The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.
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.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the conflicting nature of human desires and societal norms.
Esther Perel's quote reflects the complexity of human sexuality and attraction, suggesting that while people may publicly conform to certain societal expectations or ethical stances during the day, their desires can often contradict those sentiments when they are in private. This dichotomy emphasizes the erotic mind's tendency to transcend political correctness, illustrating the innate conflicts between our inner impulses and external societal norms.
In practice
Using this quote in a relationship workshop to discuss the nuances of desire.
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.
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.
Most humbling of all is to comprehend the lifesaving gift that your pit crew of people has been for you, and all the experiences you have shared, the journeys together, the collaborations, births and deaths, divorces, rehab, and vacations, the solidarity you have shown one another. Every so often you realize that without all of them, your life would be barren and pathetic. It would be Death of a Salesman, though with e-mail and texting.
she knew she could help him best by being silent and by being near
The good life is built with good relationships.
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
The girl was grateful to the young man for every bit of flattery; she wanted to linger for a moment in its warmth and so she said, 'You're very good at lying.' 'Do I look like a liar?' 'You look like you enjoy lying to women,' said the girl, and into her words there crept unawares a touch of the old anxiety, because she really did believe that her young man enjoyed lying to women.
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