With a tousled bob and boho waistcoat worn over bare arms, Esther Perel looks like a rock star. This is fitting because the evening before we meet she commanded a sell-out crowd of nearly 4,000 at the Eventim Apollo in West London. But Perel isn’t in any conventional branch of show business.
The 65-year-old Belgian-American—glowing tan, sharp blue eyes, and the kind of muscle tone you usually see on a Pilates instructor—is the world’s most famous psychotherapist. When it comes to the messy business of love and sex, there’s no one whose wisdom is more sought-after.
For four decades she has been fixing people’s relationships, whether between colleagues, partners, or even people who shouldn’t be hooking up because they’re supposedly committed elsewhere (more on that later). Her books have circulated like samizdat among my female friends.
Initially, Perel’s guidance happened only in her Manhattan consulting room, where she charged (according to contemporary estimates) a few hundred dollars an hour—then in 2003 she wrote an article that turned her career around. She pointed out that when couples with a struggling sex life seek support, therapists and counselors always seemed to give the same advice: to work on their “emotional dynamics” and “communicate their needs.” But, she wondered, what if that was the opposite of what these couples needed to hear?
“Sexual desire doesn’t play by the same rules of good citizenship that maintain peace and contentment in the social relations between partners,” she wrote in her essay for Psychotherapy Networker. “Sexual excitement is politically incorrect.” It was a provocative thesis and it hit a nerve.
Her first book, 2006’s Mating in Captivity, has been translated into 25 languages and become a global bestseller. Her follow-up—The State of Affairs, published in 2017—also made the bestseller lists. Her TED talks on “The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship” and “Rethinking Infidelity” have been viewed more than 20 million times each. But of all her work it’s Where Should We Begin?, the podcast she launched in 2017, that has brought her the widest audience.
In the podcast, which still regularly tops the charts, she conducts one-off sessions with individuals or couples. These can be astonishingly intimate: in one, a couple navigates the fallout from the revelation that the husband secretly fathered a friend’s child by sperm donation; another notable episode is titled “You Want Me to Watch the Kids While You Go Out with Other Men?”. I’ll often start an episode snickering at the title, then find myself gasping out loud as the disclosures come and (frequently, though not always) end up feeling sympathetic to everyone involved.
“Sexual desire doesn’t play by the same rules of good citizenship.”
The episodes have the tension of a true crime story with Perel as the investigator, probing at the story until a revelation comes. She’s no passive listener, but will get right into the muck of her participants’ lives—sometimes very entertainingly. In one session with a particularly fighty couple, you can hear Perel lose her patience and snap: “You can stay together, but if you stay together like this, that’s miserable.”
The voyeuristic appeal for the listener is obvious here, but for the participants it can be truly therapeutic. “It’s very, very rare that people say they had a useless experience. Sometimes they say it didn’t change everything—it’s a one-time session—but it took them in a whole different direction.”
In short, Perel is responsible for changing the way thousands of us speak about relationships, teaching us to bring the style of the analyst’s couch into our everyday talk. If you’ve ever found yourself in a conversation about monogamy’s inherent tension between “security” and “novelty,” you’ve been talking Perel language.
So as I watch her being photographed in a west London studio, I feel more as if I’m anticipating an encounter with a guru than preparing for an interview. In person Perel has a fearsome charisma that she turns on easily for the camera. With her lilting European accent, she sounds almost exactly like the platonic ideal of an analyst—she pronounces her name “Es-stair,” with a languorous final syllable.
When it comes to projecting expertise about sex, a subject she has covered expansively, it doesn’t hurt that she’s rivetingly attractive. She moves her hands lightly, one of them glinting with a silvery chain that runs from her middle finger to her wrist, as she talks about the erotic frustrations of the Western world. The urge to confide some profound secret in her bubbles up in me frequently. I’ve spent countless hours listening in on her work through her podcast and absorbing other people’s romantic woes through her books. It’s easy to imagine reclining on a couch and unspooling my inner life for her to interpret. Equally, though, when it comes to the end of our hour, she switches her warm demeanor to cool detachment with the practiced efficiency of someone who knows her attention is her most bankable asset.
Perel is responsible for changing the way thousands of us speak about relationships.
There’s a serious appetite for guidance in our private lives—especially in our relationships. We are, Perel tells me, “living in a psychological era, and there is a need for people to have a clear vocabulary for explaining what is happening to us.” This is probably why she can charge $199 for a five-part online course titled “Rekindling Desire.”
The reason? We’re more anxious than ever before because we have more options than ever before. A few generations ago, for most people “monogamy is one person for life.” “You get married and you have sex for the first time. All of these very clear boundaries and rules,” she explains. These relationships were often more functional than romantic, but they weren’t necessarily expected to be anything else: a marriage was a machine for making children and running a household, with clearly defined roles for men and women.
That’s no longer the case. Over the course of Perel’s career, she has seen a radical reinvention of the way we love. “When you work with couples and families, you see social change unfold in front of you over decades.” She ticks them off, in no particular order: “When infidelity became no longer just something a woman suffers through and accepts. The first time gay couples started to come in. In more and more couples, a woman is the breadwinner. By the Eighties, you have all the shifts of divorce, blended family, remarriage. Monogamy being up for negotiation.”
These shifts have spared a lot of people from a great deal of misery, but—as the song in Team America: World Police goes—“freedom isn’t free.” “Freedom is also a burden at this moment,” Perel says. “Freedom is the fear of doing it wrong. I’m the only one who gets to make the choice, which is great. But I’m also the only one who gets to bear the consequences. I have nobody to blame but myself.”
She thinks dating apps push the idea of perfection even harder. “The digitalization of life is trying to give you perfect, optimized, polished, smooth, frictionless solutions. Now you have an algorithm that dates for you and does all the screening in advance. I’m tearing my hair out!” She found her husband—Dr. Jack Saul, a psychologist—the old-fashioned, in-person way. They met at Lesley University in Massachusetts when Perel was writing her dissertation and someone suggested Saul would be a helpful contact. They became friends and when Perel was preparing to leave the United States she realized she didn’t want to leave him. They’ve now been married for almost as long as she has been a practicing psychotherapist and have two adult sons.
In interviews both Perel and Saul are scrupulous about protecting the privacy of the marriage and effusive in their professional respect for each other. Meanwhile her sons seem sanguine about their mother being the real-life version of Jean Milburn from Sex Education—although Adam Saul, the eldest, has said that he used to beg her to hide her books about sex when his friends from school were visiting.
“By the Eighties, you have all the shifts of divorce, blended family, remarriage. Monogamy being up for negotiation.”
I’d like to probe more about Perel and Saul’s home life and whether she lives by her own advice. But there’s a good reason for Perel to keep her own relationship out of the spotlight: there are many who would love to see her marriage fail. Specifically because of her ideas on infidelity. Famously Perel doesn’t take a rigidly judgmental line on adultery. “The victim of the affair is not always the victim of the marriage,” she writes in one widely quoted line, which led to her being branded “the world’s most well-known cheater apologist” and much worse besides. Perel shrugs these criticisms off: “It’s not for me to be the moral police.”
Still, she knows that her work around infidelity has proved valuable to a lot of people. At her shows she sometimes asks everyone who has been affected by adultery to raise their hand—whether they were the cheater, the cheated-on, the other man or woman, or the child of a cheater. “It’s about 80 percent,” she says. “This is not a few bad apples; this is the shadow story of relationships. If you just want to say it’s a terrible thing, you’re not helping people.”
It would be easy to see Perel’s success as the sign of an increasingly liberal society. In some ways, though, she thinks we’ve grown more conservative in her lifetime—especially when it comes to sex. There is, she says, “a real generational shift,” with younger women now demanding accountability and sometimes punishment from workplaces and other institutions for men whose sexual infractions fall short of the criminal. Is that shift a good thing or a bad thing? For the only time in our conversation, she seems withdrawn and cautious: #MeToo is precarious ground, especially for anyone who came of age in the sexual revolution. But then she regains her equanimity. “Neither,” she shrugs, putting her own principles about accepting disagreement into practice. “It’s one of the richest conversations intergenerationally among women.”
Perel accepts that her public image will always be heavily associated with sex, especially of the illicit kind. Nonetheless, stereotyping her to this one issue clearly irks her. That’s especially important today because she’s here to talk about her latest project, which is very much not designed to titillate. Called “Turning Conflict into Connection,” it’s an online course that promises to help participants “find peace and reconciliation even when you disagree.” The title sounds like pure therapese, but then I remember the number of acquaintances—and, in some cases, friends—I’ve blocked over arcane political disagreements in recent years and I stow any skepticism.
The course seems timely, I say, given how many relationships seem to have been permanently broken over the past few years by rows over Brexit, Trump, Covid, and the Middle East. “What’s happening at this moment is that people are easily cutting off friends, siblings, family members with whom they have a divergence of opinion,” she says. “They don’t know how to stay connected to somebody who may view the world differently from themselves.”
Perel’s interest in seeing people as more than their most extreme belief has its roots in her parents’ history as Holocaust survivors. (In fact, as she has said elsewhere, they didn’t merely survive but chose to “live life at its fullest:” they went ballroom dancing once a week.) The question that fascinates her is why some European Gentiles risked their own lives to protect Jewish children during pogroms. “Those people were often perfectly anti-Semitic, but they saw a hungry child and the value of not leaving a child hungry was more important than the value about hating Jews.”
She puts the blame for our increased polarization in large part down to the digital nature of our lives. “When you live in a world that is increasingly accustomed to efficient, convenient, on-demand and frictionless existence, you become less adept at dealing with the idiosyncrasies and the inconsistencies of other human beings.” An abstract disagreement can feel like an immediate threat to one’s identity: “Either I exist or you exist, we can’t coexist,” she says. She has a knack for compressing the chaos of the human heart into these pithy one-liners and even if catching an issue in words can’t fix it alone, it certainly makes it feel more manageable.
To get beyond this, both parties must cultivate curiosity about each other’s beliefs, without necessarily sharing them. “Typically in a relationship, ten seconds—that’s three sentences—is how much we can tolerate listening to someone saying things, especially about us, that we disagree with.” The key, she says, is to learn to accommodate the unpleasant feeling of being contradicted “so that you don’t find yourself in counter-attack mode all the time.”
In her podcast she always follows up with her participants and will sometimes run “where are they now” episodes months or years later to catch up with their progress.
Do her subjects ever regret hashing out their most personal issues in such a public sphere? Participants are anonymous, but with a global listenership of many thousands, it seems likely that voices will occasionally be recognized. “Only one time. We had a couple that didn’t like the story that was being told. We thought it was incredible; people think it’s one of the best episodes we ever did.”
There’s something deeply reassuring about Perel’s worldview. Her work takes her into some of the most uncomfortable recesses of the human psyche: the most shameful desires, secretive lusts, and self-destructive impulses. Yet she tackles these things with such warm self-assurance, it starts to feel possible that anyone might be able to address them—even ordinary people who aren’t transatlantic celebrity psychotherapists.
Her job, she says, is to help people rewrite the fixed narratives they have about themselves, and which doom them to repeat the same behavior. In her consulting room and on her podcast she sees herself as an “editor,” guiding rather than controlling this process: “You come in with one story, you leave with another.” And then our time is up and the glow of her interest snaps off as if she has hit a dimmer switch.
The Esther Ethos
On selfishness
“A healthy sense of entitlement is a prerequisite for erotic intimacy.”
On knowing your partner
“Some couples [confuse] intimacy with control. What passes for care is actually covert surveillance.”
On the purpose of children
“We no longer get work out of our children; today we get meaning.”
On spontaneous sex
“I urge my patients not to be spontaneous about sex … committed sex is intentional sex.”
On fantasies
“We may be wise to dream alone, for we may not be on the same erotic wavelength as our beloved.”
On long-term relationships
“Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem to solve; it is a paradox to manage.”
On affairs
“Affairs offer us a window into those other lives, a peek at the stranger within.”
On men
“Sex is the entrance to their emotional antechamber.”
Sarah Ditum is a London-based journalist
