LET’S BEGIN

WITH TWO TED TALKS, AS MANY BOOKS AND A WILDLY POPULAR PODCAST, ESTHER PEREL IS THE MOST INFLUENTIAL RELATIONSHIP THERAPIST OF OUR TIME. WE PICK THE BRAIN OF THE WOMAN WHO SEEMS TO BE ABLE TO READ YOURS

Esther Perel: the relationship guru of our time.

IF YOU’RE LOOKING at Esther Perel to offer a quick fix for your relationship woes, you won’t get it. In a world where the answer to any question entering our minds (Which moment from childhood sparked my intimacy issues?

Does crying to The National mean I should leave my partner?) is expected to be at our fingertips instantly, and we leave uncomfortable conversations on “read”, the beloved couples therapist offers no hardand-fast rules, instead forcing us to hold up a mirror and do the work ourselves. As Perel will tell you, “I don’t have answers, as in, ‘This is what you do.’ I do say, ‘This is how I think it works.’”

Yet her pull is powerful. Between Perel’s 2013 TED Talk — on the all-too-familiar topic of waning desire in long-term relationships – and a diatribe on rethinking infidelity which came two years later, her talks have more than 27 million views. Her word, when it comes to our most intimate relationships, is considered gospel – a kind of sexual healing for a generation that’s dating faster but marrying later than ever before. Tapped by Fortune 500 companies to act as an organisational consultant and by Showtime to advise for TV series The Affair, the psychotherapist now has two books, a prolific online presence that includes twice-monthly newsletters and, of course, her podcast

Where Should We Begin? Oh, and she still runs a clinical office in New York, which is currently not accepting new clients. (Can you imagine the waiting list?)

Despite the fanfare, Perel has the pragmatism of someone fluent in nine languages with a background in group and race relations, having worked in conflict resolution between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. Her French-sounding accent is misleading; she’s Belgian, born in Antwerp to Jewish parents who spent time in concentration camps under Nazi rule. Each were the sole survivors of their families. “They came out of that experience wanting to charge at life with a vengeance and make the most of each day,” Perel has said. “I owe them much of my perspective on life.” Perel studied in Jerusalem before travelling to New York for post-graduate studies, and says one of the main reasons she never used her return plane ticket was because she fell in love with her now-husband of more than 30 years, Jack Saul, who is also a psychologist (the couple has two adult sons).

For someone who has come to be synonymous with intimate relationships, it may be a bit surprising to discover that it wasn’t until her mid-forties that she switched her focus, after working mainly in group and family therapy. Now, first and foremost, Perel is a couples therapist, but explains, “I work with all relationship systems.” She says about 70 per cent of her clients are romantic partners; the rest are individuals and some families, the latter typically with adult children.

Her podcast, which has been running since 2017, features real couples in unscripted therapy sessions. In one episode, Perel encourages a husband to take on an alter-ego named Jean-claude to appeal to his wife’s dormant sexual desires. Where the man and his wife speak English, Jean-claude speaks a sort of Franglais, with Perel acting as the translator (it needs to be heard to be believed). You’d think it would prove difficult to find couples willing to have the sore points of their relationship aired to the world via a play-on-demand clothesline for their dirty laundry. Instead, Perel’s team whittled down 1,500 applications from couples via her website and social media. She’ll soon launch a new podcast, set to focus on workplace relationships. “I’m dealing with completely different partners,” she explains.

For Perel, people wanting to divulge their problems has been happening on a macro scale long before she was a trained psychotherapist. “People confided in me from very early on,” she says, partly due to an innate knack for understanding them and their problems (the other part, we’d hazard, might have something to do with that accent). She began reading about psychology in high school, as young as 14. “I was very interested in the human experience — the human psyche, human suffering, human hope, human desire, human connection – all of it. Even human evil and cruelty, for that matter. I was interested in all aspects of people. And I suppose I was trying to figure myself out.”

Romantic relationships had a particular draw for her. “There is not another unit, relationship-wise, that has so many expectations put on it as the couple,” says Perel. “The romantic ideal is one of the most important stories of the 19th and 20th centuries in terms of our aspirations.” Where she comes in, Perel says, is “when that couple falls apart, or becomes disillusioned, or betrays each other, or loses trust, or doesn’t desire each other anymore, or is completely estranged from each other and doesn’t even notice anything the other one is doing. It’s an extraordinary thing. If you go to the wedding, then you see them coming to couples therapy, you would say, ‘My god! What disenchantment.’”

She’s realistic and admits that some of the time it’s best to part ways. “Some people want to end with the ‘conscious uncoupling’, as we call it. Some relationships have run their course and that doesn’t mean they have failed, it means they ended. Not everybody is meant to live 60 to 70 years with the same person or in the same relationship.” But more often than not, she says, the couples who come to see her want to stay together, and for them, “I can be a facilitator of new experiences between two people who often have such hope with each other.”

She admits that when she was starting out, she thought if a couple wound up in her office after only a couple of years together, their relationship wasn’t long for this world. But enough time practicing has completely changed her view. “There are couples who come and you say, ‘Oh my god, I wish you had come so much earlier,’ and there are some who come early on and you say, ‘It’s really good that you’ve come now, because if this doesn’t change it’s going to creep up on you for years to come.’”

Perel welcomes the shift in thinking around couples therapy as a matter of maintenance early on in the relationship rather than a mad scramble as it’s all falling apart. This is perhaps best exemplified by Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard, who reportedly started couples therapy shortly after meeting. Even former First Lady Michelle Obama revealed during her Becoming book tour that she and Barack went after their children were born. Perel says she now often sees couples who are preparing for marriage, a baby (or adjusting to life with – or without – one), or who are pondering a big life change, like a relocation. She characterises it as seeing couples “when they are having difficult conversations”, adding that couples therapy is for “people all along their lifespan. It’s no longer just because they are stuck”.

The morning of my interview with Perel, The Cut published an article titled Is Marriage Obsolete? When asked what value the institution of marriage has in 2019, Perel offers: “People will always look for a certain way to formalise their attachments and their relationships. It will always take new forms. We use the same word but, at least in the West, the institution of marriage has nothing in common with what it used to (social status and economic support were once main motivators). We turned marriage into a romantic arrangement where love, affection and trust are the centre. Therefore, we ask: Does the institution of marriage still make sense today? Or can we have other family arrangements or relational arrangements that are more multiple?”

On the topic of “multiple” (aka polyamorous) relationships, Perel shares some observational wisdom: “Usually if two people are in my office, it’s because one person wants something more than the other. The first thing [to ask] is [are multiple partners] something both of you are interested in? How do you imagine [the logistics of it working] – would it be with people who are anonymous? People who are of the same sex as you? People who are of a different sex?”

It’s clear Perel is as woke – if not more so – than the millennials who hang on her every soundbite. For starters, she’s unfussed by the idea of polyamory. “There are new conversations that enter relationships all the time. Now we can talk about, ‘What does it mean to have sexuality or love outside of one’s marriage?’” she says. “I create a space where people can explore and have the conversations that need to be had.” As for her marriage, Perel makes a habit of not revealing much. “If I talk about [my life], that means I have to talk about [people who] may not have chosen to be spoken about,” she says.

Perel gives an admirable weight to her friendships, too. “The entire scaffolding of my life is one large relational network. Probably because I have no family besides my immediate family, so my friends have always been the re-creation of the lost community for me.” She adds: “I’ve always had friends who are much older than me, but they seem as young as me. I have a couple of friends who are in their seventies. I look at them and say, ‘I want to live like that.’ I mine inspiration from the lives of the people I know.” Essentially, that’s also what we’re hoping for. With every dogeared page of Perel’s books, every pearl of her wisdom we pore over with friends, every revelatory conversation with a SO that’s stemmed from something that’s come from her mouth, we mine her wisdom to be better versions of ourselves. And if we fail? Then at least we can take solace in the fact that even our deepest, darkest flaws sound better when spoken in a mesmerising accent. Perel is speaking at Vivid Sydney on June 2

“USUALLY if TWO PEOPLE ARE in MY OFFICE, it’s because ONE PERSON WANTS SOMETHING MORE THAN the OTHER”