There are many reasons we can speak more openly about our relationship dynamics these days, and Esther Perel is one of them. From her first book, Mating in Captivity, to her podcast, Where Should We Begin?, Perel has broken open the essential questions so many of us have about how we, as humans, relate to each other. “We have a need for belonging, a need for meaning, a need for identity, and a need for community,” says Perel. “Where do we meet those needs?” Whether she’s talking a couple through infidelity or calling up a listener to help her understand her inherited trauma, Perel has a way of uncovering the deeper story beneath the surface of a situation.
For Perel, it begins and ends with connection. As a psychotherapist, deepening human connections has been her ultimate goal from the start, and she has worked toward it in nearly every medium: books, courses, her podcast, a card game, and now a live tour around the country. “It’s a little bit like a session for me,” she says. “It’s an interactive experience, and my goal is for people to co-create a conversation with me.”
Those conversations cover all the topics you’d expect — “love and sex and desire and jealousy, breakup, betrayal, the whole pantheon of relational dynamics, whether we are single, whether we are in a relationship with one or more people, or whether we are in a couple” — and you can listen in for yourself during her New York City stops on April 17 and 18 at the Beacon Theatre.
The real show, though, she says, comes after the show. “The idea is that we don’t just talk about connection, but hopefully we create new connections while we’re there.” In the days leading up to the tour, which kicks off today, the Cut spoke to Perel about what she was looking forward to most on the road, her favorite game to play, and why she avoids horror movies and gossip at all costs.
Your work is so much about connection and intimacy and really requires people to be vulnerable and open up. What does it mean for you to be able to connect with your audience in this way, and what are your methods for facilitating that connection with such a large number of people?
A lot of it is the interactivity, which changes. There’s something much more vulnerable than if you just bring a ready-made text. I have a few thoughts that I share upfront, but the rest is really happenstance. There is something about sharing the conundrums together that still, even if we don’t have the answers, at least we sit with the questions together.
So I do it by asking them a lot of questions. I do it by doing specific things that call out people who came alone. I do it with humor. I do it by having people have conversations with each other. The show starts before people enter the theater, so there are a lot of different levels of interaction for people to connect with each other. It’s as important as them connecting to me.
What city on the tour schedule are you most looking forward to for its food? What about culture?
For food, Washington, D.C. For culture, I would actually say Philadelphia has some incredible collections of art that I’ve really loved seeing, and it’s a city that I’ve always thought I should go to for a day or a weekend and discover more. It’s very close and I have not given it its proper attention.
How do you find good restaurants when traveling?
I tend to say to other people, “Take me to one of your favorite places.” They don’t necessarily become my favorites, but I love to enter someone else’s world as a whole. I think that I’ve had some of the best Indian, Ethiopian, Thai food in Washington, D.C. — or in New York, but not in Manhattan, in Jackson Heights, Queens.
If you like city questions, I’ll give you one that I love to play with the card game. If cities were people, which one would be your blind date, which one would be your boyfriend, and which one would be your life partner?
What’s your answer?
My lifelong partner is New York. Boyfriend, in reality, was Boston. For a one-night stand, or one date or blind date or whatever, I think I would do Philadelphia, actually. I don’t think of Washington, D.C., as a very erotic city.
If you had to boil down your central philosophy or goal with your work, how would you describe it?
We seem to have some fundamental human needs — we have a need for belonging, a need for meaning, a need for identity, and a need for community. Where do we meet those needs? Traditionally we met them in our religious lives and in our communal lives. Then when religion began to wane and communal structures began to dissipate, we moved those needs to our romantic relationships, to our work life. And so, I’m interested in the sociocultural development of relationships but spoken about in the language that everybody can relate to. Why are we so miserable in our dating life at this moment? What happens around divorce? What is the status of relational ambivalence? Why is it that so many people constantly wonder, Is this it? Have I found the right one? When do I know it’s time to go?
The work aims to really present complexity in simple language without simplifying the complexity. The work is cross-cultural. The work is nuanced and not dogmatic, and the work understands that there isn’t a one size fits all. When you listen attentively to others, even if it’s stories that are not yours, and you recognize yourself, because there’s always universal themes, human themes, it does something to you. You enter into a kind of invisible dialogue with people.
How do you feel about that broader trend of talking about our mental health online?
You’re confronted with, on the one hand, the power of destigmatization. It’s important. In my time, psychotherapy and mental health were hushed, often secretive and shrouded in shame. There is something about mental health becoming a category to contend with, and to integrate it as part of relational health and as part of overall physical health. At the same time there’s something about the psychologization authorization of our society that is also highly individualistic and that likes to name and frame in ways that are enclosures. Sometimes they help clarify, and I think it’s always useful to have a name for something. But sometimes the name also becomes an enclosure to the pasture. And we grow, we change. We’re not just so locked into the same place all the time. And to me it curtails our curiosity toward human beings. And I do think we weaponize it. It’s an interesting thing when your therapy status becomes an asset on your dating profile.
Is there a show that you’ve seen recently that you really loved?
One of the shows I saw recently that I liked was The Animal Kingdom. It was in a small theater, the Connelly Theater. It’s 50 people and you sit around the stage and basically it’s six sessions of family therapy.
It’s extremely well played and written. I mean, I tend to search for small little jewels. I’m looking forward to seeing The Outsiders that’s coming out. I’m maybe going to see The Ally soon. I’m going to see Herbie Hancock tonight. Oh, I went to a magnificent concert of West African music from Mali — kora, harp, and guitar — on Sunday in a church near Columbia. It’s quite diverse, whatever presents itself.
New York is the city to be in for shows.
If you’re not going to go and see whatever the art that you’re into, whatever the genre that speaks to you, then you begin to wonder why you live in New York. Because you have to contend with a lot of challenges and obstacles. What makes it all worth it is the richness of people and of culture. If you don’t use it, then you really wonder, Why am I struggling here?
Where do you get your best culture recommendations from?
Pretty much from my friends. I’m on a WhatsApp thread about theater and another WhatsApp thread about exhibits, movies, events that are interesting. Either I create them or other people create them and it says, “I saw this, go see that.” The other thing is basically being on the good old mailing lists of many of the institutions that I’ve gone to, so that I have some sense of what they’re doing. It used to be Time Out that told me where to go. And now it’s either I go or I read about where I should go, but then my time has been used up by finding out where to be and not being there. The quickest thing is hearing of other people’s recommendations.
Do you have a comfort re-watch?
No, there are too many things that I haven’t seen. And actually, I’m in a film club and we’re watching a movie that I saw maybe twice in my life, and I was just like, Oh, I don’t want to, it’s a great, great movie, but I do not want to see it again. Especially if it was a movie that shaped me, it’s so clear that it was because of when I saw it and where I was at in my life. If I see it now and I don’t have the context that gave it its poignancy, then I’m like, What was that about? That’s a good movie but why now?
You’re having a dinner party; you can invite five celebrities, dead or alive. Who would you invite?
Oh, wow. They may not all get along at the same dinner, but I would invite Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Viktor Frankl … I would invite maybe some politicians, too. Nelson Mandela — I mean, people who really made peace, took us to the other side of the Rubicon when we were so stuck. So I have an author, I have a politician, I have a film director — I would love a musician. A musician or a singer. Oh, I would have Nina Simone. That’s a little eclectic bunch for you. They’re all dead, no?
I think so.
All the ones I gave you are dead people. But it would be the same caliber of people who are alive.
What is the last meal you cooked for dinner?
Usually I do not cook alone. I find cooking is a collective, communal experience. We had a dinner on Friday night that we cooked all together, six different types of fish. We had delicious mussels, a fish soup, crab and shrimp and rock shrimp and halibut, and this incredible feast of fishes that a friend of ours brought up. We were about eight people and many of them had never met; only half of them knew each other. Everybody just participated. Nobody felt the burden of it, to me that is very, very important. And everybody who came made another little addition to the meal: Milanese with smoked salmon and horseradish, and the other one brought different types of pâté and the other one … It just was like a feast, and that’s my kind of meal.
Do you have a ritual for before you record a podcast episode or before you go into a session with someone?
I don’t really have a ritual. If I enter a session, I will reread the intake just so I have a sense as to what the people are coming with and where my mind is going as I read it. Then it’s about getting some nice tea and meeting the people. My ritual is more afterward. I love it if I can put my helmet on and get on a bike. I bike home, and I just feel like this is a moment when nobody can reach me. I don’t pick up the phone. I have a good 20 minutes of just me on the bike. That’s a ritual I do as much as I can. I do have a ritual before I go on the stage.
What is that?
Humming is a big thing I do. I hum and I breathe, I walk, I pace to calm my body. I need to be alone. I can’t have people around me at that moment just before. I get very nervous, actually. But not when I do a podcast episode, I don’t get nervous, neither when I do a session. I’m looking forward, I’m anticipating, I’m curious where this is going to go.
Is there something that you would never, ever watch, no matter what?
I have been known to close the screen or to even leave a theater. I’m one of those that if I see scary movies, I put my fingers in my ears and I close my eyes and I tell my neighbor, “Tell me when it’s over.” If I feel like I spend half the movie closing my eyes and clogging my ears, then I probably shouldn’t be there. In the past I could do it. I would literally sometimes spend half the movie under my coat. This is ridiculous. If it’s not for me, it’s not for me. But at that time I thought, I should be able to get through this. Now I’m like, I should nothing. If it makes me more nervous than anything else, there’s no point in being there. It’s usually stuff that makes me intensely afraid.
What’s the best piece of gossip you’ve ever heard?
I don’t know. Because I understand the social meaning and the social importance of gossip, and the way that gossip serves to create norms and reinforce social behavior and the like, but I also am very, very careful. I think that people can sometimes flippantly gossip about others without paying attention to what that does. I am kind of known for being a non-gossip. I don’t do it. And I don’t like, necessarily, people doing it with me. And when I do it, I catch myself and I’m saying, “Ooh, I just got taken for, I got swept.” But I don’t particularly enjoy it.
Do you have a favorite game to play? I know you have a game of your own.
My favorite games are usually imaginary games. They’re about role play. I’m not a big board-game person. But things that catch you, that make people do things, say things — mystery games. I did that recently, actually. It was a lot of fun. We each got a role and we each had to play a part and we had to decide who was the killer and the whole thing. And it was fantastic. You were tricked by everyone. You had no idea who was who. But the person who prepared it really wrote down exquisite parts for each of us.
Is there music that you listen to when you’re alone?
When I’m alone, I listen to songs that I grew up with. French music primarily, French chanson — what you would call here folk singers. There’s not that many people I can share this with here. I’m not from here, and when I’m really alone is when I want to be transported back into my own personal worlds, and this is one of them.
Is there a book that you couldn’t put down?
Oh, there are many books I couldn’t put down. A good book is a book I can’t put down. There’s not one that stands ahead of everything else. I have a house full of books. Writing a book changes your relationship to reading books.
What is the best and worst advice that you’ve ever received?
When I’m very, very tense and someone says, “Relax.” It’s like, obviously if I could relax, I would. I’m tense. Reassure me, maybe. Help me bear it, but don’t try to get me to the other side with nothing. That’s bad advice. Doesn’t matter specifically what it is, you’ve got to be attuned to me. Good advice is usually advice that helps me not be perfectionistic, that basically says, “Okay, you made a mistake,” or “Okay, you may not have made the best choice,” or “Okay, this is the consequences of the choice you made.” Or, “Okay, you can be pissed at yourself, but you don’t have to be contemptuous.” It’s advice that basically says you’re important but not that important.
What is your favorite piece of art that you own?
All the paintings in my house are by Jack Saul, who happens to also be my husband. I am surrounded by magnificent artwork. He’s an incredible painter and colorist. These are rather not recent, but in the studio there’s a lot of new work. I come in and say, “I love this one.” I generally like German expressionist art, if you’re asking in terms of style. I like rough surfaces; I like abstract. I like high intensity, high emotions.
Speaking of your husband, is there a show that he’s not allowed to watch without you?
We have a thing where I say, “No, wait for me, wait for me. I want to see this with you.” But then he waits weeks and then he finally sits down and watches the whole thing. And then I say, “Why didn’t you wait for me?” And he says, “Because I’ve been waiting for you for weeks.” I watch very little and I join him on occasion. What was the famous one that everybody was … Breaking Bad. That was where I kept saying, “Wait for me. Wait for me.” And I basically saw just a few episodes, because I have other things to do and so I end up not watching. He can watch everything without me. If he had to wait for me it would be a long wait.
What would your last meal be?
I don’t know if I would be eating so much at the end, but I would be surrounded by people. I enjoy eating, but I don’t think the food would matter much. Usually by the end you’re not eating that much anymore. Unless you’re one of those who falls asleep and doesn’t wake up. But the last meal is not so much about what’s on my plate but who’s at the table.
What’s the worst thing to do at a dinner party?
To hog the conversation, not lift a finger, not serve other people while you’re filling up your own plate. I think hogging the conversation is a big one. Just listen a little bit. Pay some attention to others. Be curious about other people. It’s not all about you. And people who talk very, very loudly and never ask a question to somebody else, that’s very annoying. People who never get up to help, that’s very annoying. And people who don’t offer to others. They fill their glass and they don’t look at the one next to them. What’s the point of being at a table with other people if you can’t make sure to fill everybody else’s glass?
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
By Katja Vujić , 2024-04-04 18:24:57
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