The Esther Perel Love Lexicon
Adapted from a conversation with the relationship therapist on the podcast "On Being with Krista Tippett"
Love As Practice
Erich Fromm, a long time ago, was actually quite a visionary. He wrote in the '50s.
But what he was very capable of seeing was that we think that love is easy and
that finding the right person is what is difficult; that it's the love object that
is complicated, but the experience itself, of loving — and of course he turned it on
its head; that love is a verb, that it's not a permanent state of enthusiasm, and
that it's an actual practice — and that that practice gets repeated all the
time
Play As Safe Risk
Play is when risk is fun. But you can't play when you are in a situation of
danger, anxiety, or contraction. So you have to feel safe in order to play; but
if you do not play, you won't experience the erotic.
Loneliness As Ambiguous Loss
I like the concept of ambiguous loss because I think that it's an actually a good description of the
kind of new form of loneliness that I think we are often describing.
To explain ambiguous loss is, for example, when a person is still physically present, but
psychologically gone, as if when they have Alzheimer's, for example.
Or if you have someone who disappeared, they are physically gone, but psychologically present.
In both cases, you cannot resolve the question of mourning and loss,
because you don't know, are they here, or are they not here?
When people describe to me being put on pause in a conversation or lying next to someone in
bed who is scrolling through their Instagram feeds and is physically
present but psychologically gone, or is having literally another life with their
phones, what they're describing is not the physical isolation of loneliness.
They're describing a loss of trust and social capital that they are
experiencing next to the very person with whom they should not be feeling alone.
That's ambiguous loss.
Passion As Phases
The idea is that passion is like the moon; it has intermittent eclipses. This notion that people will
live in a permanent state of passion — no, of course not. Nobody would go to work,
work for that matter.
Desire As Self Worth
Desire is to own the wanting — that's one way of looking at it.
And in order to own something, there needs to be a sovereign self that is free to
choose and, of course, feels worthy of wanting and feels worthy of receiving.
That's why desire is so intimately connected with the sense of self-worth.
Aliveness As Erotic Intelligence
Many of us, these days, are at least gonna have two or three marriages or committed
relationships in our lifetime. And some of us will do it with the same person.
And those people who do it with the same person — that is erotic intelligence
because they're able to reinvent themselves on location and to create a
newer relational arrangement with each other
and if you cannot do it with each other, you'll go do it somewhere else. But you
need to do it, because if not, you die. You need to change to continue to
stay alive. And it involves novelty, but novelty is not about new positions;
that's why people then end up thinking you're talking about sexual postiions — no.
Novelty is new experiences of yourself in the world and of your
partner in relationship to you, if you're talking about a partner. But if not,
it's new experiences of yourself in the world, and that involves taking risks and having an
active engagement with the unknown, as Rachel Botsman calls it.
And when people do it, there's a sense of purpose, there's a sense of aliveness,
there's a sense of joy, there's a sense of transmission, there's no age.
There is no age in the chronological sense, because you are in touch with life.
Intuition As Nonjudgemental Assessment
What is intuition? It is a nonjudgmental way to actually assess
another person that is not rational, but that is driven by the meaning that the
person has for us. And that form of knowledge is not as popular these days —
or, certainly not, in the West. And I think that it is a fundamental piece of
knowledge that people need to have in relationships, because when you don't have that,
then you're left just dealing with borders and consent and rules and
things like that, rather than the ability to play.
From the "On Being" episode "The Erotic is an Antidote to Death" with Esther Perel