How do we not miss those things or create those in our relationship?
But we know that if you want to bring excitement into a relationship, you need new experiences
ESTHER PEREL: You know how many times I say to people, tell me something. The person that is here in this other relationship, is that the one who comes home? I mean, the one that your partner-boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, is dealing with is not nearly as charming and as attentive. When you prepare your suitcase and you fly and you choose your carefully chosen clothes and you prepare yourself, you don’t bring work with you. But when you go home, you’re on your phone the whole time, you bring the leftovers, you’re not nearly that attentive, you’re way less is charming, your humor is gone, and then you tell me that your wife is boring or your husband is boring? And you? Who are you here versus who are you there? Not who are they, who are you? So that’s the first thing. It’s like what happened to you that you let this thing seep out of you, and what makes it difficult for you to bring this back into your own relationship?
ESTHER PEREL: Magical reasons why people neglect themselves in some way. Why is it that there you can be such a free woman, and here is this boyfriend of yours who think you hate sex, you have no interest, you are utterly frozen, and this one is the same woman. What happened? That’s the bigger lie. The bigger lie is not only that you’re having a lover. The bigger lie is that your husband, your boyfriend has no idea what’s the truth about you. Why? And then different stories. Sometimes it’s stories from childhood. “I have no idea how to bring that part of me in the context of family because family was the place where sexuality was the most dangerous so I had never known how to experience pleasure at home. Home was the place where I’m made sure to be safe. Pleasure, I took somewhere else.” Then you start to see the way that people have carved out and compartmentalized themselves and the reasons behind it.