How Technology Is Changing Love and Work — with Esther Perel

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Welcome to the 362nd episode of the Prop to E-Pod.

What's happening?

It's still Scott-free August, but we're still bringing you thoughtful conversations all month long.

In today's episode, we speak with Astaire Perel, a psychotherapist, New York Times best-selling author, and the host of the hip podcast, Where Should We Begin?

We discuss with Astair how to build better relationships at work, why remote life is changing the way we connect, and how to bring more intention to our personal and professional lives.

I've become friends with Astair.

I find her just so

she's just so good at what she does and an interesting woman.

And I've learned a lot from her.

We're also represented by the same podcast networks that we call each other and share confidential information about our agreements.

But she's become a friend, and I think she's,

I don't know, she's just an incredibly impressive and insightful person.

So, with that, here's our conversation with Astair Perel.

Esther, where does this podcast find you?

This podcast finds me in

New York City.

It's a beautiful day today, isn't it?

Yes.

I mean, it says kind of the shoulders can begin to drop as the heat is beginning to envelope.

It's nice.

So, you said that the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives.

So, let's start where most of us spend most of our time, the workplace.

What are the pillars of strong workplace relationships?

The relational pillars in the workplace can be summed up as trust, belonging, recognition, and collective resilience.

And maybe to say also that

because that's often what I mean, so how did you come up with these four?

There's two different routes that took me there, but very much at the head of this is the fact that this thinking has been done in collaboration with Culture AMP.

And so I brought my intuitive sense and my expertise working with small micro-relationships, and they brought 1.5 billion data points of experience survey, which I've never had that kind of backing of scientific evidence.

Usually I say this and I've seen it, but I can't say, you know, this is validated at a scale that is, you know, incomparable to me.

So trust,

because

the questions that we have,

do you have my back?

Can I rely on you?

Will your interests be done not at my expense?

Will you look at what the consequences are of your decisions on me?

Trust as

the glue that seals interdependence, that seals loyalty, that seals community, and then belonging, because it is a foundational pillar that is the antidote to I am alone.

If I belong to a group, I am part of something that is bigger than myself, where I see myself reflected, my values,

my aspirations, and the group sees me as an individual and sees my contributions.

And then recognition is exactly that.

The respect, the recognition of my contribution.

I value,

I matter, I'm important.

I make a difference.

So the belonging is what the group offers me and the recognition is how it sees me from an individual perspective.

And then the most important for me really is the issue of the collective resilience because that one touches on what are probably two of the most important foundations for any relational system that is healthy, which is adaptability and flexibility to circumstances, to changes, to innovation.

So, collective resilience is the ability of the system to tap into its resources in order to stay relevant, cutting edge, competitive, alive, basically.

It's true in nature and it's true in social-ecological systems as well.

So, those are the four.

And no matter how much we went around and around, we came back to these and then they got validated as such as well.

So one of my theses, I'm just thinking about young people.

So remote work has been an unlock for caregivers and other people who live far from work.

But I think it's been really a negative development for young people.

I think young people, especially young men, need the guardrails and the socialization that's provided in the workplace.

I'm curious what ramifications on not only relationships at work, but just emotional development and your relationships outside of work, remote work has had an impact on.

How has remote work changed us?

First of all, I would probably broaden this beyond a particular gender.

I think that as a whole, we are experiencing a superposition of things.

On the one hand, before we started with remote work, we had already started with social isolation that got really amplified during COVID.

We had already started with an increasingly contactless world.

We had already started with a reality in which, and that

was very much amplified in COVID, I don't need to leave my house, neither to work, nor to eat, nor to shop, nor to exercise, nor even to meet people.

Now we add to that a self-imposed isolation.

Basically, I would rather do things alone at home than go out.

I would rather go to the restaurant, pick up my food and bring it and eat it by myself in my house than eat it on the premises.

That's an enormously important social shift.

And then you add to that the remote work in which on the one hand, here we are, we're getting to do this podcast because of technology, as we know, and it's fantastic.

And at the same time,

If I didn't know you, I would just be talking to you without any context by seeing you in a frame.

I have no idea of what's around you.

I have no idea of what the culture that you bring, the history that you bring.

There is no contours and that is extremely difficult for getting to know people and establishing relations to people.

So I think that the remote work amplifies the social atrophy and is a consequence of it.

It interacts with it.

The most important shift at this moment is that atrophy.

It's a de-skilling.

It's the loss of

the playground.

It's the loss of all these situations where people have had to interact with with others in multitudes of situations.

It's a combination of remote work with

predictable technologies, with self-imposed isolation, and with the loss of the playground.

That quadrant would pretty much describe

the challenges that we are more and more facing.

We have five generations in the workplace at this moment with very, very different relationship experiences.

We think a lot about the quote-unquote mating crisis.

60% of 30-year-olds used to have one kid in the household or more.

Now it's 27%.

And young people are not two in three women have a relationship under the age of 30, only one in three men because women are dating older, because my understanding is they want more economically and emotionally viable partners.

I'm curious what observations you would make around young people finding each other

and how romantic relationships are evolving or devolving and any advice you might have for young people.

I just see a lot of young people that are not connecting, if you will.

There's a lack of connection.

What are your thoughts?

It's important to separate not connecting from not connecting romantically.

There is definitely a shift romantically.

Many 17-year-olds have never been kissed.

You connect in groups, you connect with people, but you don't necessarily connect through the arc of love that was such a formative experience in previous generations.

That doesn't mean you don't connect.

Now, the question of if you have five young people sitting together and each one is into their phone, are they connecting?

That is a whole other

level of the question.

I would beg to say very differently.

Very differently.

There's a lot more parasocial than in real life at this moment.

But I do think that we had a model for a long time where romantic relationships were cornerstone relationships.

You began your life when you met somebody and you began to build with that person and you put one thing in front of another and you got your first place and you got your second job and you build like that together.

We have shifted from a cornerstone model that used to take place in the late teens, early 20s to a capstone model that takes place in the late 20s.

early to middle 30s.

And that capstone model, I've already done my jobs, I've already a career on the way of some sort, I may already have my own place, I may have a car, I meet you to validate and to solidify that which I already have established.

It's a very different developmental stage and set of expectations that accompany as a whole, I think again, the social atrophy is and the isolation is contributing at every level of how people spend their free time, where they go, who they meet, how many people they meet, and what kinds of relationships they establish with them.

And more importantly, I think that as these things change in the personal domain, it is completely shifting what's going to happen at work because that becomes one of the last places where you do have to interact with people, not always remote.

There's still a lot of places where you meet people at work.

And so, how does the fact that you have not enough contact, not enough social practice in your personal life affect how you're going to interact with people at work.

That becomes a very interesting question for me at this point.

Aaron Ross Powell, when I think about young people

not connecting, my sense is there is a difference, loosely speaking, between men and women.

And that is when women don't have, as you put it, that cornerstone romantic relationship, oftentimes they'll put that.

additional relationship energy into friendships, family, and oftentimes pour that additional incremental energy back into work.

And the data I've seen is that men or young men aren't as good at channeling that energy that

they may not be getting from a romantic relationship into more productive means.

I mean, at the end of the day, do men need romantic, is the romantic relationship more important or beneficial to young men than it is to young women?

You know, the research on happiness in marriage has always favored men.

The research on health and longevity in men is always connected to being in a relationship.

There's not a single,

maybe not a single, but there are not many men in their 90s who are doing it alone.

But that's because we could also say historically, often men

have centered their relational lives in their family.

And if they had to work super hard, they even more so.

Whereas their female partners, in this case, often had other relationships and other connections.

So in that sense, the question is why do in some cultures, you know, you go to Greece, you see the men sitting in the morning on the terraces, they are interacting with each other.

This has not always been historically the case.

American men had social connections.

Beyond sports, they had social connections, they had friendships.

There's been an atrophy of their friendships into the family and now that they don't have many families or romantic relationships, we say there are way too many of them that are all alone and that doesn't bode well neither for them nor for this for the lives of women

i know you have a son i have two boys

my one of my biggest fears my mom was always worried i was going to get into too much trouble my fear is that my boys aren't going to get into enough trouble that they're so overprogrammed so warned about everything

You know, that I worry they're not going to push the boundaries of things, not take risks, not establish.

I mean, my boys are blessed, so they have a lot of opportunities to be social.

But you said something that I've parroted that absolutely blew my mind, and I use it all the time, that we might be evolving a new species of asocial, asexual males.

Can you speak more about that?

There are multiple factors for why

we are less social at this moment.

Every indicator from doing team sports to going to bars to going to restaurants together, I mean, the number that really has been shocking to me is that 74% of food that is cooked in a restaurant is not eaten in the restaurant.

I find that an amazing number.

I mean, because this is a place where people have gone together to hang with each other, and hanging out is an essential component of socialization.

So I think that that, combined with artificial intimacy, artificial intimacy, not just artificial intelligence, is creating a situation where we are in some way planning our extinction.

You know, we are living in a world, so are your sons and so are my sons, you know, surrounded with predictive technologies that are presenting a life that is basically frictionless, polished, smooth, and that gives, you know, that is the experience you get from the app.

And you forget that relationships and people are by their very nature unpredictable and imperfect.

And so you lose one of the most important pieces for socialization and for that species that we have been, which is we, what is flexibility?

It is how to deal with uncertainty.

Okay?

We are not just in a crisis, we are in a rapidly changing world.

That happens every, it happened three major times in the history of humanity and in and with that uncertainty we usually have to deal with experimentation making decisions making mistakes figuring out what it was dealing with negotiation dealing with having to make decisions figuring things out if you get an entire socialization with predictive technologies that basically prides itself on being more flawless than human beings, then human beings don't know anymore how to learn the flawless, the

flawed nature of what it means to be human.

And in that sense, we are

gradually creating something in which we interact with machines.

We like that fact that the machine is sycophantic and responds to me in ways that are quite pleasing to me,

very empathic.

It doesn't demand my accountability.

It doesn't demand my responsibility.

It doesn't demand mutuality.

It just is there for me, which is really, from a developmental perspective, quite regressed.

I mean, a baby is self-involved.

You know, the whole socialization of children is based on learning the relationship between self and other.

But if you are in a machine, there is no other.

And gradually, you then lose that ability to experience subjectivity.

And that connects to a different interior life and that difference of interior life is the beginning of the change of the species.

And now,

I spent many years researching this in the reload in the personal realm, romantic family friendships and now I really wanted to see and how does all of that show up at work?

Why?

Because Every company wants me to come talk to them about relational intelligence in the workplace, how to deal with the very questions that you are asking, but how they manifest at work.

You know, the loneliness and how that relates to work, the absenteeism.

I just heard an extraordinary number of absenteeism in Brazil.

I'm going to give a talk in Brazil.

It's like, whoa.

You know, so all these things that you describe show up on the job.

And the job is interested in figuring that out, the companies.

And that is the new challenge: is what can work offer its employees who are struggling with every single thing that you just described.

You know, who do you go home to?

If you have a 10-year moratorium between school and maybe setting up family or relationship, that means that for 10 years your job is the hub of your most important existential, economical, and emotional needs.

That puts a whole new responsibility on the job that used to belong to the communal structures and to religion.

We'll be right back after a quick break.

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Going back to the workplace, I've run companies and been on the boards of companies.

And generally speaking, the HR and legal department would rather that nobody ever have a relationship at work.

And I always felt that was totally unrealistic.

My understanding is about one in three relationships began at work or in a professional context.

In my view, it's always been above a certain power dynamic.

Once you get to a certain seniority, you take that off campus.

There's just too much opportunity for a power mismatch.

I find that a lot of the powerful men I have worked with will mistake kindness for sexual interest

and

accidentally, slowly, incrementally start abusing it.

And so from the outset, you just have to say, once you get to a certain point of seniority, it's off limits.

You do it, you're guilty, you're out.

But below that level, which is 95% of the employees,

that obviously you tell people to tread lightly and

honestly, you're taking a risk, but that I've been to 12 weddings of people who met at my companies.

And I think it's a wonderful thing.

And I would imagine that 99% of the relationships at work are consensual.

What is your view on romantic relationships in the workplace?

I mean, your question at this point cannot be separated from simply what is happening to romantic relationships in terms of where people meet or how people meet.

I mean, usually you ask people how did you meet and you get a whole story.

An airplane, a street, a flat tire, you name it, you know, and work.

Now, you don't have to ask where did you meet because you're going to get way too many times, you know, six out of ten, you're going to meet, you're gonna hear on an app

then you may get a story why did you meet that becomes the new question but yes i think

that people have always met in the places school and work were the two first places where people met and then through other friends basically the big distinction is that people have always met in

places that were part of life.

What is interesting in the new dating culture is that we are meeting in secluded places in a virtual space that is away from anyone we know, that is away from the public eye, that is away from the rest of our life.

That is one of the most important changes.

It's not the abverses, it's the fact that it's a space that has no connection with our life.

And it's only after you've met for a long time that you will do the big reveal and bring this person to

the people that you know.

Imagine if you meet somebody at work, you have conversations about that person with a lot of people who know that person.

You have a ton of data points.

You see this person interact.

You've seen how this person talks to people, how this person leads, or you know, not in an authority position, just in the projects and stuff.

So, in that sense, work is a social situation where meeting, making friends, it's not just romantic relationships, it's making friends, it's developing intimacies,

it's creating tight bonds,

has always been at the forefront of people's lives,

whether it was industry or service economy.

And at this moment, the remote nature makes all of this really very almost impossible, basically.

You know, when I think about the rewards of having economic security and being able to do nice things that economic security provides, It's wonderful, but one of the reasons it's so wonderful is, quite frankly, it was hard to make it.

I oftentimes think money is great, but making the money is what makes money so rewarding.

And when I think about relationships, I think that what makes relationships, part of what makes relationships so rewarding, is getting to a friendship, a romantic relationship, quite frankly, is really hard.

And that's what makes it so rewarding.

And I use that as a pretext for if you could advise

governments or parents or trying to implement a series of cultural norms around how to encourage more young people, more connection either outside of work or at work.

What advice would you have for governments and for young people themselves to try and

quite frankly to start to reconnect a bit, become our mammal self again?

There are people for whom this is really their expertise at this moment, right?

To look at what are the effects of screens and de-socialization and stuff.

I think anything that creates free play on the streets,

anything where people can, children can have unchoreographed, unmonitored, unscripted experience for social negotiation.

Anything that involves group activities, singing together, moving together, drumming together,

doing sports together, anything that is a group activity in which you negotiate rules, interactions,

support, interdependence, you know, the social, the fundamental boundaries,

the fundamental social dimensions of life, and to have them as part of a program.

I think anything that involves, you know, I was talking with a case, a family yesterday where,

you know,

a tutor came to the house for the first time time.

And, you know, within three weeks, the child learned, you know, 10 times more than months on Zoom together.

I mean, I would encourage all sorts of activities to come back to in person.

But, you know, I ask my own colleagues, and the vast majority of them are working exclusively online in very disembodied experiences where you never, you know.

A student of mine was talking about

how do you let your patients know when you are pregnant.

And, you know, when I was pregnant, I had to deal with the fact that my patients saw me and they would notice a difference.

But at this point, you can pretty much hide nine months and nobody would know a thing.

I mean, it's just an amazing new reality.

So, what's to talk about?

You know, exactly.

I won't see you for the next four months, six months, all of that.

I think the workplace has an enormous contribution to make about this.

If people still come, and even if they just come for very particular off-site meetings, is to make intentional social interaction a part of the mission of the job, simply because if you don't do it,

the quality of your work will decrease.

So it's part of why, you know, since I don't work with teachers and schools and I work with companies, I figured this is where I'm going to go, to talk about the fact that relationships in the workplace are no longer just soft skill.

They are the new bottom line.

They are your competitive edge.

They are directly connected to culture and therefore directly connected to engagement and therefore directly connected to performance.

And I can back this up with as much data as we want because culture provided it to me.

This I could not have said 10 years ago.

Why do I go to companies?

Why suddenly do people want to talk about relationships with me?

I haven't changed.

I've been doing that for 40 years.

But because the companies understand that this is the new, this is the last thing left.

You know, what is it that human beings can do that AI can't do yet?

Because they always like to put the yet next to us.

And that for which you need the trust and the sense of belonging and the recognition and the collective resilience.

What are those things?

And how do you implement this in the workplace?

I think

if a teacher misses the opportunity or if a school doesn't ban phones, this is for me the ABC.

You don't let certain places should simply not let a phone come in.

And that's that.

You begin with that.

And you retrain people.

I do support in some way whenever it's possible for people to at least in part meet in person.

But you see,

Even when people show up at work in person, they're all sitting behind a computer and texting each other rather than walking into the next door.

So this just showing up physically isn't doing the trick, which is part of why I created the card game.

And older things, I constantly think, what can I do at my level that actually fosters this interaction, creates you know, intentional storytelling.

Storytelling is the oldest thing that people do that connects and binds us to each other, that makes people curious about each other.

Curiosity is essential to growth, development and aliveness, that makes people play together.

Play is the most important skill for adaptation to uncertainty.

I have a reason for creating a card game.

I'm not just creating a game because I think it's cute.

It's because for every one of these dimensions, I think to not be deliberate about it isn't going to do it anymore.

So when you ask me what does one do, I can't answer the mega problems of society, but I can say I see them and then I create one thing:

the podcast,

the first card game for relationships, friendships, for people to actually be able to know how to have conversations with each other, because I realize that that's become harder and harder.

To then do a workplace card game so that people can know what to do on an off-site, how to build a team, what onboarding looks like if it's not going to just be on Zoom like that.

How you can ask a question that actually, I, you know, we've tested every one of these cards by the thousands, but I also have done it in my own team.

And I see the energy on the screen shift when we play with one of those questions.

It's like people are actually interested in what we have to say versus people are doing God knows what while one person is talking and then they ask a question and then you have a dead silence.

Why do you have a dead silence?

Because half the people barely listen to what you were saying.

So, how do I reclaim the attention?

How do I reclaim the affection?

How do I do it in a playful way?

How do I do it in a way that's replicable?

And then I come out with one of the oldest games that has ever existed, a card game.

Tell us more about the card game.

I'm not a person who plays...

card games, but I am a person who tells stories and listens to stories as a psychologist in my office for almost 40 years.

So then I thought, how do I help people tell stories?

If you tell a story, I can understand you better.

If you tell a story, I will polarize less.

Because once I know the heart of a person, it is much harder to be so judgmental of the person.

So it taps at so many levels.

Connection, intimacy, curiosity, conflict, you know, all the dimensions of relationships.

And how do I do it in a way that you can do both online and not online.

So I have this little box that is the card game.

I have the cards.

And basically we start a meeting.

And instead of saying, okay, who has the report about this and this?

I say five minutes and I say, okay, let's start with, you know,

an approach I would love to try.

A first impression I had of a colleague that has changed.

The company value that I most connect with is

because

the skill that I wish I got to use more.

Part of my job I'm most proud to talk about.

The feedback I wish that I had heard sooner in my career.

I'll never forget the manager who, my go-to emoji instead of using words, and on and on.

There's a hundred of them.

And I just pick one and I say, let's just start like this.

And

there is a completely different atmosphere.

attention, energy, mood.

And then from there, when you go and you start to ask, okay, so let's move now and talk about people are together.

You've created the feeling of belonging.

You've created more trust.

And you do it repeatedly.

And it becomes part of the culture because that engages people.

And that engagement is essential to performance.

So

I could describe it to you in psychological language.

And I can describe it to you in business terms.

I like what you said, sort of the relational culture is a key point of differentiation for any company.

and I believe that.

But it sounds like a lot of this is an argument that leads up to return-to-work mandates.

That a lot of people from Jamie Dimon to a lot of executives have said, you're back in the office five days a week.

And there's been real pushback, especially from a younger generation.

Some have just refused.

It sounds like you're an advocate for return to work.

Is that accurate?

I'm definitely an advocate for hybrid.

I tell the clinicians,

I said, you have got to see your patients in prison.

Even if you don't have an office, take a walk.

Go meet on a bench, go meet at the river, go meet in the park, take meat with them, embodied.

We can't have, you know, conversations about the body and the somatics.

When you never touch a body, you never smell, you never come close, you never see it, you never see it moving, you never see it standing.

I mean, what are we doing?

That's the new species.

You understand?

This idea that we are still embodied creatures who rarely see those bodies is

quite frightening.

So I don't say just see all your patients online.

I completely understand.

I do a hybrid myself,

but I make sure that I see them regularly.

It's a completely different session.

I would say you can do a ton online, but there's a ton that you cannot do nearly in the same way if you just do it online.

And I would say that to the companies.

But I would say it's not just a mandatory return.

The same young people who are returning are coming with the kind of atrophy that they have developed.

You need to provide them more while they're there than just for each of them to sit in their cubicle next to each other on their laptops.

That's the mean piece.

It's not enough to just mandate people to come back to work.

It's everything that you're going to do to re-socialize.

And you're getting a whole generation of people who have a paucity of social skills at a level that we have never seen.

We'll be right back.

Hey, this is Peter Kafka.

I'm the host of Channels, a show about the biggest ideas in tech and media and how those things collide.

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We're back with more from Astera Perot.

I want to return to parenting.

Both of us are parents and

what role do our early relationships, especially with our parents, play in shaping our romantic patterns as adults?

And what can we draw from that as parents in terms of the way we approach approach parenting that increases the likelihood that our kids will have healthy friendships and romantic relationships?

I'll put it to you like this.

I'm interested in the superpositions at this moment between, you know, we all understand that when you enter an adult romantic relationship, you come with your family history, where you learn to love, how you learn to love, where you learn to give, to receive, where you learn to ask and feel that you deserve to be given to, where you learn to laugh or to cry or to be touched, etc.

So we come with a rich relational history.

We also come with values.

You know, a question that you can always ask is how many people came into your house growing up?

Did your parents have friends?

Did you travel with other people?

Did you have Sunday dinners just for the nuclear family or did you have an extended family?

What was the social landscape of your growing up?

I believe that all of that, by the way, comes with you to work.

It's what I call the unofficial resume.

It's not the one that tells you which jobs you've had and which titles you've had.

It's the one that tells you your relationship history that comes with you to work and determines how you deal with authority, power, competition, boundaries,

teamwork, asking for help,

being critical or supportive, doing it yourself or engaging with others.

All of these aspects will be derivatives of the unofficial resume.

So there are superpositions.

Now, as a parent,

I always emphasize these superpositions.

I said, you know, when you live with somebody, when you have a friend, this is what you need to understand.

You're going, you know, it's not enough to just send a text and say happy birthday.

Call, speak to the person,

make them know that they're a good friend.

How would they know you're a good friend?

If 10 other people do the same text, then you're not the best friend.

There are ways that you ritualize and elevate the meaning of the relationship.

And I made it very concrete.

I did the same thing then with mentors.

I did the same thing with teachers.

Then I did the same thing with leaders.

And now they're doing the same thing when they are in a leadership position.

So I think it's about being very explicit.

Why?

Because we used to have communities of people that were acquired that said the same thing.

If you went to that house, they reinforced it, you went here.

There was a kind of a reinforcement of the main values.

Today, these things are much less

part of an integrated whole.

It's this i you have multiple places where you get your information, but you get multiple places where you get your advice about every aspect of life too.

Therefore, when you are alone, you have to be very, very vocal and very, very clear with your children of what really is important, what are the main values you want to instill in them.

But we in our relational lives at this moment have put feelings above values.

And that's a shift that probably needs to be reaccilibrated a little bit.

How you feel about certain things, do you want to call grandma?

Do you want to go see grandma on Sunday?

Do you feel like it?

Is really not that important when that's the right thing to do.

And the right thing to do is not necessarily what you feel like, but what is part of your duty and obligation as part of a relational system that involves interdependence and things you do for others even when you don't feel like it.

And that is pushing back against the culture of individualism that puts the word self in front of everything: self-care, self-love, self-awareness, self, rather than other.

And I believe that that other is one of the things people used to find at work.

You would meet other people.

They're not part of your little tribe.

They're not part of your family.

They're other people.

And you learn to negotiate with them.

And that's where you develop tolerance.

And that's also how you protect democracy.

I really like that insight.

I was thinking my father-in-law was staying with us and he always did Legos with my youngest.

And my youngest is getting older and my grand or my father-in-law bought this great logo set.

And my son spent a few minutes with it and then kind of decided he didn't want to do it.

And I realized I probably should have weighed in and said around values,

you know, your grandfather's been really good to you.

So even when you don't want to do the Lego, you do it because this means a lot to him.

And those are the values we have in terms of how we treat our grandparents.

I really like that framing.

So let's talk about when the kids get a little bit older.

Young people are having less sex than ever.

they're having a difficult time connecting.

What advice do you have for young people who claim they want to be in relationships?

When you see people are having less sex, I would say in certain contexts.

I'm not sure that by definition people are having young people are having less sex.

They may have a lot more sex with themselves for that matter.

So

they may have a lot more sex that is uncommitted, that isn't part of a plot, that isn't part of a story, a relationship that unfolds.

They are often in much more in groups than in one on ones.

I'm not sure that that is all simply negative and that we had it so so good before.

It's different.

It's different.

What I think is more problematic is that they have less good friends, they have less best friends, they have less people they call to when they have a problem, they they have a lot more parasocial relationships, they have a thousand virtual friends but no one to feed their cat, or no one to pick them up at the airport, or for that matter, to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy.

And that matters.

It's like,

how do you really show up for people?

That is the piece of the connection that I'm interested in, not just the romantic aspiration.

Frankly, you know, we have had a model of romantic love and we have had marriage as the kind of culmination of romantic love.

And almost 50% of marriages dissolve.

And, you know, as a friend of mine once said, if Apple was selling you a product that fails half the time, would you buy it?

So

it's like

we shouldn't just romanticize the romantic relationship as if it supersedes everything else.

I think love is what matters.

Love takes place in a multitude of different relational constellations.

It's intergenerational.

That is one of the things that we have really lost at this moment as well, that I think is really important to reinvigorate.

Living with people of all generations, not just and working with people of all generations, and socializing with people of all generations.

It is unmatched for the young to the old and for the older to the young.

How do we help people to connect?

By

once they leave the house, you can bring them into events.

You know,

I participate in events, I do my own tour, and people can't wait to be there together.

We had a huge successful conference last week, and I mean, people couldn't have enough of each other.

But then, once they were there, it was important that we create something together.

And that meant I wanted them not just to learn about clinical approaches, I wanted them to move together, sing together, and laugh together.

So, I brought stand-up comedians, I brought people who sing with large crowds, and then people who move because it's those dimensions and you could see the craving.

So then what happens, how do we do it, is that the people who actually are responsible to do it don't say we shouldn't do it because they won't come.

You have to believe that they really need it and that you actually know that this need, some people don't even know how to access it.

And then you make sure that you make it available for them.

I think it's important for the leaders, teachers, organizers of events, you name it, to not doubt themselves, to not think this is not important, to not think we should just have the meeting

and start talking, you know, as soon as the Zoom thing opens up and we get into the thing.

Like even us, you know, if we had met in person, we would have had at least five, ten, fifteen minutes of talking to each other and what's going on in your life and in mine and where have you been and how are your children and and it wouldn't just be part of the question, it would be part of the connecting so that then when we have a conversation, it would be a very different conversation than we clicked.

We had one, two questions because we know each other.

We say, Hi, hi, how are you?

You know, it's so nice to be again with you.

And then, okay, let's get to the job.

And that let's get to the job that is this complete task-oriented, pragmatic orientation is actually not producing good enough work.

It's good, it's going to be good, but it won't be as good.

And that is true for every second work situation.

And that creativity, that elevating, that cross-sparking with each other, cross-fertilizing with each other, all that stuff that really is at the root of novelty and innovation, that we don't get in this way.

And so

the challenge is to actually convince people that

developing all the dimensions of relational intelligence, be it in the workplace or or in the personal sphere, is worthy.

It's not just something that you do adjacent.

It's not an afterthought.

It's not a soft skill.

It is essential to the survival of the species and to the thriving of our society.

And that is not a conviction that many people have.

And especially in your tech world, there are plenty of people who really just couldn't care less about this.

Just couldn't care less.

There is such a belief that the machine is better, flawless, perfect, that

who wants to deal with people?

People are messy, you know.

And the fundamental question is: what are we going to do with that messiness of human life?

Those aspects of intimacy that are much less shiny and much less

glowing.

How are we going to deal with that?

And

we are

probably not going to be as caring and as empathic and as present because we don't even notice when

people are absent.

And the place where I am really focused on this is when I had just had an episode on the podcast recently on where should we begin.

And the young woman has a birthday party.

She invites five people to come to her birthday party.

She cooks a beautiful brunch and four of them cancel within an hour.

And I'm thinking, wow, you know, and this one has that situation,

perfectly valued situation, but whoever does something like this, and none of them even say, I'm so sorry, I know you're prepared, you must be.

This girl sits there with a totally dressed table with everything, and nobody comes.

And nobody thinks that it makes a difference.

Nobody actually notices that their absence is hurtful or matters, or that their presence would have been so important

because

that that pseudo-reality, that pseudo, you know, that artificial intimacy has created a situation where you don't feel the punch.

So let's move further down the age scale here.

Today, stay-at-home dads make up 18% of at-home parents.

That's up from 11% in 1989.

So there's an increasing number of relationships where the man is no longer the primary breadwinner.

And I've read that one of the knock-on effects of that is it puts strains on relationships, that the likelihood of divorce goes up when the man is no longer the breadwinner, that the use of erectile dysfunction drugs increases dramatically because the man feels insecure.

What advice would you have for couples that are going through that?

And in some ways, this is a victory.

It's wonderful that women are gaining more economic independence.

But it does seem to have a knock-on or an externality that sometimes isn't always positive for a relationship.

What advice do you have for couples where they find themselves where

the woman is the primary breadwinner and

it might be putting a strain on the relationship?

But I don't think that I would lay it out in the order that you just have, perhaps the rate of no, it's not perhaps.

The rate of divorce went up,

not because more men were home.

The rate of divorce went up because there were laws established that women wouldn't lose their children and that there could be a no-full divorce.

The rate of divorce went up when women became economically independent, not not when men became economically dependent.

But doesn't the likelihood of divorce increase in the moment?

No?

No, I think that there is a ton of reasons for divorce, and this is one of them.

The rate of divorce started to go up in the 70s, literally when women were able to actually support themselves.

And by the way, the data is still out that in the situations of divorce, the majority of the time the woman loses her standard of life by 35%.

So I think that there are other dynamics.

Let me put it this way: the question is not just,

there's a few numbers missing.

And in those situations, how many hours of housework or family care does the working woman still do?

And how many hours does the male woman?

And the men aren't picking up the slack.

Okay, so

that will make at some point women often say,

why am I here?

Why am I doing this?

Especially when the kids grow up.

So I think

these changes, by the way, take a little bit longer than just since 1989.

I think they have been a model in place for centuries, for centuries.

And in a very short amount of time, gender roles really began to shift, responsibilities in the household.

And

I think in many situations, it works quite okay.

Um there's it's not like this model is weaker than the other model.

The model is weak in and of itself because the nuclear family puts a tremendous amount of strain on people.

The the model is weak because people have unprecedented expectations that they bring to their romantic relationships.

The model is weak because there are no social structures to support families and children and family care and all of that, especially in the United States, which is still the only industrialized country with no family leave, paid family leave.

So I think that to just look at it as based on one factor creates a bit of a distorted view.

Is it challenging for men

and women to change roles, to negotiate with cultural norms?

Always, all the time.

But norms are flexible.

Norms have shifted always.

The meaning of the child has totally changed in our society in the last 150 years.

I mean,

completely, you know, but so has the meaning of the grandparents.

And so, and the elderly, and the wise person.

So

I think if I can invite you,

I would.

If you ask this question, you have to broaden it.

You know, is there more erectile dysfunction, you know, because the man is not working and he's not performing.

And he has decided that the kind of work that he does is not performative enough and not masculine enough, and therefore it has an immediate,

you know.

I can say to you this way:

pathogens in the air are way more influential on male erections than if they are providers or not.

And then, last question, Sir, you've been very generous with your time.

This is what I call my asking for a friend, which is

my way of trying to get free psychotherapy from a world-class clinician.

But

I'm struggling, and I think a lot of men my age are struggling with, I have 14 and 17-year-old boys.

And just to be blunt, they don't want to hang out with me as much as they used to.

And I'm struggling with it.

And I find it very upsetting that my kids don't have,

I understand it.

I understand they're separating from the pack.

They have their own friends.

I should be happy for them.

But it is still, I find it very upsetting.

They just couldn't get enough of me when they they were younger and now quite frankly i find myself following them around the house and them trying to get away from me what advice would you have for people as kids go through this healthy separation and maybe just don't think dad or mom is the bomb anymore and are just kind of struggling with it

are your kids interested in what you do

professionally for example or even this have they ever come to your studio not at all they really don't yeah they don't that sometimes i wonder if they even know what i do yeah they're down Maybe that's because I haven't done a good job introducing them to it.

Yeah, but my family, generally speaking, is not interested in what I do or impressed by it.

I think

but I think that, you know, I found this whole, I remember when I came to the United States, there was this Bring Your Child to Work Day.

I thought it was an amazing idea.

I mean, when people worked on the farm, you didn't have to bring your child to work.

Everybody knew what's happening.

So

where are these people leaving to the whole day?

What are they doing there?

One thing I would say, this is an invitation to you, get yourself a deck of where should we begin, the first game, and actually

play with them.

It's fascinating to have this story, you know, this story game with the kids.

You know, the last time I lied, was

the rule I have broken most often is,

I mean, I'm giving you a few of the questions that I know that teens

men, because play allows for truth to come in.

It's the same, you know, play being at work or play.

It invites truth said in a way that is in an adjacent reality called the reality of play.

And in play, you don't take things too seriously, but in fact, truth can be told with this, like it's like truth with a smile.

I think that for many families, that I can say, you know,

fact at this point, that playing a storytelling game where people get to talk to each other without being told, well, we should have a conversation,

where they get to hear things about you that they never knew, you know,

stuff that you've done, you know, your guilty pleasures, the biggest risk you took that changed your life, you know, you name it, is really revelatory.

I can confirm this.

I was on vacation vacation with my sister and her husband and their kids.

And I've never, I liked my brother-in-law a lot, but we're just not very close.

And we did one of those games, I think it was called How Well Do You Know Your Family?

And he just, there was a level of, there were some things he talked about.

I just had no idea about him.

And I just found that, I just found that by the end of the game, I just liked him so much more.

I just had no idea that he had like this nuance and texture around relationships.

I can vie for that.

I mean, where should we begin?

In that sense, the stories people tell the letters we get it's like people say i never knew this about my partner i never knew this about my parent i had no idea my child thought this way i mean it's it's really

um it's it's the power of storytelling and then in in the context of a game it's true at for people who need to work together and people who live in love so this is my first advice for you and your kids is you do that and then the second one is you travel travel with them.

You may not want, don't follow them around the house.

Plan something that you know is interesting and go alone, not in the family, alone with each child.

And then you'll get to the 20s and then it will change again.

But for this phase, I think that there is nothing that matches the possibility, whatever kind of trip.

It could be a camping trip for if you have little means and it can be

a trip to wherever if you have the possibility to do so.

But traveling together is being on an adventure, it's dealing with the unknown, it's being curious, it's being playful, it's managing uncertainty and unpredictability, it's connecting, it's negotiating.

I mean it has so many of the richness of relational life.

put in a particular metaphor called to travel, to explore, to discover.

It is pretty much unbeatable.

And I would say this for you as a father with a son.

I would say this for friends.

And I would very much say this for people who work together at this point, who need to create situations where they can discover and explore each other in

different contexts and in person.

Esther Perell is a psychotherapist, New York Times best-selling author, and the host of the hit podcast, Where Should We Begin?

She joins us from her home in New York City.

Esther, I always enjoy our company.

I have a tough time with our podcast because I find I want to like go an hour deep on every single question and we're unable to do it.

But I'm really, and I've just enjoyed watching your career over the last whatever seven, ten years that we've known each other.

I think you're having a real impact.

Appreciate your time.

Thank you so much.

It's a real treat.

I think the key is if you're going to be crude and inappropriate, you got to be really disgusting.

It's, you know, you got to lean into it.

You got to own it.

All right, where are we?