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.
Why has marriage failed? In the first place, we raised it to unnatural standards. We tried to make it something permanent, something sacred, without knowing even the abc of sacredness, without knowing anything about the eternal. Our intentions were good but our understanding was very small, almost negligible. So instead of marriage becoming something of a heaven, it has become a hell. Instead of becoming sacred, it has fallen even below profanity.
Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!
A great many men's gratitude is nothing but a secret desire to hook in more valuable kindnesses hereafter.
I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care.
If you pour oil and vinegar into the same vessel, you would call them not friends but opponents.
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