"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."
"The whole notion of one person being enough for everything gets instantly challenged when you start to talk with somebody about wanting more or of wanting something else. They take it personally, feel like a failure or feel that they lack something, so you don't talk about it because you don't want to hurt, offend, or scare the other person. You also don't want to be rejected or have them leave you, whatever the reason."
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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."