Deleting the App, The New Ritual of Commitment: Esther Perel

[Music] stand up if you've ever felt rejected [Music] thank you stand up if you have rejected and look around you see you have to look around when this happens because we see it stand up if you have ever experienced heartbreak thanks then just go back because it's has a big it has a different effect when the vision when you rouse rise and when you go down stand up if you have done something unforgivable thank you stand up if you have experienced loss in the last year nos nos nos and OSs if you have experienced loss in the last six months if you have experienced loss in the last three months in the last month Wow thank you stand up if you have experienced a powerful sexual awakening in the last two years five years stay up the others you can stay 10 years thank you stand up if you're still waiting for them for the awakening to come if you are still waiting for the awakening to come see one of my colleagues once had the most beautiful question he said your best sexual experience have you already have you already had it or is it still to come how do you know but if but whichever way you answer says about it says a lot about us right stand up if you've ever been critical of your body stand up if you've become less critical of your body CH helps contrary to what they say stand up if there's someone that you own an apology - an apology you will get used to my accent in five minutes thank you and stand up if there's something if you if you find yourself still waiting or hoping for someone's apology to you thank you oh that's a nice one stand up if you've ever lied about yourself about your own needs and wishes thank you oh yes stand up if you think you received good sex education growing up sex education you know that thing it's called sex ed no no but look at this stand up if you think you receive good sex education this is for five people six people in a room of a hundred forty people that says it all you know huh does that say that that says something no I have so many I can go on like this ah stand up if you grew up in a home that was more warm and loving thank you and stand up if you wish you had grown up in a home that was more warm and loving it's more of that right but thank you stand up if you think you've done a better job than the home you grew up in nice nice look at it just take it in you know things don't stay the same forever huh stand up if you've had to work hard to change the way that you relate to yourselves that's why we're here thank you now also because that is the way that you are on that project yes that's a nice one to stand up if you hold yourself to a difference then you hold others too we could do this a whole night right I could just go down all aspects of relationships so it's very it's fascinating to listen to to Justin and I think what we wanted to do is to just do very short kind of recaps this evening I'm also it would you for two hours tomorrow morning and then another hour and a half tomorrow night so whatever I don't cover now we have plenty of time but do you hear me when in the back yeah okay but I think that really the opportunities for us to engage in conversations with each other actually not just with Justin I think all of us that that really is where the richest lie you know but I I had the thought of what I wanted to say and then I kind of changed it completely as I was listening to you because I I thought you know it's everything you say and then there is everything I'm going to add to it that is that I think lives in the same vicinity you know I think of all the ideologies of the 19th century the only one that has maintained itself and with ever more fervor is romanticism communism is gone Marxism is underway the whole I mean romanticism you have all of what you described and then when people choose to the person got one and only the level of romanticism that we bring to our relationships today is unprecedented so I thought I was I would give you the way that I am imagining what has changed and so I'm a clinician I don't do research in this way and it's more you know it's clinical work across the world but still I will tell you I have no evidence for anything I say meaning I can sound super confident but I don't know if it's true but somehow over the years it seems that people relate to it so there must be some truth to it you know if it's very important because I don't think of myself as a scientist I think of myself as as a person who works with human behavior and as a clinician but it's different than to collect that kind of data but I think what what what I see is that there is something fundamental that has arrived in the realm of relationships and it means that not and this is to me less than a hundred years ago so I don't go back that far I think if you look at friendship it hasn't really changed too much in the last hundred years if you look at sibling relationships plenty of relational systems that have rather stayed loyal to them for their form parent-child has really shifted but romantic love the couple that is a unit that has just gone through a massive transformation and we used to live in communities and when I say we used to I'm thinking in contrast to the dominant model of the United States and the west of your and Western societies all of these others all of these still exist in our country too and they certainly exist in many other parts of the world but definitely there was a collective model and in that collective model of living in the village relationships were very clear everybody knew who they were you knew what was expected of you and you know how you needed to behave you knew whose salary was the one that's going to be the important one you knew who was gonna wake up to feed the baby you knew who had the right to demand for sex and you knew how parents not needed to talk to children and they didn't need to spend ten minutes explaining why it was important to clean their room and you know how children went into a rich aunt were thirty and you knew how husbands were going to talk to their wives and you also knew how their wives were not gonna respond to the husbands and the others didn't get to be married so there was that and in that model that which was a religious model which was a model with social hierarchy which was a model very clear incentives and prohibitions the boundaries were clear that doesn't mean they were not infringed upon all the time but they were clear and all the big decisions were made for us we had to make rather small amounts of decisions so you had a lot of certainty we had a lot of clarity you had very little personal freedom and who cared about personal expression or fulfillment but we have moved to a model that is on the other side of this with unprecedented freedom all the big decisions we have to make whose salary matters really whose career is more important who's gonna wake up tomorrow morning who's planning for the next date who initiates for sex on a more regular basis it's all negotiated relationships today are not made up of rules and duty and obligations they're made up of conversation and negotiation and a lot of negotiation stuff people never had to negotiate so we don't know how to do it those big decisions are all for us massive amounts of freedom loads of options a thousand people at my fingertips as he as Justin describes but an enormous amount of uncertainty and an enormous amount of self-doubt and a system that is predicated on self-criticism because if you feel too good about yourself you're not gonna shop you won't consume you have to not never really feel like you reach it the market is not predicated bless you I'm feeling so good and that I think is the first thing that is fundamentally shifted in the realm of relationships that's number one number two comes to marriage we used to marry basically once when a marriage was the primary form of committed relationships and basically it was one time for life and if you didn't like it you could always hope for an early death years or the others but somebody had to go there was no way out do we don't we can't even understand what that means there was no way out stuck you were you know bad card bad card and we used to marry and have sex for the first time today you marry and you stop having sex with others we used to marry till death do us apart today you marry till love dies you used to not believe too much in happiness because happiness in the Christian world primarily was for the afterlife you suffered well here you could be rewarded later this notion that we want to be happy in our relationships for God's sake and that it's not just an option but a mandate we don't even divorce because we are unhappy we divorce because we could be happier and how do I know if I'm happy enough and could it be better and is it worth the gamble and all of these decisions are part of the big decisions we used to have sex primarily for reproduction on the on the farm you need many kids and it was a woman's marital duty did anybody ever ask her if she wanted it and if she liked it seriously this gathering where we are together here men and women thinking about radiant intimacy and sexuality and orgasm and energy and I mean I try to imagine not my grandparents for sure my parents that none of these people would have ever known this was possible so to me there's a lot of bad news but this is extraordinary news the fact that we can even do this you know that we even have the privilege of being able to not have to deal just with survival needs so that we can actually think about the the quality of our erotic connection and I don't mean erotic just in the sexual sense you know we did we we got blessed with this thing called contraception because the woman working outside goes together with contraception these two we had to go together if she just went outside but she still had too many babies she couldn't have done what she did this democratization of contraception changed everything to me that is the second revolution the agrarian one and then contraception the internet the Internet but the Internet is changing lots of things but contraception changed something massive fundamental for the first time we could separate sex from reproduction for the first time women and men could experience sexuality without the threat of mortality for the first time we replace duty with desire for the first time we are thinking about sexual bliss as I do for the first time we actually as our do and certainly within the context of romantic relationships which today are often committed relationships you don't have to go outside of your committed relationship for the romantic love which is what we've done for centuries for throughout all of history adultery was the place for love because marriage was worth made to mercantile and way to mercenary to have that be the place for passion so there was a pragmatic arrangement and romanticism took place somewhere else then we brought love into marriage and marriage became a romantic arrangement and then adultery became the betrayal of that thing then we brought sex to love now we connect marital satisfaction with sexual satisfactions whenever did we do this marital happiness related to sexual satisfaction that's a that's a revolution of a paradigm you know and we take all of these things so for granted right intimacy used to be that you work the land together and you deal with the vicissitudes of everyday life and you what you deal with the droughts or the rain so the you know this the convivencia it was really the sharing of daily life intimacy today's intimacy and intimacy means that what I'm sharing with you is not my heard my diary is not material my door is my internal life that's what I come to share with you my aspirations my anxieties my worries my wishes and when I share them with you I want to feel that you care about Who I am what I am what's going on inside of me because I'm a creature of meaning and my sharing it with you is giving it a meaning that's why we call it significant other this whole notion of bringing oneself to someone to create that kind of intimate connection with one person with whom I'm going to momentarily transcend my existential aloneness why because I'm asking today from one person to give me what once an entire village used to provide because with you I want to experience everything traditional relationships were about companionship family life economic support and social status were probably the four major aspects of committed relationships of long term relationships I still want all of this but I also want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover and my intellectual equal and my co-parent and the person who is going to help me become who I want to be it's the self actualization model of marriage as Eli Finkel calls it you know it's not just the mate on the Maslow ladder it's no longer for survival it's not even for belonging and meaning it's for self fulfillment and self-actualization that's why the slow sex is the slow model is so crucial because the slow model doesn't happen at 18 it happens at 28 and at 28 I've already worked on my identity I've already defined myself when you choose me you choose me for as a recognition of my authentic self that's a whole different story but they call it the capstone model versus the cornerstone model that's another version of the of the slow of the slow movement so then we bring sex to love and then we bring happiness on top of it and then we bring another concept that to me is really crucial which is that we want to be able to reconcile love and desire in the same relationship and love and desire in the same relationship is also a reconciliation of two fundamental human NEADS which is that we on the one hand of a need for security for stability for anchoring for reliability dependability all the stuff that gives us the oxytocin or that is connected to the oxytocin but that it's an every story knows disability or distension it's not even a duality it's every epic story knows the the movement between a home and journey so this is home but then we have the other side of us that once changed and novelty and mystery and the unknown and the unexpected and spontaneity and danger and risk and we were all have these two fundamental human needs by the way men and women everybody but in this room every one of you if you track down just over in one moment your little history you will realize that some of you came out of your childhood wanting more protection more roots more stability more anchoring and some of you came out of your childhood wanting more movement more space more freedom and probably you partnered at least on occasion with people whose proclivities match your vulnerabilities capisce if Allah me you know so we want this reconciliation but sometimes instead of dealing with the two needs inside of us we can have assigned once at one part of it to another person which at first we find intensely attractive and then we find it intensely threatening because it's often the very same thing that is attractive in the beginning that becomes the source of conflict later because it still is ultimately different and this reconciliation of these two fundamental human needs to me is the real challenge of modern love or modern relationships we've usually had them separate the concept of a passion that marriage would have been an oxymoron and you can use marriage as a metaphor for relationships committed relationships I don't care if they're legal or not you know and this is the same way that we want to experience together love and desire and we've been told in the romantic parlance that if you love you desire they go together but they don't always go together and everybody knows it so I began this work for me around mating in captivity about 15 years ago because I had really learned a few things as a therapist you know I was told sexual problems are always the consequence of relationship problems and so therefore you have to fix the relationship and then the sex will follow and then I fixed plenty of relationships or they fixed themselves and then it did absolutely nothing to the sex it improved in the kitchen and it changed nothing in the bedroom and then I began to think that notion is really very seductive but I'm not sure it is just that accurate I had so many people who would come to my office to say we love each other very much we have no sex and I'm not talking about less sex I'm talking about no sex we are family we are not erotic we are very affectionate but we almost used affection sometimes as a sexual appetite suppressor those were not the same ways of relating we experienced secure attachment but we don't know how to experience that attachment and at the same time also I have the tension that is needed for the erotic and then I began to think a rhotic is really you know is not sex I'm not so interested in the sex per se we were talking with Justin at dinner it's like you know so often when people think sex they think of something they do it's an act I think of sexuality not as something you do I think of it as a place you go it's an energy to trip you take inside yourself with another with others you know we are the creatures who have an erotic life we can make love to somebody for hours have multiple orgasms have a total state of bliss and have touched absolutely nobody just because we can imagine it and a rhotacism is sexuality that is transformed by our human imagination but it does one thing it makes us feel alive it gives us a sense of vitality of vibrancy of energy that when people complain about the listlessness of their sex life they may sometimes want more sex but they always want better and the better they're talking about is to reconnect themselves to a quality of aliveness and vibrancy and vitality it's that that renewal that they're longing for you know and so I began to think you know what does it take to to create that kind of thriving relationship what does it mean to imagine the state where people experience their relationships not just as not dead but as a life you know and the image for me the origin was very clear because so I died in my family I do pain my husband I do pleasure my husband does pain he's a trauma expert and he does large-scale trauma you know shootings terrorist attacks refugee crisis things like that and collective traumas and one day we were talking about working with basically victims of tortures or people who've been kidnapped journalists humanitarian aid workers and so forth and I kind of asked him you know at what point do you know that somebody comes back back to life not just back to the states like the three people from Korea two weeks ago you know and it was very clear that you know that the person comes back when they are once again able to play because if they played and they're not in a constant state of vigilance and when they are able to once again take risks and play is when risk-taking is fun I mean they basically are the same two things meaning when you can when you're not just having to do this the whole time to protect yourself and you can actually go and walk into the world that's exactly what the babies do when they leave our lap and they start to go to explore and to discover and to see what else is out there and I thought that that was an incredible stay meant about sexuality because I've seen plenty of people do sex and feel nothing that's not the point you know and that so what I began to connect it to it was my own history which was that you know I grew up in Antwerp in Belgium in Flemish Belgium and I was part of a community that was all Holocaust survivors that was it and and all the children and they were often two groups of people in that community and it's a very funny thing because I've told the story a few times but I just had my first reunion after 42 years with all these children we were 15 years together in the same class we were all born in fifty-eight we were all children of survivors and we had never talked about it but I took care of that and literally said to them do you understand what we were so and I want to know I've told this story and I said in America I tell the story about the two kinds of families that I remember those that were not dead and those that came back to life but you can apply to all trauma it just happens to be my reference you know I said do you remember this do you have that same sense I thought maybe I weren't the only one who actually sensed this but no everybody knew which were the morbid homes the morbid homes were the homes in which you could not rejoice too much because when you are rejoicing too much not watching out for danger you know and the other ones decided that life was worth living with a vengeance if you were there you made them make a best of it at all moments you know you could never sit down actually and to me it is that energy that I try to capture when I think about thriving relationships the rest are all the words that we know about what makes a good relationship but that quality of aliveness that you know the and and all the work I've done around infidelity afterwards has been to understand how people are talking to me about that in many many different contexts as well so what I see is another interesting thing and maybe I'll stop at that is that I find that there is a moment now in light of what you were saying justing that it's like a amazing combination between on the one hand they search for the soulmate and a method of romantic consumerism meaning we have literally soulmate has always meant God you know now it means the person that I'm gonna find that is that one and only with whom I'm going to experience transcendence and meaning and connection and wholeness all the stuff that people used to look for in the sanctuary of the divine and that conflation between the spiritual and the relational is really what is happening when in the absence of religion romantic love is taking its place but how do we go looking for that soulmate is on the phone on the apps so that when I find you and I know that you're the one you know how we know because I delete my apps that's the new ritual of commitment you know and it is an amazing combination to go in looking for somebody like that that exists somewhere in cosmos that we know is gonna be the one that's gonna recognize me that's gonna see me at my essence or the whole stick that I talk about and then to do it in such a consumeristic approach I find that an amazing combination I find the thing that you described about the hanging out the way I call it is stable ambiguity stable ambiguity is a way that so many people have relationships these days which is just enough connection not to be alone but not too much connection to forego my freedom stable ambiguity you know I I I think it's the perfect term for it doesn't it it's just unclear enough but it is just stable enough that you can rely on it it's in orbit you know you can and and you can do it by icing people you can do it by simmering you know you hold them like you know will meet I'm very busy right now but maybe we could check in with each other again in another month you know so it's like this whole it's a it's it's actually I mean in some cases it it as the hanging out it's quite it can be quite fulfilling as well and nurturing but in many other instances it's actually some social atomization like that of bits and pieces of big of relationships but nothing really it's like people who nibble the whole day but never have a full meal is that the image I have at times [Music] you

Channel: scienceandnonduality

Views: 205,419

Rating: 4.8907104 out of 5

Keywords: Esther Perel, science and nonduality, Radiant Intimacy, relationship, sexuality, eroticism, love, romance, dating

Id: hxLdu66qr3g

Length: 30min 15sec (1815 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 29 2018