“The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives.” This is how Esther Perel began, one of the most appreciated voices of contemporary psychotherapy, author of bestsellers translated into over 30 languages and speaker with over 40 million views at Tedtalks, the speech at the conference Roots – “Search for self” that took place recently in Bucharest.
“We have two fundamental sets of human needs”, she said. “We have the need for safety, stability, predictability, mutual addiction, trusting, having someone to support. But we also have a strong need for risk, freedom, adventure, mystery, exploration. Each person comes to the world with both sets of needs, but comes out of childhood with a more dominant one.”
In a phrase, he described the essence: the need to be protected and the need to be free. To belong and, at the same time, to escape. From childhood we leave with a dominant fingerprint: some long for affection, others after space. And in the couple, these stories meet. Usually, the one who is afraid of abandonment reaches the one who is afraid of suffocating.
When we ask from a man how much from a whole village
“It is often the case that, in couples, we choose partners whose inclinations correspond to our vulnerabilities. In many relationships, you will find a more fearful person in the face of abandonment and another, more fearful in the face of choking. It is a living dynamic. Attachment and commitment: friends, mentoring relationships, creative collaborations, many other forms of profound connection ”she explained.
In his opinion, in part, I think this happens because the safety came from the great traditions: especially from religion. “Religion helps us to live with what we cannot understand, to give meaning to suffering: not to avoid it, but to endure it. Religion offered us a moral framework to manage evil. But when we lose religion, community and all the big structures that gave us safety, we bring that need in romantic relationships. Continuity: but also adventure, freedom, mystery, risk, problem.continues Esther Perel.
The freedom that made us lonely
In fact, Perel told how, at her first visit to Romania, in 1979, she noted that “People had begun to move to the city. They became freer, but even lonely. I do not idealize life before, but people understood what it means to eat alone, to lose the share capital.”
It is one of those observations that, although spoken calmly, have the strength of a diagnosis. Because, meanwhile, we got used to calling loneliness.
“We took all those needs that the community offered us and put them in a small unit of two: a” social state “in miniature. And why do we do this? Because, honestly, where else could we go? When I wrote Mating in Captivity (erotic intelligence), in 2006, I was already saying that we were overloading this relationship with huge expectations and it will collapse under their weight. I do not say today that a person cannot be a whole village, and should not be forced to be. ”
I replaced the village with the apartment. The ritual with planning. The voice of the community with that of the algorithms. We won our autonomy, but we lost the invisible network that kept us alive: the feeling of belonging to someone and somewhere.
Happiness as a new obligation
One of the biggest changes that have occurred with social transformations is this, adaguguga specialist: “For centuries, happiness was reserved for the afterlife. On Earth you had to suffer well, and if you managed to do it, you were to be rewarded after death. Like the carrot in front of the donkey, yes? Exactly, happiness became a possibility, then an obligation. In the name of happiness we do a lot of things..
For the first time in history, admit Esther Perel, if you ask a Western parent who wants most for his child, the answer is no longer: “to be healthy”, “to be a good man”, “to have what to eat”, but “I want to be happy.” “For me, this completely changes the landscape of relationships. In the last decades, the field of mental health helped many people understand themselves better, to become more introspective, to recognize their patterns, traumas, wounds. But in my opinion, a humble one, all these have become overly individualized.
In therapy, people often become blocked between the two impulses: they want safety, but they suffocate in it, they will be freedom, but they are afraid. One of the most subtle distinctions that Perel does is between love and desire. Love wants closeness. Desire needs distance.
Love needs safety, the desire for the unknown. Therefore, the modern paradox is that we want to feel you want, but without the risk of becoming vulnerable.
When the discussion came to the idea of reconciliation between domestic and erotic, Esther Perel made an important observation: the way we talk about intimacy today is, in fact, an epoch issue. “We live in a common vocabulary, in a language of our time,” she said. And the favorite word of the present generation is safety.
Love wants closeness. Desire, mystery.
We talk about safety more than ever, although we live, paradoxically, in a safer world than ever. Safety has become an emotional fetish, an ideal that promises stability, but in excess the desire suffers. Perel admits that if she were younger, she would probably have been fascinated by the paradigm of the attachment. But she comes from another school – psychoanalytic, systemic, psychodramatic – and has learned that love and desire are not synonymous, but forces that intersect and contradict.
“In love you want to reduce the distance, to create safety. But the desire needs distance, mystery, freedom”, she explained. That is why, Perel says, he is not interested in sex as an act, but the erotic as vitality. The erotic is what makes people feel alive: to feel curiosity, play, risk, joy. It is the parallel narrative of a relationship: where love seeks closeness, desire needs space to breathe.
“We feel attracted to the partner when we see him in his element, when he is self-sufficient, when he does not need us. The care is full of love, but completely anti-hero.” completes Esther Perel.
For Perel, the erotic becomes an antidote to fear. She confesses, in fact, in front of a Archipline hall that she asked her husband, Jack Saul, trauma specialized therapist: “When do you realize that a man who was tortured begins to return to life?” And the answer was: “When he can take risks. When he can play, because the game is the risk lived as pleasure. When it can be creative, because creativity means you can relate to the unknown.”
And for that, she adds, you can't be hypervigilant.
“I remembered my childhood. I grew up in a community of Holocaust survivors. My parents were the only two survivors from all over their community. I saw two types of people: those who did not died and those who returned to life. And this can be applied to any type of trauma, but they are not dying. That if you look up and you are vulnerable, something bad might happen. You don't trust. The world is a dangerous place. Those who come back to life do not believe that the world is safer, but that they can live in it differently. It is not about “healing”, but to increase your life around the wound. They understood the erotic as an antidote to death and numbness.
From there it all started. That's how I got to say: I'm not interested in sex, I'm interested in what makes you feel alive. And this is also related to your question about happiness. I do not work “happiness”. But I work with something next to them – with vitality. Vitality made me understand that sex is not something you do, but a place where you go. Where do you go when you make love? With which part of you do you connect? What fragments of you are expressed there? Because in the erotic you don't have to do much – the imagination is the main engine. Curiosity, imagination, game – these are essential“She said.
Relational maturity
Then she explains how she began to observe couples in her office – what does the spark keep them? What makes them alive, connected? “I noticed three things that are constantly returning: 1) attraction: compared to the person, not only physical, but vital. The key question: When do you feel the most attracted to your partner? The answer is almost universal: when it is in his element. Sympathetic joy – the joy for the happiness of the other, even when it is not related to you.
Erotic freedom, according to his statements, is not sexual freedom, but the freedom to be alive. To leave you curious, vulnerable, necessarily. To live at risk, not against him.
Therefore, Esther Perel does not ask us to choose between safety and freedom, but to learn to keep them together without confining them. Safety is not control. It's trust. Freedom is not fleeing. It's the ability to stay connected even in open space.
What she proposes, in fact, is a new form of relational maturity: the love in which you do not have to lose yourself. In which the other is not your guardian, but your witness. In which you can say: “I love you, but I can breathe.”
Maybe that's why her words resonate so strongly in the generation that grew between two extremes: parents for whom everything and a current culture for which freedom became religion was. Between the two, many feel suspended: too bound to be free, too alone to be safe.
