Love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning.
Esther PerelRead
The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Love requires mutual care, but this can sometimes diminish passion.
In this quote, Esther Perel reflects on the dual nature of love and desire. While the qualities that foster a loving relationship—such as mutual support and responsibility—are essential to nurturing a bond between partners, they can also create feelings of stagnation or inhibit desire, suggesting that the very elements meant to cultivate intimacy can paradoxically lead to its decline if not balanced with a sense of spontaneity and passion.
Themes
LoveDesireRelationshipsMutualityResponsibility
In practice
Example use cases
During a relationship workshop, to highlight the complexity of love.
More from Esther Perel
All quotes →If you start to feel that you have given up too many parts of yourself to be with your partner, then one day you will end up looking for another person in order to reconnect with those lost parts.
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What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism.
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Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.
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Most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day - the erotic mind is not very politically correct.
Esther PerelRead
It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.
Esther PerelRead
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