With over 12 million views of her TED talks on YouTube, couples counselor Esther Perel explores the relationship between love and desire, and the idea of “erotic intelligence.”
She is particularly interested in why and people get bored in long term relationships, and how to keep that from happening. Married for 20 years, Perel is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors of concentration camps, where she learned at a young age that her parents “didn’t just want to survive, they wanted to revive. They wanted to embrace vibrancy and vitality — in the mystical sense of the word, the erotic.”
Perel began to ask the question to her couples to answer: “I turn myself off when…” and they answered things like “When I don’t like my body, when I’m worried, when I don’t feel worthy of receiving pleasure…”
Then she asked them to answer when they were turned on to their partners. Their answers were “when I see him working in his studio, “when I see her on stage,” when they are doing something present.” Couples also said they liked being separated from their partners, longing for them, and then reuniting again. Longing for someone is a turn-on.
And what is the secret to long term passion and not getting bored with each other? The secret she says, is “exploring, adventure, travel, playfulness, novelty, and most of all imagination.” She also notes that imaginative fantasies are sometimes “wrong,” but that’s okay. “The erotic mind is not always politically correct.”