"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."
"People grow up learning to be silent about their sexuality, so where are they going to learn to talk about it when they are in a relationship? Shame, guilt, ignorance, reservation, prudishness, all kinds of different cultural systems and social stereotypes shroud sexuality in secrecy and in silence. And there's the romantic notion. "If I say in the beginning, that I am missing something, you are instantly going to think that means you are not enough.""
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More quotes by Esther Perel
"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."
"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."
"Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex. For men, sex is the connection. Sex is man's language of intimacy"
"Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery."
"Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance."