The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.
Esther PerelRead
Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.
Interpretation
True love requires both surrendering to one another and maintaining individual independence.
This quote by Esther Perel highlights the dual nature of love, where intimacy and independence coexist. It suggests that a healthy relationship thrives on both partners willing to surrender to each other while also honoring their individual identities and needs, leading to a balanced and fulfilling connection.
In practice
This quote can be shared during relationship workshops to illustrate the importance of balancing intimacy and independence.
The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.
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.
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.
What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism.
Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.
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.
Keep the other person's well being in mind when you feel an attack of soul-purging truth coming on.
That was one of the most fundamental and sacred duties good friends and families performed for one another! They tended the flame of memory, so no oneβs death meant an immediate vanishment from the world; in some sense the deceased would live on after their passing, at least as long as those who loved them lived. Such memories were an essential weapon against the chaos of life and death, a way to ensure some continuity from generation to generation, an order of endorsement and meaning.
It is wonderful how attractive a gentle, pleasant manner is, and how much it wins hearts.
Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.
The way you start to break down systemic racism is to start building individual relationships with people who are not like you.
What was so extraordinary to me about going through this box of my mother's letters and diaries was meeting my mother not as my mother, but as a real person. And what breaks my heart is that I had no idea how self-aware she was and how protective of me she was.
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