But we know that if you want to bring excitement into a relationship, you need new experiences
ESTHER PEREL: You know how many times I say to people, tell me something. The person that is here in this other relationship, is that the one who comes home? I mean, the one that your partner-boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, is dealing with is not nearly as charming and as attentive. When you prepare your suitcase and you fly and you choose your carefully chosen clothes and you prepare yourself, you don’t bring work with you. But when you go home, you’re on your phone the whole time, you free Senior Sites singles dating site bring the leftovers, you’re not nearly that attentive, you’re way less is charming, your humor is gone, and then you tell me that your wife is boring or your husband is boring? And you? Who are you here versus who are you there? Not who are they, who are you? So that’s the first thing. It’s like what happened to you that you let this thing seep out of you, and what makes it difficult for you to bring this back into your own relationship?
ESTHER PEREL: Magical reasons why people neglect themselves in some way. Why is it that there you can be such a free woman, and here is this boyfriend of yours who think you hate sex, you have no interest, you are utterly frozen, and this one is the same woman. What happened? That’s the bigger lie. The bigger lie is not only that you’re having a lover. The bigger lie is that your husband, your boyfriend has no idea what’s the truth about you. Why? And then different stories. Sometimes it’s stories from childhood. “I have no idea how to bring that part of me in the context of family because family was the place where sexuality was the most dangerous so I had never known how to experience pleasure at home. Home was the place where I’m made sure to be safe. Pleasure, I took somewhere else.” Then you start to see the way that people have carved out and compartmentalized themselves and the reasons behind it. Now is real therapy work, that’s the difference. That’s when you start to really try to understand why can’t you integrate the different parts of you?
LEWIS HOWES: Even if we love our partner, sometimes you’re just like, I love my partner but I feel like I’m missing these other things
LEWIS HOWES: Is it kind of like the idea of always dating in your relationship, it’s like always trying to be your charming self and not forgetting it? How you got into the relationship, don’t forget that, is that kind of the concept or-
ESTHER PEREL: I don’t know if it’s always dating, but for sure, the couples that are erotic couples are couples who maintain a level of attention on each other. They don’t take each other for granted. They flirt, they ask physical, they continue to play with each other. They create desire. I mean, it doesn’t just stay. It is an amazing thing to see how attentive people are to their creative projects, to their artwork, to their businesses. Often rather neglectful, even a date night. It’s nice, but what do you bring to the date night?
ESTHER PEREL: Do you do something? Look, we know that if you do familiar activities with your partner, it’s very nice and it creates a real sense of comfort to go back into repeatings that you enjoy. You need to have this relationship be one in which you take yourself out of your comfort zone, in which you discover something, in which you explore travelling, but it doesn’t have to be just travelling by going abroad. It’s travelling, it’s taking yourself to new places, to new experiences with each other, to new threshold. All the research backs that up. It also builds testosterone for that matter. Novelty breeds testosterone. That’s the work of Helen Fisher.