SEXUAL HEALING

Esther Perel has reached superstar status as a relationship expert just when the world needs her most. Ahead of her first visit to New Zealand, she talks exclusively to Sarah Catherall about having it all – adventure and security.

The night I am due to interview relationship guru Esther Perel, I’ve just had an argument with my partner. We rarely bicker but there is one stumbling block: he is a long-term planner and I’m not. My idea of planning is what we might do this weekend. His idea of planning is when we might sell our home and where we might live when the kids all leave.

I bring the sparkle to our relationship and it’s what he was drawn to when we met six years ago. Me? I’m like a cork bobbing on an ocean so I was attracted to his stability, confidence and security.

Ha, yes, Perel smiles over Zoom when I ask her about how the things we are drawn to in someone can end up being a source of conflict. “We are attracted to someone who is ‘other’ and different. But sometimes you get more than you bargained for,’’ she tells me.

She hears this a lot in her New York clinic where she counsels couples two days a week. “The question: Can you come up with a different arrangement? You can’t change people but you can change the way we dance with each other,’’ she says.

The 63-year-old psychotherapist has made a career out of talking about sexuality and relationships in her bestseller books, podcasts, and her Ted talks, which have been watched by millions.

Her work takes her around the world. On November 20 it will be to New Zealand for the first time to discuss relationships, love and desire at Auckland’s Aotea Centre. When we talk she’s in a room in London, surrounded by bookshelves and dressed in a smart shirt with her blonde hair brushed into a perfect bob.

Our romantic and sexual relationships have never been more challenged, says Perel, especially since Covid, and we need to rethink them. “In a very short amount of time, there is one relationship that has gone through an extreme makeover and that’s our romantic relationships. It is love. What we expect from it and how we go about building it,’’ she says.

Perel argues that we expect our partner to be our friend, lover, co-parent, to provide social status and family life, to sometimes also be our business or economic partner; we also want that same person to give us intimacy, affection and trust. “And now we want our relationships to go to a newer level. I want you to help me become the best version of myself. We have never expected more from our romantic relationships… We want that all over the long haul and the long haul keeps getting longer,’’ she says.

Perel’s bread and butter is talking about the paradox of wanting adventure and security in our monogamous relationships. “The very things that nurture us – stability and love and security – are not the same as the ones that nurture passion, exploration and freedom. Everyone is negotiating how much freedom you give up for security and what does that security look like? And what is the line between care and control?’’

Marriage and relationships used to be guided by religion and communal society. However, over only about 60 years, those Western institutions have been dismantled, she says, so much so that we’re left confused about how to date, how to break up, and how to function when we’re together. “Big decisions used to be made for us. You knew how you were going to meet people and how you were going to date them and how long before you were going to get married. Sex used to be a woman’s martial duty primarily, today it’s organised around desire and pleasure. If you don’t want children, you need a different reason to want it.’’

Perel has other concerns. We are bombarded with expertise and advice around everything, including sex and relationships. “We used to have religious authorities telling us how to live our lives – we now have influencers and experts.’’

“We’ve never had more freedom, we’ve never had more options and we have never had more uncertainty and self-doubt when it comes to how we live our relational lives,’’ she explains.

WHERE SHOULD WE BEGIN?

Perel was born in Antwerp, Belgium, the only daughter of Polish-born Holocaust survivors. Her parents, Sala Ferlegier, and Icek Perel, survived concentration camps but lost seven and nine siblings respectively. “Trauma was woven into the fabric of my family history, and would inspire my work for years to come,’’ she writes on her website.

Born 12 years after her brother, Perel grew up in a community of Holocaust survivors. “I was going to have to do something important. It was the sense that don’t waste the life that others don’t have,’’ she writes.

She did exactly that. She studied educational psychology and French literature at Hebrew University and started creating workshops with Jewish immigrants about cultural identity. She then headed to the United States for graduate school, where she studied psychotherapy. She only planned to stay for a year but met her husband, Jack Saul, a professor, there. For the first two decades of her career as a psychotherapist, she counselled couples and families – often from different cultures and backgrounds – in cultural transition.

The turning point that took her from the clinic to the international stage came when she penned an article on American sexuality, sparked by the affair between former president Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. It went viral and Perel was approached by a publisher to put her insights on sexuality into a book. Published in 2006, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, the book has since been translated 25 times and sold millions of copies.

Her CV makes eye-watering reading: she is fluent in nine languages, has published another bestseller, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, and her Ted talks have garnered more than 20 million views.

I’ve listened to dozens of episodes of her popular podcast, Where Should We Begin?, in which she counsels anonymous couples seeking help with topics such as infidelity, sexlessness and grief.

Why does she still work as a therapist two days a week when she is in demand on the global stage? “I work at scale and I’m speaking to large audiences but that’s very different to being in a room where you do

the step-by-step micro changes of the processes of therapy… To do the work and not just become a storyteller is essential to the quality of my work.

“When you’re in an office it’s humbling. You’re in front of the pain of people. It tells you there are no tips. The lives of people are complicated, complex, painful sometimes and intricate.’’

On that note, many readers would love her relationship tips. She quickly retorts. “There are no tips, as in one size fits all. The tips need to be adapted to the person, to the history of the person, to their deepest needs.’’

‘REORGANISING THE DANCE’

Perel will arrive in Auckland at a time when about nine in every 1000 New Zealand marriages end in divorce. Those figures don’t include the four in 10 partnered couples who end it, walk out or sell the home they’ve bought together.

I tell Perel I’m divorced so I have been through that trauma. I repartnered six years ago. I had therapy with my ex-husband more than a decade ago – in our final session, the therapist made it clear that my husband had emotionally left our marriage and there was literally no chance of getting us back together.

Perel shakes her head that relationship longevity is not a marker of success. However, she counsels couples about “reorganising the dance’’.

“The degree to which people can last or how they will last is to do with their flexibility and nimbleness, and how much people can change.”

Do we need to think more carefully about who we choose? “No,’’ Perel shakes her head. “In love relationships we keep talking about ‘finding the right person’. We don’t talk enough about being the right person. Who am I in this relationship? What are the patterns I get stuck in? There is what people do and there is what it means. What they do, which is conscious, and there is what people mean, which is unconscious.’’

She talks about different cultural expectations of love and relationships. “If you live in a place where there is almost no divorce, you don’t have to spend too much time thinking – how happy am I, what about the kids? When the structure is tight, you don’t have to grapple with ‘do I stay or do I go?’”

‘COUPLES DON’T HAVE SEX’

Six years ago, Serafin Upton, a Wellington-based psychotherapist, trained online with Perel and another American intimacy coach, Terry Real. Upton spends 90% of her practice counselling couples. She did the course because she says: “I wanted to learn from the best relationship therapists in the world.’’

While it guided her thoughts on helping her couples with sex and intimacy, Upton argues that Kiwis are different to Perel’s core audience – Americans and Europeans – as we struggle with being emotional, heartfelt, flirtatious and sexy.

Upton gives an example. When she counsels couples, she sets an assignment for them to give their partner a pet name. “They look at me like I’m mad. They say things like: ‘Oh that’s cheesy’. We’re really bad at being touchy-feely and it’s not just men who are like that. It’s women, too. It’s destroying our relationships.”

While most couples come to her in distress, Upton still thinks our Kiwi culture means we struggle to express our feelings. “That’s a major, major issue I see. The struggle to be intimate and vulnerable, to talk about our feelings.”

The couples who come for help are typically either drifting apart or there is deep resentment about something. “A lot of couples also don’t have sex. Tonnes and tonnes of couples just don’t have sex. We’re talking about young attractive couples, too.”

A lot of her clients are conflict avoidant, so they don’t work through issues as they come up. “They’re the hardest to help.”

The lack of communication means that one partner might just walk out one day. “I call it ‘death by a thousand cuts’. Over time a partner does something irritating and we stay quiet rather than saying, ‘Hey you did this and can we talk about it?’ People keep their issues to themselves and then one day someone leaves and the other partner is often shocked.”

But Upton does end our interview on a positive note. She is noticing that Gen Z and Millennial couples are coming to her early in their relationship to work out how they can negotiate and communicate if things go awry. “They want advice about how they could behave, which is so heartening to see.”

Love and intimacy is not guaranteed but something they will need to work on. They want to know: how do they negotiate being together while needing their own space?

That’s an approach Perel also wants more of. Perel rounds off our interview saying: “Love is a practice. It’s an active word and it is conditional. You love your children, but you don’t like them all the time.

“Love is about trusting you can ask. It is also about the ability to give and to receive, to share and not to compete. It’s the ability to say no, and not to think that to say no doesn’t mean ‘I don’t love you’.”

An Evening with Esther Perel, Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Auckland, November 20