#986 - Esther Perel - How Love Dies: The Psychology of Cheating & Attraction

Oddly,

our attachment systems lie to us.

They lie to us.

And this was put to me earlier this year: red flags don't look red if you're wearing rose-colored glasses.

And I think that's what the early stages of a relationship are.

The early stages of a relationship are rose-colored glasses.

And a lot of the time, it means that you don't see red flags.

Yeah, I mean, definitely the early stage is a stage of idealization.

You project onto the person, you feel so good about yourself in their presence.

They make you feel smart, beautiful,

irreplaceable, unique.

And

you kind of get hooked to that feeling.

You know, I used to feel so good in your presence.

Why now do I don't don't I?

Why has it changed?

Some people

partner with someone, and all they think to themselves, consciously or not, is please don't ever change.

And some people partner with someone, and in the back of their mind, it is, this is going to change, this is going to change, this is going to change.

Oh, they're in love with that potential.

Yes, that's one way of looking at this.

It's like,

yes.

that's definitely one one one one way but i think it's an interesting thing who you know when you actually want this to remain set.

And

I think that

after the idealization, we start to experience with the people that we are with

experiences from other relationships, expectations, disappointments, breaches that we experienced elsewhere and that we now bring into this relationship.

The way I typically used to say it is that there's only because people often say, I don't have this issue with anybody else,

I don't have this at work, I don't have this with my friends.

And I always say, I totally understand it because there's only two relationships that mirror each other: the one of your romantic and intimate life now, and the one and the original one.

They echo each other, the one that you had with the people who raised you.

And these two have an echo chamber with each other in most unconscious and visceral ways.

It's strange to think about how much of our adult life is puppeted by things that happened before we could even remember it.

You know, it's, it's kind of, it's strange with attachment theory, right?

Because attachment theory is

your attachment.

Is it true?

Is it true, Chris?

Is the question.

We think this way.

It's a common model.

It's a framework of modern psychology

and it suits us.

I mean, you know, it's very much a second nature for me to think this way because I was steeped into this kind of way of thinking about the humankind and human nature and relationships.

But sometimes I ask myself, is that

what would happen if somebody came in with a completely different theory?

You think that attachment theory might be due for a replication crisis at some point in the future?

Here's

someone, you know, there used to be a very prevalent theory when psychoanalysis was really at the core of our psychological culture, and it believed in what, and still does, in the Oedipus complex.

Now, you know, who still talks about the Oedipus complex in the general culture, maybe in an analyst office, but in the general culture, it's kind of passe,

you know.

The truth of today is often the joke of tomorrow.

So this is a perfect example of something that was never considered considered a theory.

It was considered true.

Every five-year-old goes through the Oedipus complex.

Every three-year-old.

I mean,

really?

Wow.

So

the current world of anxious attachment and this happened before you could even speak and this is ingrained in your nervous system might be in 20 years time the Oedipus complex of 2025.

Yeah, it's a theory.

Let's, you know, and a theory has definitely elements of truth that it tries to describe.

It theoretizes over a certain set of observations.

But that doesn't mean it's true.

And there have been other theories like that that have been debunked that we've sincerely believed in, you know, including that children don't remember anything, you know, but they do.

And that, you know, so there's a lot of

attachment is a theory.

It's a very powerful and a very useful theory.

It's a vocabulary.

It's a meaning-making system.

It's a theory.

It would, there's definitely a question around how much is it a self-fulfilling prophecy?

How much is it that you've done this assessment or you've spent some time reflecting and you think that you are a person with dismissive avoidant attachment or you've got anxious attachment or you've got what?

And then you start to show up in that way in your relationship and it becomes unfalsifiable because you know it, you can't unknow it.

You know, when I say to people,

you really found each other.

It's a very interesting way.

You found each other, and it allows you to both replicate your core models of relatedness or attachment.

And the reason why that's useful is because it allows you, in order to, once you've replicated it, you can finally change it.

It's a beautiful framework.

It's useful.

I have no idea if it's true.

Do you understand?

But it's useful.

It helps.

It makes sense of things.

You know, you and I, we're doing with each other, and I do with you, and I interpret you, you know, in ways that have kind of a second nature to me.

I've really learned to expect that when people act the way you do, I'm interpreting it A, B, C.

And now that we have replayed my original drama,

we can start to work on it and hopefully rewrite it and differentiate myself from it.

It's great.

but

I like the notion that it's useful.

And I say things in my work to people, and it only is true if they bite,

if it's relevant to them, if it resonates with them, then it's true.

They say, that's exactly it.

Okay, I love it.

Means I resonate with you.

I understood what's going on here.

But is it true?

They say, that's true.

What do you make of the man-keeping trend that women are worried about right now

another word we need it in the vocabulary in the pantheon of relationship vocabulary I mean honestly um

I think that as a whole

I tend to stay away from polarizing discourses

I carry the burden

you carry the burden oh I carry the burden you know

have women often been the primary social outlet for men?

Yes.

Does that have to do with something that men want?

Not necessarily.

Yesterday I spoke with a patient who, you know, has a newborn and young kids and was really kind of feeling like she's not doing it well, neither at the company nor at home.

Something very natural that we hear often from moms, but that's because we don't ask dad that question doesn't mean dads don't experience it and at one point you know he wanted to go and me visit his friends abroad and and you know the question was

is there a permission and I use the word permission and acceptance for him to not be home except when it's for work you know is it only okay to not be home when you're working If you actually are going to see friends, then you may just as well be home with me.

And then we talk about about how men often don't have friends in the house.

And then we talk about how they rely on the Minister of Social Affairs and it's a she.

And when you look at queer couples, this whole dance is very differently.

So, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be gendered.

Often it is a role arrangement in which one person

is the one who

orchestrates the social life.

and the other one follows.

Sometimes it's because they don't have people, sometimes it's because they're conflict avoidant and sometimes it's because they're just placating and they want to make it easy, and I'll just go wherever you want to go.

So I think I like to look at dynamics.

I think I don't necessarily want to create dogmas and mankeeping.

You know, it's social affairs and it's emotional life, right?

Yes, a lot of men find themselves in relationships with women in this context where she is his primary emotional outlet.

Now,

some of this is because they may live in a context where male vulnerability is not tolerated.

Some of this is because

we accept much more that men can lose their friends.

I mean, when you look at seven-year-old and six-year-old boys, they're no different.

They cry like the girls, they have friends like the girls.

It's a male code,

it's a cultural indoctrination that leads a lot of men often to give up on their friendships.

They're not valued for having great friendships, they're valued for being competent and accomplished and useful and performative.

And so,

you know, I think

for me, it's more interesting to look at cultural systems,

look at what is universal, what appears in every culture, even though it comes in a different color, you know, pink, red, and others, than talking about it as something that is men versus women.

I think these days we're sliding into real polarizing men versus women.

This one doesn't need, and TikTok is just like clamoring away about how he's an idiot and she's a bitch.

And

seriously,

I don't want my kids and anybody else's kids to be part of that kind of a culture.

I think that friendship between boys and girls is phenomenal.

Friendship in general is is phenomenal.

Let the boys and girls have a great friendship.

You'll learn a ton about what not to do with your girlfriend and boyfriend and whatever else and them friends.

You know, to me, it's about how do we add things, not how do we separate things.

I think it's a great point around the tribalism at the moment.

I mean,

people can be tribal about anything, right?

There's a great study where they brought

a group of 100 people, brought them into a room, and at the front of the room, they tossed a coin.

And if the coin was heads, you were blue team.

And if the coin was tails, you were red team.

And everybody behaved according to the color they had.

Oh, yes.

So you go over and you speak to the blue team and you say, so what do you think about the red team?

And they go, wow, I mean,

they're not as smart as us, are they?

They sort of look a bit stupid.

Like, they're obviously not.

It's like you've just seen.

how arbitrary the selection criteria was.

You know that it was a 50-50 complete chance for you to be on this side than that.

And immediately people fall into the tribal thing.

But I couldn't agree with you.

It's like the prisoner experiment.

I mean,

it's phenomenal, you know, how you tell me I'm this and I will become that.

I will act accordingly.

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On the cultural coding side, just to ask a question, you're evolutionarily educated.

At least as far as I can see, it would have been adaptive and it seems to be the case that men are able to deal with more transient and looser friendships because there was a higher likelihood, higher male disposability ancestrally.

We go out for a hunt and unfortunately you're Ian now.

Ian,

you fell down a ravine and you're gone.

So Ian's gone now.

I need to be able to move on as a man.

If you're allooparenting with your group of female aunties, friends and grandmas and stuff, that social network would naturally be more tightly tied.

So at least as far as I can see,

I wouldn't lay everything at the feet of culture.

I'm aware that this may vary across the world, but I certainly think that men have an uphill battle when it comes to in adulthood, especially if they're working, especially if they're trying to provide and do all of the things for the family, and also trying to hold on to male friendships in a manner that maybe just isn't quite so natural.

to them.

You know, 51% of men lack a single confidant for emotional support.

And obviously, we have your significant other, the person you spend the most time with, the one you're building this life with.

You go to sleep with them every night.

You've got this shared family and you're bringing these kids up.

And I think, you know, to fly the flag for men, I think it's a difficult circle to square that men are told to sort of open up more and be emotionally vulnerable, but they have a limited bucket of people to be able to do that with.

And the one that they can do it with is now feeling the pressure of, I have to be his therapist, I have to be his, his muse, I have to be be his diva, I've got to be his housekeeper and his massage,

you know, physical therapy, I got to be all of these things.

And both sides, again, as opposed to going,

that's really tough.

We can't live on a single wage anymore.

And you have to do the double shift when you get home from work, my darling, because not only have you worked today, but the kids need their

packed lunches making for tomorrow.

And I've had a rough day at work as well.

And I've got to get home.

And I had this, I had, I'm feeling some stuff, and I really need to open up to you.

And as opposed to that, it is this, it's very tight and it's very adversarial, and that's reflected in the single world and in the married world.

It's reflected in media, and it's reflected in relating relationships.

And I'm on board.

I don't like the way that everything is becoming more and more tribal, even within the context of an intimate relationship or people talking about getting together and trying to be in love.

So, you bring up two

points for me.

First of all,

on the evolutionary versus the cultural, I'm multilingual.

I speak many languages and I speak that languages too.

I can go back and forth between evolutionary language and cultural language.

For me, the beauty is how they interact with each other.

not which one has the supremacy over the other.

Is it more cultural?

Is it more evolutionary and biological?

It's the, you know, know, you come in with a certain predisposition that is biological or innate, and then there is a culture that sits on top of it and responds to this versus that, because this is the thing that stands out.

So

I totally agree that

we are shaped by both, you know.

But the interesting thing about the...

your allusion to the mankeeping or to the men having relying primarily on their partner is that

sometimes one of the paradoxes here is that he coming to her,

confiding in her, opening himself up to her, letting him, you know, when a man opens up, often in my office too, you know, it's not just that he's saying something that he has not said to others.

He's often never even said it to himself.

It's really beautiful and very moving.

And so she, in the beginning, looks at this and thinks, this is wonderful.

I am the chosen one with whom he feels that comfortable, that open, that vulnerable.

You know, so back to your thing that the very thing that is originally attractive can become the very source of conflict and disagreement later.

This one, too.

You know, I liked how you talked to me, and I like how, you know, I feel so chosen by

the fact that it's with me that you've decided to domesticate yourself, to open yourself, to finally settle, whatever the whole thing.

So

it's an interesting thing that, you know, what becomes man-keeping later wasn't always experienced as man-keeping in the beginning.

Oh my God, he's so open with me.

He's never said this to anybody before.

Of course, I feel like that's

very special.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, this, this is the,

that's why to make it

rather than this is a whole different way of looking at it.

I do,

you know, this notion of male loneliness and the phenomenon that we're talking about at this moment is fairly recent.

19th century America, men had plenty of friends.

You go to your islands and all over the world, men sit after they've finished fishing, they're talking to each other, they're schmoozing.

They don't need to do personal,

you know, expression of their deepest feelings to feel intimate and close.

There are multiple languages.

And

make this

a kind of a an innate or a gender division i think is is unfortunate and it's being exploited big time it's being exploited by people who really gain from creating divisions from creating suspicions from kind of

breaking the the deep feeling of um

complementarity actually that exists now you know the thing that's very interesting for me is that for so many centuries, we saw masculinity as obvious, luminous, simple, doesn't need explanation.

What is a man?

It's clear.

It's not a woman.

And, you know, women was this kind of mysterious continent that you had to go and elucidate, figure out what's in there, you know,

what's in there from the psychological point of view and the genital point of view.

What's in there?

What is this thing called woman?

Yeah.

You know.

And then you begin to pay attention

that, you know, there's an entire apropos vocabulary: man up, show me your man, you know, be a man.

I mean, masculinity is often accompanied with a mandate, with an imperative, with a thing that needs to prove itself constantly.

So I began to think that if you always have to prove it, maybe it's not that obvious in the first place.

Oh, that's interesting.

Nobody would ever say that you need to woman up, That a woman's value is innate and imbued, whereas a man's,

she knows who she is.

A man's is performative.

Show me your usefulness.

Yeah.

And go to the woods and get some rituals that toughen you up, that transition you from boy to men.

I mean, there are very few of those rituals for women because they're biological, apropos evolutionary theory.

They're very biological.

She doesn't really have to wonder, you know.

Of course, a lot of these things switch once you begin to separate gender from anatomy but until for historically that so what that was the case so i began to think masculinity is not nearly that simple not nearly that obvious maybe not nearly so easily acquired actually it is hard to acquire and easy to lose

what do you

lay

the male loneliness that we're seeing at the feet of what's what's driving this sort of beyond surface causes of people spending more time online.

I think that male loneliness is not just male.

I think that there is women, girls, children.

I don't think it's just gender.

I think it's more so for men,

for boys.

Let's start because it's younger.

Because there is less of an acquired socialization that is about if you feel the stress, you go and you reach out.

The socialization of boys is often if you feel the stress, you toughen it up, you keep it in,

you do something to get the state, you know, you go do some sports, some activity to get the feeling out of your system.

You don't go to find someone to talk about the feelings.

That is a very different, you know,

I have two boys, a brother, a husband, a father.

I've not had women in my

intimate circle except for mom.

I've kind of spent a tremendous amount of time.

That doesn't mean I'm right, but it just means I've looked at this.

You know, what did I say when they would be in certain situations?

And what would I have said if I had a girl?

You know, we know that we touch boys as of the age of three, much less than we touch our girls.

So

it's coded in on so many levels.

So what makes the boys feel lonely is

yes, I do think it's a whole

increase of the contactless world that we're living in.

You know, you could say they're not lonely when they're playing games and they're online with other kids who are also playing.

I mean, they are interacting,

but it is absolutely not the same as going outside and playing with a ball.

I think that as a whole, kids are not playing on the street these days.

They're playing freely on the street and having this huge ground for social negotiation

where you hone your skills.

You make war, you make peace, you create alliances, you have groups, you fight, you resolve, you fight without adults, unsupervised, unscripted, unmonitored, you learn social skills.

That whole thing is gone, more so for boys than for girls because they played more in groups like that

through the sports that used to be played on the streets.

What makes boys more lonely is that their girls and women later are over served with advice about relationships

and typically men are underserved

that is not what people if you look at the magazines it is not what people magazines and everything online that followed magazine it's not what men are served with you know you're not served with you know what you do when you hurt what you do when you're mad what you do when you're heartbroken what you do when you fall in love with someone who hasn't even noticed you?

What do you do when you ghosted?

And they come to me, they come to you, they come.

You know,

I have more men almost than women alone on the podcast on where should we begin doing sessions with them.

And I'm just every time I think the courage it took for them.

I mean, I think the courage for the girls too and the women, but there is something about, especially when I know which part of the world they're calling me from.

And I'm thinking, wow, we're going to talk about how you fell in love with your best friend.

Wow, we're going to talk about how, you know,

you fear the violence inside of you because of what you experienced

was done to you.

Wow,

you know, you've actually had massive acne all your life and you don't have any sense that somebody could ever find you attractive.

Well, I mean, I can rattle you like 25 of you.

As you're saying them, I'm thinking, if that was said by a woman, what is my sort of natural response?

It's a awe,

it's sad, it's sort of coddling, it's she deserves sympathy.

And to hear it from a guy, to hear a guy say something about my body, there's a part of my body or my appearance that I'm ashamed of.

And, you know,

even in me as someone, I'm trying to be pretty empathetic.

I think I'm pretty empathetic.

I'm like, there's a the initial response is

that's something that we should all get over.

And how much of that is my own insecurities about myself coming up and not wanting them to be seen, not wanting them to be thrown into harsh light by that guy?

I read this phenomenal article yesterday.

And this is a pretty unpopular opinion, but it's so unpopular, I've literally never heard anyone say it before.

So a lot of the time we talk about how men don't get a lot of support publicly for falling behind.

We've got high rates of depression, suicidality, incarceration, drug addiction, homelessness, death by their own hands, dangerous driving, you know, death by cop, death by overdose, all of these things.

Right, you're right.

And at the same time,

much of this is pushed primarily by men who want to stand up for guys and say, systemically, we need to change this thing.

We should have an initiative that helps.

Look at what happens when girls and women fell behind.

We had Title IX, we had, you know, a cultural movement, we had Me Too, we had Time's Up, we had all of these things that came along.

And for guys, they feel like they're being left behind.

So this is

outwardly, men will say,

we

should support men.

Inwardly, when it happens one-on-one, men see a man who's struggling a lot of the time as kind of a bit icky and a little bit of an unreliable ally.

Women see women that are struggling and men see women that are struggling as this is something precious.

This is something that we need to look after.

We should uphold them.

The women are effect.

When men see other men struggling, there is a little bit of a sense of, well, we're part of a coalition, but we're also part of a competition as well.

And the fact that this guy's falling behind a little bit,

maybe that moves me up a little bit in the status ranking.

Perhaps that means that they're not as tough and they wouldn't be a part of my coalition.

I wouldn't go on the hunt with that person.

So it's a very strange, this article was really brought it into land.

I wrote it, do you know?

Yeah, I can find it and send it to you.

I would love it if you send it to me.

It's fantastic.

And I'd never seen any guy talk about the fact that men are not prepared to show up for other men in the way that women are prepared to show up for women, and even men are prepared to show up for women.

Guys do not have quite the same level.

And even the ones that outwardly talk about we should change the system and there needs to be more funding and we should have all of the

when the rubber meets the road interpersonally

guys just

treat struggling men with suspicion.

Yeah, it's

I mean, it's very interesting.

I often think, you know, the word loser doesn't exist in the feminine.

And the word emasculated doesn't exist in the feminine.

And

I don't know if they treat it with suspicion, as I think sometimes they react to it with a certain fear.

It's the man you don't want to be.

It's the man you're afraid of becoming.

And part of the same thing that I said, masculinity, hard to acquire, easy to lose.

If I am with a loser,

I

actually begin to fear, consciously or not, for that matter, what I could lose to or how I could get there, how I could be there at the bottom of the pail.

And

when I go to men's groups, I have attended quite a few men's groups where I'm alone with 60 men for three days and watch how they work with each other.

I have to say it is when they show up for each other.

It's moving beyond.

And sometimes I think of myself, would I be as moved if I saw women show up for each other?

And this is to concur with what you say.

think of it differently because I don't see it as often.

But I know it exists in the military, but I know it exists in different societies that are, you know,

the girls can be perfectly cruel to each other at a level that is just unmatched as well.

So,

but it's true that we don't see it as often.

Men reaching out for each other, holding each other, weeping on each other's shoulder.

I have seen a lot of fascinating studies for the military about that, dealing with grief.

I mean,

risking one's life to save someone else who is wounded.

I mean, I think fundamentally we raise our men to be prepared to die.

And that in itself doesn't make it so easy then to see men who struggle.

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I wonder how much the

coalition and support that you're talking about there is because those men are on the same team.

If you're in an army, if you're in a sports team,

I wonder whether men don't have that shared sense of unity right now, which means, well, why am I going to show up for the guy that even lives next door to me?

I have nothing in common with him.

We're not on the same team.

There was a great, a great study, Tracy Viancourt from Canada.

You'll have probably seen this one.

Female basketball players on the same team showed less physical affection to each other than male basketball players on opposing teams.

And how did they explain it?

How did they explain it?

How did they study it?

Yeah, what did they make of it?

I think the issue that you have with women is that their status seeking and their status competition is covert, not overt.

And if you are a man on the same team, if you've got a phenomenal player that you're a part of his group, you're kind of in the blast radius of his brilliance.

That's right.

You've got an amazing front man lead singer of a band and you're just the dude that plays bass at the back.

Well, you know, you're not the lead singer, but you get to go along with him.

And this is pretty cool.

And the same, you go on a hunt ancestrally.

You've got the strong guy and you've got the fast guy and you've got the smart guy.

And you're just like the helpful guy.

You go, well, I'm not the strong or smart or fast one.

But I'm with them.

I'm getting pulled along with them.

Isn't that great?

The same,

it is more zero sum in a covert way for women, I think.

And they are much more conniving, much more sophisticated with the way that they play status games.

I'm thankful every day that I don't have to deal with that because I'm totally not built to be a woman in many ways.

And uh,

I think that the challenge that you have with guys showing up for other guys is, well, what have we got in common?

Why should I show up for you if I'm atomized and spending all my time on Netflix and on social media?

Unless I would bet guys that go to the same church or guys that play in the same sports team or guys that do the same, you almost need an excuse as a guy to support another guy.

Whereas I don't think that you have that with women.

I'm thinking, I'm really thinking, I think that it's a very interesting observation.

But

I will concur with you.

You know, when it happens,

something magical goes on.

I mean, it's

when a guy falls into, you know, just collapses onto another one who holds him up.

Especially around grief, especially around grief, because it

we always tend to talk about the power, the aggression, but I think the harder feelings are not those.

They're really grief, sadness, loss,

you know,

and

the weep that comes with that.

But I think we spent an enormous amount of time condensing the male repertoire around those issue feelings, like we condense the female repertoire around issues of, you know,

of aggression, for that matter.

That would be a classic one.

So every gender has its licensed language for what it is allowed to want, for what it is allowed to express, for how it is allowed to express it.

And I think this is across the globe.

It's different in different cultures, but every every gender has a license.

Like I'll give you a license in couples,

right?

Because that's a classic.

It is the license of men

when you're not allowed to experience or to express the need for tenderness, for affection, for softness, for surrender.

you know what do you do you have one language that men can use to express any of those needs it's called called sex.

You translate it into a vocabulary that is sexual.

And through that sexual experience, you get to experience many of the needs and the feelings that are forbidden or disavowed in the male code.

If people say all he wants is sex, they often are making a big mistake.

All he wants is the things that sex enables him to experience that he doesn't have the permission to ask in other ways.

What is the code for the woman?

I know no, the woman cannot ask for that.

She needs to have five layers of relatedness to justify why she may want to have sex, lest she would be just a slot.

So she covers it and covers it exactly like the status games that you're talking about.

Because her license is to ask for connection and for closeness and for intimacy and all that stuff.

And when she's got all of that and the right conversation and the right communication and intimacy of the moment, then of course finally I can ask for sex.

You know, and I think this has nothing to do with intrinsic men and intrinsic women.

This is actually the the erotic scripts of men and women are not nearly at that different on this front.

But the cultural code around it makes it very clear what is the language that each person is allowed to speak in.

It's interesting when I think about this,

it seems to me that the

weakness shaming around men and the slut shaming around women primarily come from their own sex, not from the other sex.

I think that men are primarily the enforcers of

guys feeling scared about being weak.

And I think that women are primarily the enforcers of women being scared about being too open sexually.

You know, if you offered most men on the planet the opportunity for women to be more sluts, I would guess that most of them would probably take it.

Something tells me that

a slut is a much bigger threat to a woman than she is to a man.

She's a threat to a woman who is single and trying to find a mate.

She's a threat to a woman who's coupled and has a partner that's trying to remain faithful.

The same thing goes for guys, that a weak man is maybe he's your coalitional partner.

Maybe he's the person that you work with.

Maybe he's the person that you rely on in your sports team, or the person that you might need to lean on at some point.

And uh, yeah, we're

we're not good compatriots of each other all of us.

But this thing that you just highlighted, that the pressure from within is often m stronger than actually how you are perceived on the other side, is true for many, many things.

You know, um, somebody said to me recently that uh the leaders of the main monotheistic religions, Moses, Muhammad, and Jesus, were all betrayers.

They all were unfaithful to their own group.

And they paid the price.

So it's a very interesting thing how

we internalize the stuff and we become harsher than the very people who

on the outside have created it.

I think that this is such a profound observation, but it really expands way beyond just

the dating stuff and the love stuff.

It's really,

I am very interested in that.

What do you make of this adversarial and tribal dynamic between men and women?

You know, we can talk about the call coming from inside of the house, the fact that guys aren't showing up for guys, and that women won't touch their basketball

players the same way.

What's driving men and women apart in the modern culture, do you think?

Hola.

I can only add a few thoughts.

I mean, I think it's bewildering.

I think

I would, but I will say a few things for me because it hasn't been a part of my experience.

You know, I'm a 70s person.

That was not our story.

You know, I'm the generation with the pill and before AIDS.

That was not our story.

What a time to be alive.

Very free, you know, to be in your 20s.

You know, that was a total period of effervescence and exploration and all of that.

And

that was not the way we thought of it, as camps.

That doesn't mean that we didn't understand the reality.

of men,

but

there was more kindness, more empathy, more sympathy, but all in all, there was simply a lot more contact with each other.

You know, I came here to the United States and I began to notice that they had women's night and men's night.

And I just thought,

why?

Why don't you go at the night to do the thing with the people that you know enjoy this the most?

Why does it have to be segregated like this?

I found this segregation really interesting.

I found the segregation of the sports activities interesting.

I found the segregations of the summer camps interesting.

I noticed this segregation all along.

Now, that doesn't mean that this is uniquely a U.S.

problem, but there is something here that in Anglo-societies

that is more intense about that.

Latin cultures have their own issue around all of this.

It's not like

nobody has a price here.

We haven't yet found a society that we can all model after.

But

it became then exploited.

More and more, it became, you know,

young five-year-old boys or six-year-old boys that had to hide that they were inviting girls to their birthdays.

What is that about?

You know, and on and on like this.

So

I think

it magnified.

It magnified because of the changes in society, because of the challenges of boys in school, because there is 50 years of a women's movement in which women have had the opportunity to redefine their identity as women, knowing that the lives of women will not change until the men come along.

And the men need to take on their own way of redefining what it means to be a man and what is masculinity, but not necessarily to do it based on the rejection and the hatred of women.

What I will add, though, is that there is throughout history a major

coming together between tribalism, between the genders, and rise of authoritarianism.

Between the coming together of the genders and authoritarianism?

No, no.

Genders split and polarize when authoritarianism rises, or more reverse, when authoritarianism rises,

you know, does gender split.

The first question that Yuval Harari once asked me

when we had a conversation together is why does authoritarianism or fascism start with sexual oppression and repression?

It could be homophobia,

it could be anything that smacks the feminine part of what lives in a man.

So, weakness is considered feminine.

The reason weakness is so scary is not because it's weak, it's because it's considered feminine.

And the rejection of the feminine that is at the core of how masculinity has often reinforced itself throughout history.

This is, we go back, back, back

to bring order, to bring strength, to bring structure, to bring, you know, that's the coming together that exists each time.

Every time you see fascism rising, you see a complete split between men and women.

You see

men wanting women back into the house, you know, you see women, you know, playing a version of it.

We could have had a trad wife conversation as much as we have a man-keeping conversation.

And it's an amazing thing to observe because each one has to go back into their kind of core box.

The men go back into the box, the women go back into the box.

Everybody is in place.

No messiness here of people coming together, creating non-binary things, creating things that are more loose, more messy, more, more, you know,

all of that.

We can go back all the way.

It's been happening over and over.

That's what fascinates me.

Are there any examples from history?

Any obvious examples from history?

I mean, National Socialism as a close one, for sure.

You know, the Aryan cult, it was, you know,

every degenerate art that represented men and women dancing.

No, no, no, no, no.

The beautiful paintings is that everybody's sitting around the table and she's serving the home-cooked food like a good Frau line.

It's complete.

Everybody takes back its place.

Nobody challenges the received order.

It's neat, it's clean, it's divided, and no, and it's controllable.

It's controllable by the forces above.

Nice.

You know, and

throughout, throughout.

it's a fascinating thing because what is considered degenerate is considered anything where masculinity softens itself and femininity gets a little bit too much power.

When, you know, the men are

long hair,

the men dressing in certain ways, the men piercing in the ears.

And

this is all, where's the man?

Show me the dude.

You know, how would you

and the women reverse?

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How would you square that circle in the modern world?

I know a lot of people say that we've got rising authoritarianism across the world, especially in the West.

I don't know if that's accurate by the definition, but I certainly see lots of people talking about it.

And I also see there is a pushback.

There is a trad wife movement.

There are people just

increasing rates of church attendance, which I think is kind of a harken back to that.

It's more traditional.

It's more rigid.

But at the same time, we also have more acceptance of gay rights than we've ever had before.

We've got more LGBT people than we've ever had before.

We've got more trans youths and adults than we've ever had before.

It seems like both things are moving in opposite directions at the same time.

I wouldn't say that we're seeing a rollback in terms of acceptance, especially around

like some of the more progressive stuff.

I mean, I don't know if you look at

Russia as an example that is current,

the homophobia and the rolling back of the LGBT presence and recognition.

No,

I think that

whatever has been acquired is actually what some people find is what has made society lose its compass.

This is like messy, dirty.

Men should be men, women should be at home, everybody should do what's expected.

What you describe is part of what is being seen as the problem.

Now, why does it happen?

Because I do think that whenever there is massive technological shifts, breed from agriculture to industrial, from industrial to technological, from technological to AI,

the men experience it as tremendously threatening.

Because it shifts us so fast.

And if you're just one generation above, it's really, really scary

because you don't know how to handle it, how to continue to provide, how to take care of your loved ones, etc., etc.

And this plays into the usefulness conversation because men need to be useful.

They're going to be displaced by this new, more useful technology more quickly than women.

When men are threatened in their ability to provide and to protect,

this whole system starts to go in place.

That's one way of understanding it.

And the tribalism is the mechanism for that.

You know, it's not just trad wife, it's a whole kind of a dress with a pastoral thing.

And she has like zero ambition.

It's wonderful.

Like the only ambition is to pluck the avocado.

And

it's very pastoral.

It's incredibly old standing stories that when you know how many boys are raised by hard-working single mothers these days?

I mean, and

some of the biggest entrepreneurs we find, that's their story.

And they said,

I'm going to make it.

And I'm going to take care of her.

And I'm going to make sure that she doesn't have to hold two jobs.

And the drive comes from the very witnessing of what it's been like to raise.

And I think that if there's almost a 50% divorce rate, that means that there's almost a 50% rate of boys growing up with moms alone, seeing their dads and everything.

Let me give you this.

You mentioned about some

ugly

examples from history.

Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong all shared at least one thing in common.

They hated their fathers.

Remarkably, all three seem to have loved their mothers, and Hitler and Mao saw themselves in alliance with their mother against their father.

So good fathers may be able to stop world wars in that regard.

I mean, basically, what we're saying is that there is a real challenge for many men when they say, I don't want to be like this guy, either this brute, either this loser, either this drunk, either this absent.

I want to be different.

I want to be better.

And why not?

They should be given this opportunity.

Many women are living lives.

I mean, look at me.

My grandmother,

where was she?

You know, I'm living, I'm two generations away and I have a completely different reality.

I want the men to have that opportunity too.

You know, I want, and that, by the way, has to take place in community.

This is not something that men deal with alone, you know, at their computer.

It really demands solidarity.

It demands reinforcement.

It demands seeing people do this

without thinking, you know, that's embarrassing.

You know, it demands carrying your baby.

Lots of things that have, a lot of things have changed, you know.

I mean, I remember the first times that men were brought in to watch the birth of their child.

That didn't always happen?

Men, no, no, no,

no.

My parents' generation, no, didn't happen.

I don't think every man should be in the birthing room, mind you, or at least should stand exactly where she stands.

Like most European countries, you know, make sure that you have the same view.

But this was a this was a beautiful revolution.

Whoever wants it should do it.

But what it said to finally invite the man because it was it came along with the beginning of the thinking about modern fatherhood.

The bird of fatherhood, which came, of course, at the same time as women became more independent economically,

is that he didn't have to just define himself by his material contributions, and he could also be an emotional unit.

And it's great,

I mean, according to me, for whatever that's worth.

Yeah.

Talking about, you mentioned divorce there.

I read a piece from you recently where you said the real reason people cheat isn't always about what we assume.

It's not just about lust or boredom or one too many margaritas.

It's about something far more unsettling and sad, a sense of deadness in the relationship.

What's deadness?

What is deadness?

Complacency,

neglect,

estrangement,

lack of laughter, lack of play,

lack of curiosity,

management ink, 99% of the time,

criticism,

indifference.

If I'm here or if I'm not here, does it make a difference?

Does it matter?

Except you may not want to be be alone but that doesn't mean you really want to be with me

all of these are expressions of deadness lifelessness loss loss of vitality loss of vibrancy loss of imagination

it's a lot of things that

I mean interestingly

and you know, I wrote a whole book on infidelity after 10 years of studying this state of affairs.

And the one word that I heard all over the world when people would talk about their affairs.

And there's a ton of different kinds of affairs, and I'm in no way romanticizing, nor approving, nor condoning, nor encouraging.

Just want to put that out there before I even say a word.

But people just said, I felt alive.

And the truth of a therapist's office is that we don't work with the majority of the people we meet are not chronic philanderers, nor sexual addicts, nor narcissistic pricks.

We see people who have been narcissistic pricettes, if you want, on the other side, it doesn't matter.

But what we see is people who've often lived, you know, rather committed monogamous lives for decades, 10, 25 years.

And then one day they cross a line that they never thought that they would cross themselves.

And so for a glimmer of what, why would people try to risk losing everything they worked for so long and so hard?

for what

and that's when I began to think there's more here

you know what is this deadness that people are referring to that would make people act out acts of exuberant defiance

to the point of really losing their pants

and skirts whatever this I'm not this is not a gendered story at all and so

I got very, very interested in what are relational betrayals and

how do we address them and how do we create an approach that is more human and more helpful than the polarizing and you're going to hear that theme for me all the time it's like i

um it's not difficult to yell at each other

that's a great point it's very difficult to be patient with each other though to be understanding to take a little bit of time, to take a breath before you respond.

That's much more more difficult.

Yes, to tolerate the other person's pain,

a lot of things.

You asked me, you opened the conversation by saying, why do some couples succeed and why don't they?

And what is the fundamental incompatibility?

I think the most profound incompatibility is the ability to live with an other.

Difference.

Much of relationships is managing difference.

Another person who stands there, sees the same thing as you, and has a very different experience of it.

How can that be?

You know, and the ability to

really and then be curious about this person who is other,

different,

not you, not an extension of you, not there to make you feel good about you.

just is whoever they are.

And how do you come to accept that?

It's called differentiation,

you know, in a relationship.

That, you know, that they perceive, experience, respond to the same situation differently.

And that will not be threatening to you.

What are the

early signs of deadness?

Or what are the ones that maybe people

recognize?

You know, there's one that I often think is an interesting one, right?

You go, you have dinner with a bunch of friends, you talk, your partner starts talking about the movie they saw, the music they listened to, the book they read, and you have no idea who's talking.

You know, none of it.

And especially these days, it's in the computer, it's in the phone, you don't even see a book on the table.

So, you know, or not even a Netflix, you know, when you used to get a cassette.

Something, culture was visible.

Now it's like,

so.

But they talk and they have interesting things to say and people listen to them.

Then you go into the car and it's like, who's going to the supermarket tomorrow morning?

Or who's picking up Joey?

Or did you call your mom?

Or like nothing.

And you just say, why don't you continue the conversation that made this person actually interesting to you?

You were alive there, but you're dead here.

Yes, curiosity is erotic.

When I talk about erotic, I'm not talking about sex and turn-ons and excitement.

I'm talking about a fundamental sense of aliveness.

You can have sex and feel absolutely nothing.

Women have done that for centuries.

It's not, the act itself

doesn't tell you anything about the experience.

So it's really, how do people feel alive?

And that means you can do very little and feel a lot.

Just because you're imagining, because you're, you know, the kiss that you imagine giving, as Proust says, is as powerful as the actual kiss.

Just use your imagination.

So

what is deadness is when people have kind kind of nothing to say to each other, don't engage with each other.

It doesn't have to be conversation, but

something that says, I want to

reach out to you on the other side of the bridge, like knock, knock,

who's there?

I've seen that in relationships, my friends' relationships, where they've turned up to dinner and

you know, they are one person when their partner's around, and they're another person when their partner's not there.

You know, even the presence of their partner at dinner.

And maybe part of it is that sense that, God, if I let myself loose and become my true self with my friends in the presence of this other person, they're going to feel like they're going to know that there's something up.

They're going to know that I don't feel that excited to speak to them, that I'm not that curious about them, that I have these thoughts and this level of energy that I just struggle to bring to this relationship.

So, I guess, given that those are the

early warning signs.

So, I sometimes say to people,

if you brought 10% of the creative imagination,

or if people brought 10% of the creative imagination that they bring to their affairs, into their primary relationships, their life would be very different.

It's very interesting how people

become lazy.

Is that a conscious choice?

Is that something that people can consciously step in to do, or is passion something which is bottom-up and it's emergent and

it's it sort of comes out of you

no because love is a verb that you have you know it's not a permanent state of enthusiasm you you practice it this is an Eric Fromm idea you know it's not that wasn't the original thing or that it's like you you it's a verb you conjugate it in multiple tenses and all the time you do things that express this if

I play a sport if you play a sport

you it comes with a whole ritual You get your, what sport do you do?

What's your two?

Cricket.

Cricket, like a good British guy.

Yes, yes.

So you get your stick, you get your, you know, you have your clothes, you have your, there's a whole ritual that says,

I'm going to play, you know, and nobody says it should be spontaneous.

It should be passionate and just kind of sweep you.

It's a very interesting kind of way that we have about thinking that

there is a surge, there is a force.

It feels like you're fearless in those moments and you're ready to

embrace life with a vengeance kind of thing.

But

the truth is that I often have said to people, the person who comes home to your partner, to your spouse, is absolutely not the person who the other one is meeting.

And now you want to tell me that your wife is boring or your husband is boring?

I mean, seriously, you are boring too.

Well, they were interesting enough to be able to get this person to sleep with them.

You know, so it's a,

you know,

I think

we could have two hours only on the subject of infidelity because it's a very

powerful and painful and destructive and

also repairing, you know, experience in

people's lives.

I

interestingly, after having spent

four decades pretty much, you know, researching couples and families, I began to think about other pairs.

I got interested in other forms of partnerships, you know, friendship.

I'm deeply interested in friendship these days.

I'm interested in creative partners.

I'm interested in co-founders.

I'm interested in parents and adult children.

I'm interested in the concept itself of pairs, because pairs are rarely just two.

There's often a third one lurking somewhere.

The third one can be the previous manager.

It can be the parent.

It can be, you know, it's not just in the concept of infidelity.

Do you have turds?

I've heard you talk about this.

I looked at the research as well and I couldn't work out what was going on.

Women get bored with monogamy more quickly than men.

Can you try and explain?

Is that borne out out in your experience?

And what's the mechanism?

Why is that the case, if it's the case?

I know I've said that sentence here and there just to catch people's attention.

And because it's so counter-cultural.

But it actually is

quite true in the sense that

here's how I

understand it.

It comes from the research of Dr.

Marta Maiana,

who

was one of the main researchers on female sexuality.

And the idea was

that we tend to look at male sexuality as unprompted, always ready to go, in search of an outlet, in perpetual motion, hard as steel,

enduring forever.

And as if,

and this is, I'm going to say it for men and for women, as if

the interior state of the man doesn't influence their sex

life.

If they're depressed, if they're feeling competent,

if they're lonely, if you know, if they're anxious, I mean, of course, the inner life of men influences their sexuality.

And so I debunked that.

And then I said, But let's look at women.

What do women do?

They actually don't want things sexually that, that different from men.

But we don't know what women really want because throughout history, women haven't done what they wanted.

They have done what kept them safe.

And therefore, what kept them safe was to not ask for much,

to just kind of take it, what take whatever it was.

When in fact,

female sexuality is often seen as more subjective, as more contextual,

not necessarily rooted in desire per se, but often in willingness, in the story, in the romance, in the plot.

Less mechanical.

No, more contextual, I think it's a story.

It's more driven by the plot.

This is why women can be 10 years with a man and then 10 years with a woman and back to another 20 years with the man.

Because the story, the relationship, is what often will drive the attraction and the sexuality rather than something that is more fixed

in that sense.

So it's more flexible in that sense.

It's more fluid.

And therefore, it responds to the context, to the story.

Is it interesting?

Is it going to be different?

Is it about me?

You know, in my work with straight couples, I hear a lot of men who tell me nothing turns me on more than to see her turned on.

It's great.

I have rarely heard a woman say that to me about her husband.

Oh, that's interesting.

Nothing turns me on more than to see him turned on.

On occasion, that's her thing.

No, what turns her on is what's happening to her.

Not what's happening to him.

If she's not into it, he can stand there with the biggest turn-on under the sun.

It doesn't matter to her.

She's not into it.

Isn't that interesting that sexually both the man and the woman are pointing toward the woman?

Yes.

And that's true in watching porn too.

The man watched the woman and the woman watched the woman.

So what Marta said was she needs more risque, more imagination.

It's not that she doesn't have an interest in sex, it's that she doesn't have an interest in the sex she can have after 10 years or whatever with the same person.

Because

the same person who is extinguished in one place wakes up perfectly fine somewhere else.

What she needs is the active engagement.

She doesn't want to just do it.

She wants him to not just want it.

She wants him to want her.

What turns her on is what happens to her.

So,

what is the main obstacle for her is the fact that she finds herself often

in a caretaking mode.

She takes care of kids if she has kids, she takes care of him.

She thinks about the well-being of others.

And what really unleashes the desire is when she actually can stop thinking and worrying about others and focus entirely on herself and her own mounting sensations.

Why does he say nothing turns me on more than to see her turned on?

Because if she's turned on, he doesn't have to worry about the predatory fear.

If she's into it, he's not hurting her.

Oh,

it's like an identifier that everything else is okay.

Yeah, if she's into it, he doesn't have to, he's not forcing her, he's not hurting her.

She's into it.

That takes care of the predatory fear.

most guys don't want to be predators they want somebody who is totally into it with them i suppose the reason that that doesn't work in reverse is that guys are much more mechanical that it's not as much of a reliable signal that everything is okay just because i'm aroused as a guy because lots of things can be really not okay and i can still be pretty aroused the same thing isn't true at the same level for women so um it's a reliable signal it's a reliable signal from her that,

yeah, I feel pretty safe.

I think this relationship is good.

You, by virtue of that, are also good.

You are useful.

You make me feel safe.

So on and so forth.

Yes,

it's more than I feel safe.

It's I know

I am not hurting her.

I am, you know, we are playing together.

It's extremely important.

The predatory fear to me is one of the primary obstacles that men have to free themselves from in order to be able to let go and to be open and present and the

releasing the burden of caretaking is the primary obstacle for women so when i say women get bored with monogamy it means that for women to remain interested in sex they need to feel that it's interesting fun different

surprising

and not the usual Now, that doesn't mean she doesn't she's not partly responsible for doing some of that, but it it really says when women stop being interested in sex, it's not just because their sexual desire is lesser for women.

It's because they respond to the context and the context is not nearly interesting enough to remain interested in sex.

That's the...

The thorough explanation of this one line.

It is.

No, it is thorough and it's very interesting.

I saw a study that said women typically believe their marriages have around the right frequency of sex, whereas men wished for more around about twice as much sex as they were having.

This suggests that many couples adjust their sexual frequency to the lower rate of desire by the wife.

I thought that was really, really interesting.

That is true.

That is accurate.

When I say true, I mean it's accurate.

But I also think that we remember what we said before, men often think that sex is the only way to experience certain types of intimacy, closeness, tenderness, affection, that therefore they want sex twice as often.

I think if they could experience it in other ways and broader...

They wouldn't need sex less.

No, I mean, not need it.

They would just have a more, a broader vocabulary.

They would have a broader repertoire.

It wouldn't be,

you know,

it wouldn't have to be sex in order for it to...

It's that.

They could be pleased in many other ways is what I'm saying and felt good.

You mentioned before about some of the changing dynamics.

modern world stuff,

women being

no longer financial prisoners of their husband being able to have a little bit more agency or a lot more agency inside a relationship, before a relationship.

We talked before about Title IX,

women in education, boys maybe struggling more.

You've got to sit down and be quiet and do your homework and highlight like a good little boy.

And sit.

Sit the whole day.

I mean, come on, you have testosterone.

You need to move.

I mean, it is a challenging time for everybody, but I think that what is demanded from the transformation for what men have done in terms of how they use their hands how they use their physical prowess how they use their bodies how they move and now they have to just sit there in class

it it's a challenge it's a challenge I mean you know this is the whole ADHD diagnosis is not

is not an accurate way to pathologize normal boy behavior right like this is this is exactly where this is laid at the feet of but my point is another change that we've seen has been the introduction of women into the workplace.

Women into the workplace that men are in.

What

have you come to sort of learn about how

your perspective on understanding how men and women relate intimately?

What is the perspective that you now have about how men and women relate in the workplace?

What are the similarities that you're seeing between those two things?

I think I'm going to actually answer it in a less gendered way.

I think there are

four primary pillars of relationships in the workplace and they apply to all.

And this is true in the romantic sphere as well as in the workplace.

I think that what makes relationships possible is a sense of trust.

So four pillars.

One is trust.

Do you have my back?

Can I rely on you?

Will you not betray me?

Will you not lie?

Would you not push yourself ahead of me at my expense?

I can't think of this in a gendered way.

I think this is true for anyone who works.

And I like that.

I like the fact that it is, it's bigger.

It's a dimension that is just, you know, trust suffers from a lot of definitional vagueness.

It's very hard to theoretize about trust and to define it.

Is it a condition?

Is it a feeling?

Is it an outcome?

Who knows?

But everybody knows when they feel it.

And

the next dimension that is also the feeling of belonging.

You know, am I a part of this?

Am I thought of when I'm not here?

Do I have a place?

Trust is also: can I disagree with you without having to fear negative consequences?

So it also makes the trust is one of the salves against conflict and

disagreement.

Not disagreement, conflict.

And then the third thing is recognition.

Do you value me?

Is my work valued?

Are my contributions valued?

Can't think of it in gender terms either.

I think women have certain issues around that that are different from men, but I think that the need in and of itself is a universal need.

If you're going to work,

if you're going to do something, contribute, show up, you want to feel that somebody is noticing this.

Am I visible?

You know, some women think men get get more of that they get it easier they have to prove it less you know that you know a mediocre guy can often pass when

all of these lines which we've we've heard left and right I I think to me what matters is not who wins who has the title of greater victim who suffers more the thing is that these are human dimensions that are essential for relationships in the workplace.

And the last one is collective resilience.

And I love the fact that it's seen as collective resilience because I think mistakenly, we often talk about resilience as if it's an individual person's qualities, traits that live inside of them and that they're able to draw upon in order to resist and to face adversity.

Collective resilience is how does a group come together in the face of challenge, crisis, adversity, change,

and know how to tap into the social resources together rather than fracture and start blaming each other.

And I think

what is interesting in the workplace at this point is not so much what is different for men and women.

I mean, that is interesting plenty, but it's really how much relationships in the workplace have become no longer soft skills, but hardcore, bottom line.

And this is related to AI and to the fact that this is the last frontier of what humans have that

is different.

So suddenly there's a surge of thinking about what makes relationships in the workplace.

Of course, what makes good relationships is connected to what makes a good culture, and what makes a good culture is related to what makes higher performance.

So, there's a straight line.

And the way I developed this was in a partnership between my experience as a therapist in my work with relationships, but together with Culture AMP, which is an HR platform, and we had like 1.5 billion data points.

Like, I've never had evidence like this.

Like, I'm a therapist, you know, I can count the people in my office.

I don't do evidence-based.

I do clinical evidence.

This gave me a whole different entry into, give it to me on a global scale.

What are the important pieces that everyone needs?

And I love the fact that these were gender-neutral dimensions that are experienced in gender-specific ways.

That's interesting.

I mean, we're certainly seeing a change in workplace dynamic.

The working from home world that everybody thought was awesome because I only need to put pajama pants on and a shirt and I can, my kitchen's next door and no one really knows if I'm not on Slack and I can just do Zoom calls.

I think people are sick of that.

I think people are so sick.

So you're right.

These soft skills are now going to be the

hard lines that people rely on when it comes to growing a business because workplace culture's back.

You don't have a culture of growing a business.

It's also, I mean, how do you start?

How do you start when you've you start with doing online onboarding, with online interviewing, with online, you know, where are you going to learn?

I mean, I'm thinking any one of us who went from in person to online,

we went retrofit.

We had internalized all the skills.

But the every generation that comes and that has never known in person.

Yeah, the remote native worker.

My God.

Because it's not just if you work like that, you also don't go out of your house to shop for food, neither to exercise, neither even to meet friends.

You know, you become contactless.

And when you become contactless, you become atrophied.

And then you can do as much longevity exercises as you want in your basement.

But why would you want to live longer if you're miserable and lonely?

Well, this is the support that people used to get from a job when they went into the office.

This also is

why office romances exist, that you're collaborating, that you already have some of these pillars, right?

You've got some trust.

Well, this person being trustworthy, that's something that almost everybody wants in a partner.

Oh, that's awesome.

Oh, they make me feel like I belong.

Oh, wow, that's pretty cool.

I feel like I'm part of their tribe.

Oh, they recognize me.

Oh, that makes me feel like I, you know, and yes

between

a world where workplace romances were disincentivized and discouraged a lot and then another world that came on top of it not only had they been disincentivized and discouraged but then you weren't even in the workplace anymore so that was a real sort of one-two punch i think of

your new world of work looking at the workplace and your existing world of work kind of coming into conflict with each other

I mean, I think one of the words that is often not used, but that is an important dimension of human existence is the power of transgression.

Breaking the rules.

You know, kids do it when they go into places they're not supposed to go and adults do it when they have romances in the office and people have People have breached rules, people have transgressed people that I think that we can study office romance or we can study the power of transgression.

To do what you're not supposed to do gives people a sense of freedom.

And when it's done playfully, it's one thing.

When it's done hurtfully, it's a very different thing.

But the power of transgression has existed since humankind was invented or

came into

orbit.

It's not a new you can disincentivize anything you want.

The church disincentivized masturbation for a long time too.

I've never seen that necessarily so.

You know,

they did it with more guilt, but, you know, so when you go back and you ask me about these pillars, so then I thought, okay, if these are the things that really are important dimensions of relationships in the workplace, how can I help that?

How can I

bolster that, boost it?

Like, what would be a tool?

And that's when, you know, the thing we were talking about:

what is one of the ways that we have helped not polarize has been through play

by playing with people who are

different from you as kids.

And then later on, play has often been a place where taking risk is safe and fun

and fun.

It's safe because it's contained.

Sorry, within the rules of the game, and it's fun.

So I

decided I'm going to create tools that are playful, that are going to boost people's skills relationally.

You made a card game, right?

Yes, I did the card game.

I also did the podcast, Where Should We Begin?

I mean, everything I've done has been in that direction.

I've had one thought.

The quality of your relationships ultimately is what determines the quality of your life.

You can have a very interesting job if you're dealing with people who make it miserable for you and you can't sleep at night, it doesn't matter.

I mean, the quality of your relationships, you want meaningful, thriving relationships at every level and in every sphere.

So what can I do to improve that, to support, to support that, and to do it in a way that is not didactic, not scolding, not tribal.

Not even universal, but playful.

I love it.

Esther Perrell, ladies and gentlemen, Esther, you're fantastic.

I really, really appreciate you.

It's been a lot of fun.

Where should people go to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you've got going on, to play your card game, to do everything else?

EstherPerel.com.

Card game is where should we begin a game of stories?

One for your life, for your friends, your family, et cetera, and one for work.

So it's called Where Should We Begin at Work.

Podcast, Where Should We Begin?

On every platform where you listen.

And if they follow you and you tell them to come to me, then we will will meet.

Heck yeah.

Esther, I appreciate you.

Thank you.

It's a pleasure.

Thank you so much.

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