- "This is the culture of "I deserve to be happy". If we used to divorce cause we were unhappy, today we divorce because we could be happier."
- "Adultery has existed since marriage was invented and so too, the taboo against it. It is universally forbidden but yet universally practised."
- "Love rest on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness."
- "Monogamy used to be one person for life, today is person at a time."
- "Men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy and women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy."
- "Treat your partner the way you treat your client."
- "The verb for love is to have and the verb for desire is to want."
- "It never been easier to cheat and never been so difficult to keep a secret."
- "When trust is broken it implies the reintegrating of a new truth."
- "If divorce carried all the shame, today choosing to stay when you should live is the new shame."
- "The smaller we feel in the world, the more we need to shine in the eyes of our partner."
- "Sometimes infidelity is not looking for another person, but for another self."
- "When marriage was an economical enterprise, infidelity threatened our economical stability. But, now, that marriage is a romantic arrangement it threats our emotional security threatened."
- "Before we used to turn to adultery to sough pure love, but now that we seek love in marriage, adultery destroys it."
- "If we can divorce, why do we still have affairs? The typical assumption is that if someone cheats, either there's something wrong with your relationship or wrong with you (...) Assuming that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculates us against the wanderlust. But what if passion has a finite shelf life?"
- "(...) some affairs are death knells for relationships that were already dying on the vine."
- "(...) If you put more and you became the one, you will make the other be more of the one."
- "Healing begins when the perpetrator acknowledges their wrongdoing(...) quite a lot of people who had affairs may feel terribly guilty for hurting their partners, but they don't feel guilty for the experience of the affair itself. And that distinction is important."
- "We have a romantic ideal, when we turn to one person to be fulfill an endless list of needs: to be my greatest lover, my best friend, the best parent, my trusted confident, my emotional companion, my intellectual equal. And I am it, I am the chosen, I am unique, I am indispensable, I am irreplaceable, I am the one. And infidelity tells me I am not (...) It's traumatic it threats our sense of self."
- "(...) When we seek the gaze of another isn't not always our partner that we turning away from, but the person we have ourselves become. And isn't so much that we are looking for another person, as much as we are looking for another self. "
- "Every affair will redefine a relationship and every couple will determine what the legacy of the affair will be."
- "Betrayal in a relationship comes in many forms: contempt, neglect, indifferent, violence. Sexual betrayal is only one way to hurt the partner. In other words, the victim of an affair is not always the victim of the marriage."
- "I look at affairs from a dual perspective: hurt and betrayal on one side and growth and self-discovery on the other. What it did to you and what it meant to me."
- Esther Perel, Psychotherapist
and Writer
Sources:
https://www.ted.com/talks/esther_perel_rethinking_infidelity_a_talk_for_anyone_who_has_ever_loved
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE4QQMyTrC0
