Summary: A native of Belgian, fluent in nine languages, and a penetrating observer of the social and cultural patterns shaping our relationships, Esther is a practicing psychotherapist and organizational consultant to Fortune 500 companies. <br> Her 2013 TED talk, “The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship,” attracted more than a million views in the first month after its release. Her second TED Talk, “Rethinking Infidelity: A talk for Anyone Who Has Ever Loved”, was equally well-received. Combined, her TED talks have received approx. 10 million views.<br> In today’s episode, Esther and I spoke about:<br> — Her definition of desire; the importance of owning desire and how to connect to our own desires<br> — Women are socialized for connection and the associated vulnerability of the inability to connect to self<br> — Experiencing freedom from perfection without the guilt<br> — Imagination complementing reality in relationships<br> — What women can hold onto for stability in the ever increasingly gender-fluid era.<br> <br> Here is my ‘juicy’ conversation The Fluidity of Desire with the insightful and practical: Esther Perel.<br> Subscribe to the Emerging Women podcast on iTunes.<br> Transcript<br> Welcome, Esther! I’m so excited to have you here on the show!<br> Esther Perel: Thank you! It’s a pleasure for me to be with you as well.<br> CP: And every time you speak, I feel like a tender heart, because my mother, who has passed away, had a much thicker French accent than you have, and I’ve been listening to your audio book, Mating in Captivity, so I feel like you’ve been with me on my walks in the morning and listening to your content. It’s kind of taking me back a bit.<br> EP: You know, we share, in utero, it’s probably the first sense that we develop. So we are starting out with a very intimate connection. And if you want, I can even make my French accent a little stronger, so that I can channel your mother. <br> CP: [Laughs] She spoke like zis. <br> EP: Oh, wow.<br> CP: Oh, no, it was very thick. But I think that when you have an accent like that, and you’re talking about sensuality and sex and desire—I don’t know what your experience has been, but it seems like you might have carte blanche to say just about anything, right?<br> EP: Well, you know, the French accent works in both directions, especially in the United States. Sometimes it comes with a kind of bias that says, “Oh, you must know something, the je ne sais quoi that French people have in the realm of the erotics.” But then, on the other side, the opposite way is to start with kind of a warning sentence that says, “No, no, I’m not French, I’m not morally depraved, it’s not like anything goes.” I think there’s an enormous amount of projections in this domain onto the French—onto the Latin people in general, it seems, certainly onto the French—some of which is going to be accurate and some of which is the fantasy of the person who expresses it, or the person that is being designated.<br> CP: Of course. Well, I think we’re probably going to get into that a lot more [and] in a lot more depth, instead of just talking about the French accent in terms of projections, as we get into your content. So the first thing that I would love to lead with is, you speak a lot about desire. And it seems to me that—especially since our audience is primarily women, we address women, the modern woman, who’s moving it and shaking it in so many different ways—what I’m finding a lot is that women in relationships—and I don’t want to make a generalization with statistics and all that, but anecdotally, I find often women are in relationships where they’ve either lost the desire or the desire has shifted, or they don’t even have juice for desire after working a full day. I’m curious to see—this is such a cornerstone to relationships, and I would love to hear your take on, first of all, what do you mean by desire?
