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 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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Love balances security and adventure, with marriage marking the start of lasting romance.
Esther Perel's quote emphasizes that love is a complex blend of stability and excitement, suggesting that a committed relationship does not stifle romance but rather provides a foundation for it to deepen. By arguing that marriage should be viewed as the beginning rather than the conclusion of romantic feelings, Perel encourages couples to embrace both the security of partnership and the ongoing journey of love.
Themes
LoveMarriageRomanceCommitmentSecurityAdventure
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used during a wedding speech to highlight the importance of both stability and excitement in marriage.
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.
Esther PerelRead
What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism.
Esther PerelRead
Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.
Esther PerelRead
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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