The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.
Esther PerelRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote warns against losing your identity in a relationship, indicating that it can lead to seeking fulfillment elsewhere.
Esther Perel highlights the importance of maintaining one's individuality in a relationship. When partners give up essential parts of themselves to accommodate each other, they may eventually find themselves feeling incomplete. This sense of loss can push an individual to seek connection outside the relationship, as they try to regain the lost aspects of their identity that were sacrificed in the name of love or commitment.
Themes
IdentityRelationshipsLoveSelfPersonal Growth
In practice
Example use cases
During a relationship workshop, a speaker emphasizes the importance of maintaining personal identity.
More from Esther Perel
All quotes →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
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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