"As a teenager growing up in Europe, I embraced the romantic ideal. For me, I had to give up the ideal that one person would be there for everything. Once you give up that ideal, then you begin to accept the person that you are with - the person who won't be able to give you everything and who won't be able to know exactly what you want and feel without you even needing to say it."

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Source: Source: wbur.org

About the author

Esther Perel

Psychotherapist, Author

Esther Perel is a renowned psychotherapist known for her work on love, desire, and relationships, particularly through her influential books and talks.

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Esther Perel Psychotherapist, Author

"Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become."

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"If you start to feel that you have given up too many parts of yourself to be with your partner, then one day you will end up looking for another person in order to reconnect with those lost parts."

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"People cheat on each other in a hundred different ways: indifference, emotional neglect, contempt, lack of respect, years of refusal of intimacy. Cheating doesn't begin to describe the ways that people let each other down."

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Esther Perel Psychotherapist, Author

"Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex. For men, sex is the connection. Sex is man's language of intimacy"

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