaker 03 In 2017, for non-therapists, it was absolutely unheard of to be able to listen in on a stranger's therapy session. Now, there are multiple television shows where you can do just that. What is it about the medium of audio? What is it about audio that allows people to connect with it so much?
3:29 Esther Perel? Well, there's two things that are a lot for me. First, nobody on the podcast has ever been a patient, nor will ever be a patient. There's thousands of people applying. The first time, less, because nobody knew what it was like. And I will tell you the moment when I understood the power of the audio. It's in '22, right after Australia lifts their lockdown. Melbourne had the most strict lockdown for 200 days. You could leave one hour a day at your house in a range of five kilometers. People went bonkers. And they spent a lot of time listening.
4:13 Esther Perel? And they listen and it's intimate, it's in your ears. And when you listen attentively to the stories of others, you end up seeing yourself. Even if the story is not yours, you recognize something. And then when we did the Q and A, the people were asking me questions as if they had been with me. I had just not been with them. It was like a real parasocial relationship of trust. I see you, I understand you, I recognize you. It's all of that that goes into the intimacy of the audio. I think, you know, it is the first thing a baby hears in utero. It's our first sense, it's our most primary sense.
4:54 Esther Perel? When you look at others, you sometimes project onto them. But when you can't see them, you see yourself.
5:03 Speaker 03 And I love what you said before, that it's part of a public health campaign. And I've heard you say a public health campaign for relationships, a relational health campaign. What I have come to understand, one of many things in the seven years of working together, is that each of these milestones, whether it's the podcast, or Meeting in Captivity, or your second book, The State of Affairs, or the tour, or the card game, they're all part of that, that much bigger project of bringing therapeutic insights into the public square. Can you say more about that?
5:38 Esther Perel? There are two parts to it. The first, by the way, I had no idea what she's gonna ask.
5:43 Speaker 03 No idea.
5:43 Esther Perel? Just so you know. We may work together, but that's... I think, um... Relationships are changing at such a speed at this moment. The norms, the rules, the definitions. And we really need to make it up as we go. And so, to have a place that isn't just about tips, but a place that is also about interpreting what is happening, making sense out of it. Manujin, one of my main mentors, always said, "If you think right, you will act better."
6:23 Esther Perel? Rather than just tell me what to do, you have to understand why you're doing it and why it matters in this way. So this, to me, the notion that, you know, and the more AI is entering into our lives and the more relational intelligence and relationships will become, basically, the cutting edge of, in work and in other areas of our lives. So that is one piece. The second thing is, when I started, I just wanted, I felt like the office is getting too close. I want to open the door and I want to lower the walls and I want people in the general, in the public square, to have an access to the insights and the revelations and the changes
7:08 Esther Perel? that take place inside the session. Not enough people can come to therapy and therapy is not the only thing that helps people. So I thought, how do we take this stuff out of the office and make it into the public square? And the podcast was one way to do so. The fact that there are so many people here, normal people, who are just here because it's interesting to you, has kind of this, is part of the destigmatization of therapy, this thing that happens behind closed doors in which, you know, stuff gets shared that nobody gets to talk about. We are living more and more in a psychologized society. I think sometimes in a overly psychologized society, too. But it's clear that this is no longer
7:52 Esther Perel? just a practice on the side, hidden, quiet, that nobody talks about. It is hip to put your therapist's name on your Hinge profile, of sorts. Maybe not the therapist's name, but certainly the fact that you're in therapy. It no longer means you're mad or you're sick. It means you're evolved. This is a major cultural shift.
8:15 Speaker 03 I know people who actually won't go on a date with someone unless they are in therapy.
8:22 Speaker 03 Who else knows people who this is like a, I will, right. Well, we're, we have a huge bias in this space, right? Because we've got a ton of therapists. So we probably know lots of people who say this. At least in the privacy of therapy, if not more publicly.
8:34 Esther Perel? I also think, you know, where I'm from, I'm from Belgium, but French, Belgium, this whole part of Europe. I grew up with psychoanalysts being philosophers and public intellectuals. Because psychoanalysis in Europe was not medicalized. It became part of the medical profession here. You had a license. And from that moment on, it became more of a medical practice and less, or a mental health practice, and less of a cultural practice. I think that psychologists, and I'm talking about people in the field, it doesn't have to be what your degree is, have a tremendous contribution to make in the public discourse and in the cultural conversations about what's going on in our lives.
9:18 Esther Perel? And we should not leave that, excuse me, only to influencers.
9:29 Esther Perel? I said, excuse me.
9:32 Esther Perel? Don't mean to offend anyone, but it, it, you know, when you have 40 years of practice sitting in the trenches, you have a certain experience and it can be useful to the society at large.
9:46 Speaker 03 So I want to go, I want to go way back. When you just said, she just said 40 years of therapy. She has been a therapist for 40 years, which is, again, what you were saying before I came on stage, you know, who has stayed in the same job for that long? 40 years is, is really, it's impressive.
10:03 Esther Perel? That's because there's no ageism in our field.
10:08 Esther Perel? It's one of the few fields.
10:12 Esther Perel? The more you age, the better you become. It's like a good wine.
10:18 Speaker 03 It is like good wine. So, I want to go way back. This is like further, further back than 40 years to when you were a little kid. And keep in mind, she does not know what I'm going to ask her. This is improv. What is the earliest moment you can recall being interested in relationships? And I'm thinking of the Esther Perel, growing up in her parents' family, small family business shop. I'm thinking of the Esther Perel, playing behind the house in the woods and acting out characters. What's the earliest moment you can recall being interested in relationships?
10:57 Esther Perel? Wow. I have a few that stand out, but...
11:03 Esther Perel? So, I come from a community that is all Holocaust survivors, which means nobody had grandparents. Most of the families were two people who met right after the war, most of the time. I have nothing, you have nothing, I'm alone, you're alone, let's get married. That was the contract, basically. We survived and we make families. And we make families immediately because that is the way that we know that we are still human. It is... So these children become these very symbolic creatures. And that I understood very quickly. I just always asked, "Why don't I have grandparents? Why don't I have uncles? Why don't I have cousins?
11:47 Esther Perel? You know, why are we so small?" But then, there was another event that I remember vividly. The main thing of the things you remember is you wonder, "Why is it that that I remember?" So I'm about probably 10 years old, and I'm watching Cici, Princess of Austria. Any of you have ever... Romi Schneider, you know, Cici. It's the romantic schmaltz par excellence. And I go to my mother, who at that time, most of her friends had lost their husbands. And I said, "Maman, they must be so sad that they've lost their..." She says, "They're relieved they don't have to wash anybody's socks anymore."
12:25 Esther Perel? And I told to myself, wow, that cured me of any romantic.
12:31 Esther Perel? Marriage from a very different angle, you know. And then the other piece that really interested me about relationships, and it's something that I talked with Ruth Cohn, who's going to be talking here as well, is that my community, and I say it about my community, I think this applies to all trauma. This is not a unique experience of ours. There were two groups of people in my community. There were the people who did not die, and there were the people who came back to life.
13:03 Esther Perel? You can let that sink in. This is true for relationships. You work with couples who are not dead and who are trying to survive, or couples, or relational systems, or trappes, or families, or friendships, all relational systems here. And you work with people who are really craving that aliveness. I saw people who were basically, you entered their homes and you felt the morbidity. They were living tethered to the ground. The world is an unsafe place. You have to be vigilant at all times. You can't really enjoy, because if you enjoy, you're not being careful. You can't laugh out loud, because if you laugh out loud, you're not paying attention.
13:45 Esther Perel? And you basically shield yourself constantly. And then I saw people who experienced the erotic as an antidote to death. It's that definition of eroticism that really interested me. And how do you cultivate that aliveness? Why is it that the same experience breaks one and strengthens the other? It's one of the most important questions we sit with, with our clients, all the time. You know, why did it break your brother and it made you who you are? So those questions of relationships were really interesting. Then I hated school. That's probably the last thing. No, I'm not hated school. I hated the stringent discipline of my, my school,
14:30 Esther Perel? especially my high school. You know, I come from six hours of Latin a week, two hours of Greek. Four languages, it's just like, and this child meant nothing. The material mattered and the child had no value. So I got interested in all the people who wrote about alternative education. And alternative education meant rejection of authority. Well, that's a relationship theme as well. So those were, and then I began reading, you know, A. D. Lang and all these people. Um, and I, I just, and I was good at it. That's another thing. I saw my friends would confide in me. You know, I had an, an ability of not trusting what you see.
15:10 Speaker 03 I'm just curious, um, for the people who are clinicians in the audience, how many of you relate to that, that moment of, um, my friends all confided in me?
15:20 Esther Perel? My friends, my family, my parents, my divorcing parents. I mean, many of us have been, you know, talented, but also triangulated.
15:30 Speaker 03 And the other thing that, that stood out to me about what you just said, among many things, is why is what breaks one brother, what makes the other stronger? And I'm wondering how many of you relate to that in your offices and in your relationships, in your families, in your friends?
15:50 Esther Perel? Don't you find this one of the most interesting questions? Why one and, you know, what, it, because it, whatever, it's, I don't have to say one.
16:00 Speaker 03 Whatever. When did you realize that these interests could actually be a job?
16:06 Esther Perel? I mean, a job? Okay, so I, I, you know, I speak nine languages. My mother thought I should be an interpreter or a lawyer. She thought I argued well. And I, I honed my chops with her, that was for sure. But then I thought I'm gonna go study psychology. I thought it's interesting. People are interesting. Relationships are interesting. So then I am the product of mentorship. I actually have no fancy degrees. I have an MA, but, but, and I'm getting a PhD this week, by the way. I forgot.
16:47 Speaker 03 You remembered.
16:48 Esther Perel? From my graduate school. But I never did the PhD. I went for teachers. I thought, I'm a disciple. I learn on the job. I need to see it being done to see how I can do it myself. And I arrived to Boston. And I went to the Cambridge Family Institute. Because my husband said, I said, I have too much personality to be an analyst. And
17:16 Speaker 03 No offense to analysts who are here.
17:18 Esther Perel? No, no, no, no. It has nothing to do with, it's like, I can't stick, I can't just. So my husband said, Jack Saul, he said, you should go to the family therapy centers. Because Peggy Papp is there too, and she also comes from theater. And so I knocked at the door and I just said, I would like to train here. So I had done puppetry. And I went to a bunch of people doing family therapy with kids. And I said, would you like a puppeteer in your sessions? And I followed three therapists for about a year. Hours upon hours during the week. And I had puppets with me. And then when they would do the sessions, I would bring it to the family, to the parents, to the kids. And that's kind of how I thought, oh, I can integrate my passion for theater with my
18:02 Esther Perel? interest in psychology. That's kind of how it started.
18:05 Speaker 03 Do you remember when I said she has a theater background? It is very specifically with puppets.
18:12 Speaker 03 And other plays and
18:14 Esther Perel? And I've continued to use puppets in therapy. Only Zoom killed everything creative.
18:23 Speaker 03 Well, actually, I mean, Zoom also
18:26 Esther Perel? It made it possible to.
18:27 Speaker 03 Zoom also brought out a lot of creative things in you. There's tons of things that we did on Zoom, particularly in the pandemic lockdown, that we would have never done before.
18:37 Esther Perel? That is true, that is true.
18:45 Esther Perel? We have to take a brief break, so stay with us.
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20:37 Speaker 03 So what were the early years of learning and training to become a therapist like? You've told me that in the 80s and 90s specifically, sex was actually taboo in couples' therapy. Why is that? And when did that start to shift?
20:49 Esther Perel? I mean, basically, this whole body of work, mating and all of that, starts with the Clinton scandal.
20:57 Esther Perel? That's what inspired me. I thought, this is so interesting. I will give it to you from a European point of view.
21:11 Esther Perel? I just, it was like, you know, America will let people divorce three, four times without blinking an eye, and disrupt and dismember the entire family system. But you have one infidelity, and you're an infidel for life. The rest of the world, that values family above couple, actually, have always opted the other way around. By the courtesy of women, let's be clear. And I thought that is so interesting. It's not like the French just cheat better and do it more and all of that. It's actually not at all. The Americans cheat no less, they just feel more guilty.
21:52 Esther Perel? But, what is interesting is, you preserve the family, and in order to preserve the family, you make a different compromise. And so the compromise is not about your own happiness or unhappiness, the compromise is for the goodness of the collective. And that is pretty much true in many other parts of the world as well. So I write about the Clinton scandal, and I just go to the Networker conference, and I meet my other major mentor, Rich Simon, and he says, "What are you thinking about these days?" And I blurt out, "I'm thinking about Americans and sex." And he says, "Why don't you write something about it?" I said, "This makes for great dinner conversation, but I don't know that I can write an article." So, anyone who's ever written for Rich Simon
22:36 Esther Perel? knew that there was a verb called "to be Simonized", and that meant 11 versions of the same article until you have finally articulated what you had to say, and it became "in search of erotic intelligence." That article comes out in 2002, and it goes viral. In the beginning of viral. And what I knew from then, I had had one hour of training in sexuality in my seven years of training in couples and family therapy. That is not unusual. Anybody can identify with this? Yeah, this is really not unusual. And I also had ingurgitated a whole bunch of beliefs that were basically presented like truths rather than dogmas. And one of them was,
23:19 Esther Perel? sexual problems are the consequence of relationship problems. If you fix the relationship, the sex will follow. Just like that. And I had done so much work where people got along much better, laughed more, fought less. You know, everything was much better in the kitchen and it did absolutely nothing in the bedroom.
23:40 Esther Perel? And I know that I'm not the only one who knew that. But when you did change the sexuality, you actually changed the entire dynamic. The other way around was different. So that was my first thing. Sexuality was not a metaphor of the relationship. It was a parallel narrative and it speaks its own language and it acts by different rules. Love and desire, they relate and they also conflict. I had zero experience in the field of sexuality. They accepted me first, before the couples world. And it because it was written from somebody. It's like a foreigner who comes to a place and writes a whole article about that place and has a point of view that none of the locals have ever thought about.
24:26 Esther Perel? It had that experience to it. And that's the beginning. And slowly, there were people, Pat Love, Michelle Wiener Davis, David Schnarch. There were major people who were trying to integrate couples therapy and sexuality. But the vast majority of the field of sexuality dealt with function dysfunction, performance. Ninety-seven percent of the research on desire was on women because men don't have free desire problems. They want it all the time, you know that. Now, that kind of a bunch of biases and biases. And there are an incredible group of people that will talk at our event that have inspired me in all of this. I did not do this alone.
25:08 Esther Perel? So that's, that's a... And the couples therapy world didn't really want to talk about sex. So this because it's all relationships, so you know, we just focus. I mean, you could do couples therapy for five years and not a single time would the therapist ask you, "And what happens between you sexually?" And that was not unusual.
25:25 Speaker 03 Ah, so?
25:27 Esther Perel? No.
25:29 Esther Perel? Yeah, I mean, I'm not deluded.
25:32 Speaker 03 So what happens in your office with your clients when you start bringing up sex?
25:42 Esther Perel? The first thing that happens is that your patients size you up. Are you someone I can talk about this with or not? I mean, many of us have gone to therapies where some of our major issues were not addressed because we took one look at the therapist. Of course, it was challenging for us to bring it up. But we also took one look at the therapist and said, "No, not with you." So I would ask in the first session, like I would ask about where you live and the economic issues and racial issues, cultural issues, religious issues, and also sexually. And not, "Do you still have sex?" And not, "How often do you have sex?" Because none of that gives us any information.
26:24 Esther Perel? So then I began writing up what are interesting questions. And then after they've sized you up, they look to the person next to them to see, "Can I really say what I think?" And then I understood that couples therapy that involves sexuality needs to have sessions that don't involve the other person. And that means that I say it upfront. When I work with you, I will see you together and sometimes alone. And when I see you alone, those will be confidential sessions in which both of you, both of you, can tell me things that are private to you and that you may not yet or may not want your partner to know. That is a position. It has its problems.
27:06 Esther Perel? It has worked better for me than to work and be the fool of the village.
27:11 Speaker 03 So you're inviting them to speak to you. I'm interested in two things. First thing, what are they saying? Second thing, what are you hearing underneath what they're saying?
27:26 Esther Perel? I begin to understand... There's a few things and a couple of call-outs here as well. So what people begin to explain to me, once you're not asking them about "what do you do", then you start to turn the question into "where do you go? Where do you go in sex? What parts of you did you connect with? What do you seek to express there? Is it a place for surrender? Is it a place for spiritual union? Is it a place to safely be dominant, to safely surrender, to be playful, to be mischievous, to not be your perfect citizen? What is this space? If it's a play space, what do you play there? And that language invites people
28:10 Esther Perel? to think about it completely differently. Same with fantasy. I mean, some of the people, Jack Morin and Michael Bader, I mean, I was reading, I can't, like, a mile a minute, about how to think about this. And Jaya. So Jaya, we met in 2006. And I can't tell you how much I learned from Jaya, because she was doing the body work, the practice in front of me, and I was doing the relational part. And we were doing this in tandem. And I saw the translation. It was like the text and the translation of the text in its physicality. And that was a whole other level
28:52 Esther Perel? of digging deep into what is the erotic mind? What is the sanctuary where people go? What are the psychological needs that people express through this sexual language? Et cetera, et cetera. And attachments, of course.
29:12 Esther Perel? We have to take a brief break. There is still so much to talk about. So stay with us.
29:26 Speaker 03 Okay, so 2006 is also the year that "Mating in Captivity" is published. So, I had the privilege of working with you on the new preface for the 20th anniversary edition, which I hope all of you will read. It was really, really fun to work on and really moving. There were so many surprises in that process. And part of what we wanted to do as our creative process was to actually interview people who had been involved in the book. So publisher, agent, researcher, we were, we rooted deep. We had-
30:01 Esther Perel? People who are featured in the book, too.
30:03 Speaker 03 Yes. And we had many, many hours.
30:06 Esther Perel? Can I say what we wanted to do and didn't get to do, just so you can kind of see what you missed? But we missed it, too. There was, there was a couple that I wrote about in the book.
30:17 Speaker 03 Huh? This is where we're going.
30:18 Esther Perel? Yeah. Oh, really?
30:19 Speaker 03 Yeah. This is exactly where we're going.
30:21 Esther Perel? Go, go, go.
30:22 Speaker 03 Yeah?
30:22 Esther Perel? Yeah, go.
30:23 Speaker 03 Okay. All right. Improv.
30:28 Speaker 03 Yes. We really wanted to meet with a couple who is in the book. And I distinctly remember you said, "I know just the person, not the couple, just the person." And there's a couple in the book, if you're very, very, if you're a "Mating in Captivity" close reader, the couple's pseudonyms are Jed and Coral. And we had, we set up a call with Coral, and we had a fantastic catch-up with her. You continued to work with Coral for many years after the book, and after the book, they actually separated, they divorced, and you've cited them as an example of a beautiful divorce. First, I'd love to know why you cite them as an example of a beautiful divorce, and
31:13 Speaker 03 then I'm going to ask you about Jed.
31:17 Esther Perel? I mean, at that time, I am writing as much as I'm learning about what I'm writing. It's not like I have the experience yet. And it's a profound sexual incompatibility. He's heavily into BDSM. And she couldn't bear the ropes, she couldn't care less. It's not her template, it's not at all her blueprint. But they are deeply attached, deeply connected. And this goes on for a long time. And I tried everything I knew. But I also had a sense that this is not, this is... If those parts of themselves remain as important as they are, and they were for him essential, I don't know where this is gonna go.
32:00 Esther Perel? And he would say to me, "Help me leave, help me leave." Then when I would try to go in the direction of helping him, he would say, "You don't understand how connected I am. I will love this moment, I can't imagine my life without her." So that I would say, "Well, then..." And we were going like this. And they do separate. And basically, I had a sense for a long time. So why did, I thought they were a good divorce? Because they got along. She has two kids with another person. She actually goes to take care of the baby when the newborn is, when the other baby is being born. They're just really nicely related. They wish well for each other. And they welcome each other's partners. And they raise their son together.
32:42 Esther Perel? And it's just done in a nice, caring, warm, friendly... He says all credit to her, all credit to her.
32:50 Speaker 03 And am I remembering correctly that... So when he, they both get remarried. Interestingly, she married another Judd. Again, pseudonym.
33:00 Esther Perel? Who was equally into BDSM. But she didn't know it.
33:07 Speaker 03 There are actually a lot of... In a room full of people interested in relationships, there's so much more we could say about this. And I'm actually gonna point you back to the book, since we won't have time to go into all of it. But, am I remembering correctly, when he got remarried, they're having a kid, a new baby, and he actually calls Coral to say,
33:33 Esther Perel? Yes, yes, yes.
33:33 Speaker 03 Would you mind watching our baby while, yeah, would you mind watching our toddler?
33:37 Esther Perel? There was a snowstorm and her mother couldn't make it to town. Then they were living around the corner from each other. So at four o'clock in the morning, she dresses up and goes and takes care of their baby while she goes to give birth, his new wife. That's what I call a nice divorce. Would we agree? Okay.
33:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, so.
33:51 Esther Perel? So it's a...
33:52 Speaker 03 We meet with Coral, and Coral's fantastic and super generous with her time and her insights and her reflections on the experience. And she brings up Jed, and I took a liberty and I asked, do you think Jed would be open to meeting with us? And she said, let me ask him right now. And she texted him, and Jed said, yes. Why were you hesitant to meet with Jed?
34:20 Esther Perel? Because we all carry names of couples or people where we know we didn't deliver.
34:31 Esther Perel? And I knew he left mad. And I knew that he, I basically, I disappointed him. Not I disappointed him, but he was angry. He was angry. And I've always remembered him for that, not for the other piece of the story. I just think it's very important to carry a few cases in our heads where we didn't do well.
34:59 Esther Perel? It just matters. And not doing well, it can take all kinds of different approaches, but it was that. And I didn't know would this guy still want to talk to me. Not only did he want to talk to me, but he brought all his notes.
35:15 Esther Perel? People, fifteen years later. And he remembers, and I don't, you know, not as much. And, uh, and he said, "And you said this, and you said that, and when you said this." It's very powerful, because we don't have the opportunity to go back to people we don't see anymore. We, it's, we know nothing about their lives very often. And I wanted to have the whole relational system on stage here. It's graduation, that's the only reason it didn't happen.
35:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, we, we invited them, they were open to it. We wanted to have them on stage and talk through all of this. Um, and that child that they co-parent is graduated from high school right now, so...
35:56 Esther Perel? College!
35:57 Speaker 03 I'm sorry, college. What is time?
36:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, um, and there's, there's something he said.
36:05 Esther Perel? What, yeah, what he said?
36:06 Speaker 03 Yes. And I have to say, being a fly on the wall, uh, being a fly on the wall for these conversations. And I should clarify, I'm not a therapist, I'm not a clinician, I'm a journalist. But we have a similar, a similar ethos around confidentiality sources, you know, there's, there's a protectiveness there. And I wasn't even sure I was supposed to be there. I was like, "Am I, should I leave?" Because you and Jed, and separately, you and Coral were really going there. And I was so, so grateful that they let me be there and witness it. Because I got to hear Jed say to you, and you know, you and I had been, you were nervous about it before we got on with him, we were really like trying to regulate.
36:50 Speaker 03 He said, "I was angry with you for years, and I haven't been angry with you for years since. I've been grateful." And I'm really curious what it's like to hold, uh, to hold a client or a case for fifteen years where you felt like you failed, and then to have this reparative experience.
37:15 Esther Perel? I think that my most direct thing about a situation like this is as a parent. I mean, there's a lot of things we've said to our kids that we hope one day they will actually see why we needed to say that or do that versus, you know, that it will... So it was very, very moving. Basically, the very same thing that I told him that he was so angry about for so many years. He then turned it around and it became the thing that actually had opened up a whole bunch of space for him. And it's... I mean, I was in tears. He kind of was in tears. She was in tears.
37:56 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
37:57 Esther Perel? It's a one... You don't have many of those. You don't. I mean, I like when people write to me 10 years later and all of that. But this, it's moving. It's not like you say, "Oh, I was right." There's none of that. It's just very moving. It's like, wow. Because a good therapist continues to live in the lives of their patients after they are gone. But a bad therapist or a therapist who didn't do good work, it's not even a bad therapist. If you didn't deliver, if something happened, there was a breach, there was a rupture somewhere, that too continues to live. I remember my first therapist like it's yesterday. And it wasn't good.
38:40 Speaker 03 If mating in captivity asked, "Can we want what we already have?" What is the question you want to carry into the next 20 years? Knowing that we're going to talk about this on the next panel quite a bit more.
38:59 Esther Perel? I mean, mating explores the sustainability of desire over the long haul. I think at this moment, many people are struggling to ignite the desire in the first place.
39:12 Esther Perel? We're in a different landscape. So this question about cultivating aliveness is really central to me. I think, what's some of the questions that we have?
39:25 Speaker 03 I mean, there's hundreds, hundreds. You know, this wasn't a fair question to ask you because there's, there's actually hundreds of questions that we're carrying into the next 20 years. But I, I think, I think you've nailed the one that I hoped you would say, which is the question of how do we cultivate aliveness in a time of disruption? And it's, it is the question that I think, aside from Astaire's presence, drew most of you into this gathering, because it's our thematic for this year. I mean, there are so many forces that shut down our sense of aliveness. So.
39:59 Esther Perel? I will tell you, I think, a question that occupies me, there are many. But one of the questions is, I think that when you live with a phone in your hand, that with a bunch of apps that deliver very precise answers, where you go, what you do, what you listen to, what you watch next, how you get there, God forbid you took a wrong turn and discovered a coastline that you didn't know existed. You know, something happens to curiosity, to experimentation, to dealing with the unknown, to dealing with, with, with making wrong choices and then correcting them.
40:43 Esther Perel? And I think what is fascinating me with the, it's really a technological question, but it's not about technology. It's about how our expectations around predictability and perfection that technology is putting in front of us are warping our expectations with other humans.
41:04 Esther Perel? How?
41:07 Esther Perel? You know, how are we going to deal with the messiness of human life? The bums, the smells, the caretaking, the sentence that always stays with me. When we become accustomed to always on, on demand, you know, immediate delivery of our every delight, how are we going to deal with the fact that people are by their very nature imperfect and unpredictable? And I think that something is shifting like that inside of us. And so what are many people doing, and the younger we go, the more they do it, is avoid. Thank you. Basically, avoid. And with an overemphasis on comfort and security and an underemphasis on risk, which
41:50 Esther Perel? I connect to creativity, to resilience, and to eroticism and aliveness. So that nexus is where I find myself really preoccupied at this moment.
42:04 Speaker 03 Esther, thank you for not only the last 20 years, but for all of it and for this conversation.
42:11 Esther Perel? Thank you.
42:12 Speaker 03 Thank you.
42:23 Speaker 00 Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel is produced by Magnificent Noise. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with New York Magazine and The Cut. Our production staff includes Eric Newsom, Destri Sibley, Sabrina Farhi, Kristin Muller, and Julianne Hahn. Original music and additional production by Paul Schneider. And the executive producers of Where Should We Begin are Esther Perel and Jesse Baker. We'd also like to thank Courtney Hamilton, Mary Alice Miller, and Jack Saul.
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