The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.
Esther PerelRead
Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. 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.
Interpretation
People often seek change not just to escape others, but to rediscover themselves.
In this quote, Esther Perel highlights the idea that when individuals seek new experiences or change their surroundings, it is often not just about wanting to leave their current relationships or partners, but rather it is a deeper desire to reconnect with their own identity and essence. The longing to escape might stem from feeling lost or transformed into someone they do not recognize, prompting a quest for self-discovery and authenticity.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth and self-awareness.
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.
The essential problems remain the same... The kids I write about are asking for the same things I wanted. They want two contradictory things. They want to be the same as everyone else, and they want to be different from everyone else. They want acceptance for both.
For me, any story I tackle begins with the human relationships and not the plot.
The anorexic is out to prove how little she needs, how little she can survive on; she is out, in a sense, to discredit her nurturers, while at the same time making a public crisis out of her need for nurture. Such vulnerability and such power: it brings the whole female machinery to a halt.
The loneliest you will get is in the most public of arenas: You will go to a place and end up in the smallest compartment possible, because it's a distraction to everybody, and you end up not getting to enjoy it like everyone else.
There will be gay couples; it will exist. It is not very nice that people who are married - who divorce in three seconds - don’t want protection for the others. The legal system should protect everyone, not just the few people who think they are above everybody else because they are married.
The things that matter most in our lives are not fantastic or grand. They are the moments when we touch one another.
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