TED Radio Hour - Listen Again — Esther Perel: Building Resilient Relationships

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

Original broadcast date: September 11, 2020. How do we build more trusting and empathetic relationships, even during a crisis? This hour, therapist Esther Perel shares ideas on creating lasting bonds in romance, family, and at work. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Manus here with Valentine's Day this week, maybe you've got love on the brain. And whether you're single, dating, married, divorced, or otherwise, we all have people in our lives who matter to us. But those relationships, they require work. A lot of work. And so today, we're spending the hour with therapist Esther Perel to explore how we can all create stronger bonds with partners, friends, family members, even coworkers. This episode is called Building Resilient Relationships and it originally aired in September. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big.

Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you.

I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Minouche Zamoroti. And today on the show, building resilient relationships with Esther Perel. People want to feel alive in their relationships.

And they wanted their friendships. They wanted their friendships. work they wanted in their romantic relationships. It's essential. Esther is a couples and family therapist, an author, a speaker. And the host of the podcast, where should we begin and how is work? Over the past four decades, Esther has become one of the foremost experts on relationships. And with all the stress on families and partners and coworkers right now, we thought Esther was exactly the right person to talk to.

If I can help people with their relationships, hopefully I also can change their lives. She investigates big questions, like what are the expectations in a relationship? How do people create trust? How do they deal with conflict? How do they collaborate or compete? How do they build intimacy? How do they communicate with each other? All of these things.

And especially right now, relationships are. are being tested in all kinds of new ways. That prolonged uncertainty that we are experiencing is accompanied with a sense of grief and loss, not because we lose people only, but because we have lost the world that we knew. Crisis can push people apart, but it can also bring them together. That's how Esther's parents found each other. I grew up in Antwerp, in Belgium, in a community that was all... Jewish Holocaust survivors.

My parents came from Poland to Belgium. They both were the sole survivors of their entire family. They both spent years in concentration camps and then were five years illegal refugees in Belgium as well, before I am born. And my parents would never have married if it wasn't for the war. My mother came from an educated, aristocratic, Hasidic family. My father was basically illiterate.

They did not belong to the same worlds. My parents are circumstantial marriages like many post-war marriages. I've lost everything. You've lost everything. I'm alone. You're alone. Let's get married. But my dad adored my mother.

He worshipped her. He admired her. and she loved being admired. And so it worked very well. But their view was you need to want to stay together and you need to make compromises. I mean, as you said, it sounds like a lot of survivors had real trauma in common.

That's what brought them together. But did it also keep those relationships going to? A lot of survivors after they were and after they had kind of ended the initial stage of rebuilding and locating themselves and creating a new life and having children right away to prove that they're still human would look at each other and say we have nothing in common.

What am I doing here? But they would never divorce again because they couldn't bear the loss one more time. The luck I had is that when my parents would look at each other, they actually shared a tremendous amount, they loved life, they had a joie de vivre, and they rejoiced in the things that the other one liked to do and went to do for themselves.

Esther's parents transformed their trauma into a partnership that celebrated life. Together, they became even more resilient. And right now, many of us are looking at our lives and wondering, will this time destroy or strengthen our relationships? So today on the show, we're spending the hour with Esther Perel and her ideas about how we can all build long-lasting relationships, in romance, our families, and even at work. So Esther, you've been a therapist for decades now.

But back in 1986, that is when you actually shifted your whole focus to work with couples. Why did you decide to do that? Like, what was going on that you felt couples should be the thing you work on? Yes, yes. Couples therapy became a field that flourished because the meaning of the couple inside the family really transformed. When marriage was a no-exit enterprise, then it didn't really matter if the couple did that well or not. I mean, it mattered a great deal, but it didn't matter for the survival of the family. People stayed together miserable if they had to. Once people could leave

the expectations and the demands from their intimate relationships completely changed, and I found that transition really fascinating. I also found couples therapy. an endlessly fascinating practice and something that would take years to become good at and a science that was proliferating at the same time. And so I realized that it was an energy in a room with a couple. You could actually see the change happening in front of you if you help people to connect or to open up or to be vulnerable with each other or to speak true to each other or to apologize to each other.

I thought, this is a full human theater. It's the best theater in the town. And I became very, very excited about doing couples' work. And then how that moved to sexuality was same thing. I mean, it's also because the meaning of sexuality, the expectations around our sexual lives, the shift from, you know, women's rights to women's pleasure, the democratization of contraception, of course. All these things began to change the meaning of sex in relation.

You know, sexual satisfaction became linked with marital happiness. So your first TED Talk was actually about this very topic, arguing that relationships and sex are not separate things. And in fact, sex is a key factor when it comes to building a resilient partnership. And so let's turn to your 2013 TED Talk, which is called the secret to desire in a long-term relationship. So why does good sex? so often fade even for couples who continue to love each other as much as ever. And why does good intimacy not guarantee good sex contrary to popular belief? Or the next question would be can we want what we already have?

That's the million dollar question, right? And why is the forbidden so erotic? What is it about transgression that makes desire so potent? And why does sex make babies and babies spell erotic disaster in couples? It's kind of the fatal erotic blow, isn't it? And when you love, how does it feel? And when you desire, how is it different? These are some of the questions that are at the center of my exploration

on the nature of erotic desire and its concomitant dilemmas in modern love. So I travel the globe and what I'm noticing is that everywhere where romanticism has entered, there seems to be a crisis of desire. A crisis of desire as in owning the wanting. Desire as an expression of our individuality, of our free choice, of our preferences, of our identity, desire that has become a central concept as part of modern love and individualistic societies. Oh, my goodness.

Listening to that, Esther, reminds me of a conversation I had with a colleague a few years ago. And she told me that she and her husband were splitting. like, oh, I had no idea that you guys were unhappy. And she said, oh, we're not unhappy. I think we just could be each happier. And I was like, oh, oh, you're not leaving because they had a perfectly fine marriage, but they were kind of wanted to know what else was out there. Is that what you're referring to as this crisis of desire? I would say that when I hear the statement of your friend, what stands out for me is that for most of history, marriage was one time for life. Then as we got the possibility of leaving and divorce became legalized, often people left when they were really miserable.

And today, we don't live because we are unhappy necessarily, but we also live because we think we could be happier. And that is how consumerism has entered modern marriage. When I think about the crisis of desire, I think about it slightly differently. What attracted me to the subject of sexuality, after working for almost 20 years in the cultural arena, I just felt like I'm ready to explore something new. And I stumbled upon sexuality. It was absolutely not planned. And I stumbled about it actually around the Clinton.

scandal. Because what interested me was how sexuality in every society, in every culture, becomes the place where the most archaic, traditional, rooted aspects of that culture are lodged, or on the other end where the most progressive, radical, transformative changes take place. It is a window into a society through its beliefs, its attitudes, its behavior, its research, or lack thereof, like here, around sexual. And then I began to notice one of the big changes in relationships, marriage or committed relationships, is that for most of history, sexuality was primarily a production enterprise. You wanted eight children so that they could work the land. And some of them were not surviving, so you needed many of them.

And they were an economic asset. And it was a woman's marital duty. And nobody really asked if you liked it, if you wanted it, if it felt good, you basically did it. And it was the doing of it that mattered. And that changed then to a next model, which was belonging and romance inside marriage. And marriage literally shifted from an economic enterprise to an affectionate, romantic enterprise. And then we went from the service economy in marriage to the identity economy in marriage, which is that you're going to help me become the best version of myself.

So now, if you only have a few children, you need a motivation, a reason, to stay sexually involved with the partner for years on end. And that's where desire becomes part of it. It's no longer what I should do, so it becomes what I want to do. And because it was part of premarital sex, which is quite common in Western world before, desire has become the central organizing principle of modern sexuality, more than arousal, more than reproduction, more than anything. That's a lot of pleasure on a relationship, Esther. I mean...

Since the 60s, people can do it when they want. They have contraception in hand. So here is a generation with contraception in hand, premarital sex as a norm, the possibility of experiencing with each other what they want, and so often they don't feel like it. And they don't know why. And that's when studying desire in long-term relationship

became really like, what's happening? Why don't they want to know that they can? In just a minute, we'll hear what Esther discovered when she investigated long-term intimacy and more on building resilient relationships, even when infidelity is involved. I'm Manus Shumeroody, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zamoroti. And today on the show, building resilient relationships with therapist Esther Perel. And before the break, Esther was a while.

explaining how the expectations in modern marriage have changed. So we come to one person and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide. Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty. Give me familiarity. Give me predictability. Give me surprise. And we think it's a given and toys and lingerie are going to save us. that. So now we get to the existential reality of this story, right? Because I think in some way, the crisis of desire is often a crisis of the imagination. When I say that we cannot have one person give us what wants an entire village used to provide. What I'm saying is that there is a

kind of individualization in romantic love that I think is problematic. Look, at this moment, I'm not just even meeting a partner. We are meeting a soulmate. A soulmate used to be God, you know. But at this moment, people are talking about ecstasy, transcendence, meaning, wholeness, you know, things that we used to look for in the realm of the divine that have now been transcended into romantic love. It was meant to be.

It's almost a divine intervention. It fell from the heavens in front of me. And, you know, I think that the problem is with that model of one person for everything. What I will say is that people need community and they need other friends, they need other people to talk to, they need other people to share activities that their partner isn't interested in, to ask one person to do all of that, to give me belonging, to give me meaning, to give me community, to give me transcendence, to give me and then all the other stuff of everyday life, succession, children, family, life, money, etc.

That is... And clean out the dishwasher, Esther. Right. It's like, that is... And everybody knows it. And I think Eli Finkel says it very nicely in his book. It's like, you know, the people who are able to get on the top of Mount Olympus have a fantastic view and their relationships are often much better than the relationships in history.

But not everybody can climb to the top of Mount Olympus. climb to the top of Mount Olympus. And so it makes all the other people feel like there's something wrong with them because they don't have this kind of bliss that they talk. They have normal everyday marital warfare rather than marital bliss. Yeah. And I think that warfare can really be about anything, right? It can be work or family obligations, money, and infidelity, which is actually what your second TED talk was about, the one you gave in 2015 called Rethinking. infidelity. Why do we cheat? And why do happy people cheat? And is an affair always the end of a relationship. For the past 10 years, I have traveled the globe and worked extensively with hundreds

of couples who have been shattered by infidelity. There is one simple act of transgression that can rob a couple, from their relationship, their happiness, and their very identity, an affair. And yet, this extremely common act is so poorly understood. Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so too the taboo against it. In fact, infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy, so much so that This is the only commandment that is repeated twice in the Bible. One's for doing it and once just for thinking about it. So how do we reconcile what is universally forbidden yet universally practiced?

Because I find a soulmate. When you cheat on me, it hurts more than it has ever hurt in history. I come today with the expectation that it isn't meant to be. It's not meant to happen. I didn't wait till I'm 34, you know, after I've met so many other people. And I found the one. How can the one do that to me? When people did not marry, the one infidelity was deeply painful. When people marry their soulmate, infidelity is traumatic. And it's a shattering of their identity and their entire world. And in that sense, it has become one of the more ultimate betrayals in relationships.

People can do a lot of things in relationships and nobody says instantly, get out, leave, throw the dog on the curb, you know, get out. And yet there are many, many other painful relational betrayals in couples. But this one today has become the queen of betrayals because of. because love in its idealization is not meant to include this kind of rupture anymore. But you actually point out in your talk that for some of the couples who come to see you, infidelity doesn't necessarily mean the end of their relationship. The fact is the majority of couples who have experienced affairs stay together.

But some of them will merely survive and others will actually be able to. turn a crisis into an opportunity. They'll be able to turn this into a generative experience. And I'm actually thinking even more so for the deceived partner, who will often say, you think I didn't want more, but I'm not the one who did it. But now that the affair is exposed, they too get to claim more,

and they no longer have to uphold the status quo that may not have been working for them that well either. I've noticed that a lot of couples in the immediate aftermath of an affair because of this new disorder that may actually lead to a new order will have depths of conversations with honesty and openness that they haven't had in decades. And partners who were sexually indifferent find themselves suddenly so lustful evorations they don't know where it's coming from. Something about the fear of loss will rekindle desire and make way for an entirely new kind of truth. Yeah, what are you thinking when you hear

that because you now have the benefit of 2020 hindsight. And do you think that society is changing the way, I guess, are people being more empathetic and kinder and less, you know, making moral judgments about people? And I suppose that that depends on what generation you're from. I think when I listen to it, first of all, I haven't heard it in quite a few years. And what stands out for me, first of all, is the silence in the room. I remember the silence in the room. People were transfixed. I felt slowly like I am talking the taboo.

And then I felt, you know, and I am in the United States. And I knew this has never been said from a TED stage, any of this. And I just, at one point I was there. I was swimming and I had to continue swimming and walk that fine line where I really wanted people on all sides of the experience to feel like I had addressed them with respect and dignity. And that fine line was so, so important for me. I've worked for 35 years as a clinician with couples. I've seen hundreds of people around this story. And I also understand that the people who come to me were looking for. for a certain approach that was not present enough. The other view is out there and is valid for some people,

many people, it is really the view that they're looking for. But there were a lot of people that were looking for some other way. They actually knew that they were not in bad relationships. They didn't really want to separate. They wanted to find a way out of this that wasn't mired in shame and in secrecy and in silence. And that actually said to them, This is not the end of your relationship per se.

And I was very pleased and moved that I could offer an alternative perspective to those who are looking for it. There is no one size fits all. So I think this is a great moment to turn to another side of your work, which is podcasting. You let listeners hear a therapy session between you and real couples on your podcast, which is called Where Should We Begin? So I guess first of all, why a podcast? So after the TED talk, I said to myself, these are things that I've often spoken about, but only at clinical conferences and only in professional environments.

This was my first time I was putting this out to the general audience. And I thought, this is where it belongs. There's so few people that can make it to my office. or any therapist's office, this is actually a conversation that needs to take place in the public space. And I want to shape, influence, engage with the conversation on a global level about relationships today. Relationships are undergoing massive transformation on all levels, but especially couples. I've gone to an extreme makeover. There is no other relationship that has gone through so much change.

And most couples have absolutely no idea what's happening in the neighbor's house, like you and your friend. You're not living in the village where everybody hears what's going on next door. So your friend is divorcing and you think, oh, I thought everything was fine. And I thought this office, I will preserve it. I will continue to do clinical work forever as much as I can. But what happens here needs to be democratized. It needs to be made available and for free and all over the world

and to people who have no idea about this and taking it out of the stigma and the shame was a piece of it but it really was more it will make it accessible. These are the conversations that people have at dinner table or when they sit with a friend and I would like to let people know what happens to you is happening to other people too. A, you're not alone.

B, when you listen deeply to the experience, of others, you actually see yourself in your own mirror. So even if this is not your personal situation, in every episode you will find something that actually speaks to you. And see, as you hear other people have those difficult conversations, maybe you'll have the courage to start your own and you'll get the vocabulary that you have needed. Okay, so we have a clip from where should we begin? This is an episode called The Chronic Philanderer from the Most

recent season. And in this episode, you talked to a couple who is dealing with the husband's infidelity. For years, he's been talking to strangers in online chat rooms. And now he's having an affair with an old friend from high school, actually. So let's listen to a clip. It makes me feel diminished. Like, it makes me feel replaceable. It makes me feel replaceable. Knowing, you know, one thing he would say to me at the beginning is that if I had met this woman, Before I met you, this is someone I could have seen myself live my life with. I was so shocked. I thought I was finally giving him the family that he needed to complete himself.

I know. I was giving him the stability. I was trying to be, you know, loving and calm and compassionate and a good mother. And I was trying to do all these things. I thought it was like really giving you everything that you wanted. They were. And it's like, but that's where it was. Did you hear?

You were. I was, but it wasn't enough. But that may not be because you're not enough. That's the catch here, is to not translate this as if I was more, he wouldn't do this. Instead of, I was plenty. I know. And whatever he did is not. not a response to you.

You have got to know that. I know. Okay? No matter how much you've given him, there's a piece of it he's going to have to do on his own. I know. Or not. Or not.

Or not. Can I just say something to qualify the comment that this was someone I could live or see myself with a life with? I think in some ways, as warped as it may sound, I felt that was, it's not a compliment to you, but it's the idea that this wasn't just a flusy. This was someone of substance. The idea was, it was an experience. May I stop you?

Yeah. I think the only or the most imprinting at this moment, if you will say something to your wife, has to be about acknowledging how a thing it was to say and how hurtful it was. And not to justify yourself. Seriously.

I really wasn't trying to hurt her. I don't care if you were trying. But when we do, you own it. Yeah. Okay. I'm sorry. I am.

Yeah. And what makes it worse is you keep justifying it. when sometimes it's just someone just wants to hear I'm sorry and that was wrong. I mean, this clip, I don't know how other people feel about it. But for me, I am torn like on the one hand, it feels very voyeuristic. And on the other hand, I feel very judgmental. I'm like, come on, man, get your crap together.

And then I'm also really listening to how you handle him. And I'm thinking like, well, what can I learn from how Esther is talking to this guy? Interestingly, there's only, this is the only episode about infidelity in the whole season. But what people will have said and will say about this episode is many people want to strangle him. And I think that, you know, that first of all, that is not my job. My job is to hold him responsible, accountable. hopefully have some ability to relate to another person's feeling and to the effect of his behaviors on his loved ones.

And interestingly, when you reach the end of this session and you hear his challenges around his feelings about masculinity, about the fact that he could not have a genetic connection to his children, about the way that he became the way he is not out of nothing. he becomes humanized. You may not like him, but you begin to understand him. And that is the role of the therapist.

The wife has to decide what she wants to do. And nobody lives with the consequences of her decisions but her. So it's very easy to tell people, do this, do that. We are not in their seat. We help people gain clarity. We help people there to do the things that they are afraid to do if that's what they say they want to do. But we also understand that this is a couple that has two decades together, almost, that they have a rich life that they actually often get along quite well.

And that for a couple like that, COVID may have actually been very good news. Confinement, not COVID. Right. Coming up, we'll hear more from Esther on how she helps people navigate relationships in another area of life at work. On the show today, building resilient relationships with Esther Perel. I'm Anoush Zamorodi, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

I'm Anoush Zamorodi, and today on the show, therapist Esther Perel, shares ideas on how we can all strengthen our relationships, whether that's in the context of dating, marriage, family, and more recently, at work. When people go to work, you interview them about their official resume. What schools did they go to? What experience at work have they had? And nobody is asking you about your unofficial resume.

And your unofficial resume is your relationship history. And that relationship history does not. stop at a door when you go into the office. It travels with you and it is going to influence how you work with your colleagues or with your father or with your co-founder, etc. A few years ago, nobody would invite me to come to talk about relationships in the corporate or in the business context. Why? You were too risque? No, no, relationships was a soft skill. Relationship was soft skill. It wasn't part of the bottom line. And soft skills were often considered feminine skills and feminine skills were often idealized in principle and disregarded in reality.

And as we moved in the workplace from production to service to identity economy, where people now expect from work, the same as they expect from their romantic relationships, those are the two places where people look for meaning, community, belonging, continuity, all of those things. Now suddenly relationships become the new bottom line. because no amount of free food or money compensation benefits is going to compensate for a poisonous relationship. And then I began to think, you know, I would love to go and show how these relational dynamics

that I have been exploring, they don't just take place with your partner, your romantic partner. They actually are part of your relational life. And it's because of all those reasons. that you started working on a new podcast, How's Work, right, where you record therapy sessions with co-workers or co-founders and help them navigate their relationships. And I want to play a clip from an episode that's called Not Many Men Work With Their Moms, where you have a session with a mother and a son who've been running a real estate firm together. And first, the mom ran the firm by herself 25 years before hiring her son when he was 22 years. old. And now, here they are. It's six years later. And the two of them are finding it hard to separate their relationship as mother and son and their relationship as business partners.

I'm 61 and I have a problem now. I don't know how I will go on and for how long I will go on. You have your whole life in front of you. I don't. And I'm here because I cannot find my reference to say anymore. It comes a moment when I want to say maybe there's something else for me. I don't know where I stand anymore. This is my problem. And maybe that's why I'm so nervous sometimes. You know, sometimes I'm at the office. I see that he's bad-tempered. I said, oh, maybe he's hungry. I'm going to the supermarket and the mama again. And I do like this. I don't know. He's strong his face. Where's the man? Where's the boy?

difficult wow some and also when I tell you don't tell the the the clients my mom is busy she will phone you back tell Mrs. will phone you back all those things you have to adapt very difficult but I have I have a question I have a question and I have a question to you do you still need me this I want to know Do you still need me? Honestly. The way it has been the last five, six years, it has been a learning curve. And I still learn every day from you.

But it's more of a way that I don't need you to hold my hand as much anymore. You can loosen it a little bit. Or I can let the hand go a little bit as well. For my years to come, it's more knowing that you have my back. more than you hold my hands. There will come a moment where I will not be there anymore. You will have to be alone. I'm thinking a lot about that.

That's good to know. Do you know it? Subconsciously, I do. Esther, listening to that conversation, I'm just so impressed that they are so open with each other. Do you find that the people who want to do these sessions with you are, they are ready to have the conversation, or is it hard work getting them to sort of get to where they need to go?

I would say the conversation is ready for them. They have no idea what they're going to do. I am very moved when I hear this passage myself. It's like, it's, it's the conversations that, you know, the majority of the world is family business. It's not corporations. And I know so many sons and fathers and sons and mothers or daughters and parents who would like to have a similar conversation. So, no, I don't think they come in because they're ready. They come in because they're stuck. They're coming in because they experience pain.

They come in because they don't see a way out. And they say maybe a session with Esther could be helpful. And this episode really is a good example of what you mentioned before, that as much as therapy is about exploring intimacy and relationships, it's very important to have context be part of the conversation. And of course, with this duo's conversation, the context is kind of messing with their heads. There's a mother's son relationship that suddenly doubles as a professional partnership. In other cases, I'm assuming you talk to people who go in business with a close friend. What are some of the main challenges you see when relationships function or they have to function in multiple contexts? So, look, a lot of co-founders these days are friends who meet in college.

And in the beginning, you know, there's another episode of two friends like that who started a company that became very successful, except they can't communicate with each other one bit. And one is literally on the way of kicking the other one out. And that is painful enough when it's between two people who work together, but when it's your friend. And when you feel like you were the one who in the previous incarnation, were the one who was protecting him, and you were doing much more of the work,

and you were kind of letting them, you know, roll behind you. And that you're not just going to lose your partner, but you're going to lose your friend and you're going to lose all the memories that were attached to this person that used to be so positive. I mean, how often do you sit at a dinner and you meet someone who starts to tell you

these horror stories of breakups, bad breakups. And like in romantic relationships, when people remarry, you want to know what is the story of their previous relationship and their divorce. Well, when you start a business with somebody, you want to know or even a relationship with someone you work with.

You want to know what was their relationship with the people who had that position before. And I ask everybody, how many of you in peer businesses have bad breakups? And to what extent do those breakups and in what way do these breakups influence the way you start to work with the next person? And even who you hire. Often we tend to hire the person whose strengths match the weaknesses of the one before you. I think work is a very rich ecology to explore the overt and the covert, the scene and the unseen relationship dynamics that people bring. We expect it more in our personal relationships,

but it happens no less at work. It makes me think also about how the pandemic has really changed, you know, for essential workers, they're still in the same context, obviously under an enormous strain for their family. And then there are the other people who are working from home on what it feels like thousands of Zoom calls where I know for me, you know, I'm in the middle of a meeting and I'll have my daughter plop down on my lap. And it can be very disorienting, I think, for people that you're in one context

and another context at the same time. So I would say, I don't think we are working from home. Manush, I think we are working with home. I am with my family, my children for some of us, my partner for some of us, my parents, my siblings, my roommates. I am inhabiting all the roles at the same time. I am the parent, the teacher, the lover, the friend, the child of the colleague, the boss, the CEO, you name it. And it's all happening often on the same chair in the kitchen. I do not leave.

You know, we are used to having a different attire and a different time and a different space for the multiple activities that we engage in. When we go to work, we get dressed a certain way, we go to exercise, we change clothes, we move, we go from one place to another. Our activities are demarcated and delineated in time and in space. And at this moment, it is pretty much all awash. I am homeschooling here. and there's no summer programs. I'm watching my children at the same time. I'm trying to have a meeting.

I am pretty much dressed from the midline up. So we have all these disembodied experiences. And people talk about exhaustion for a reason. Because even the phone is much better. You know, where we actually are in synchronized time and not in a delay constantly. And we're not trying to look at people with whom we actually never make eye contact.

So I think it's a very different reality. For some of us, we manage. We have a separate room. We can go. Some people even get dressed in the morning as if they were going to work and they try to really maintain the routines, the rituals and the boundaries, which are the three essential elements that create structure.

But for many of us, it is way more chaotic and draining. That's the reality at this moment of working, as we like to call it. from home or Zoom life. It's funny. You know, the other thing that I've been thinking about is you talked about how work has changed and how it's become more part of our identity and community and this the sense of belonging at work. It's not a job. It's who you are. And I wonder, you know, are you hearing from, I'll give an example, like Airbnb, a company that, you know, recruited people based on identity.

You're part of the team, the free snacks, the parties. And then they had to let go of a high percentage of their workforce. And you think, well, wait, I thought we were a family at work. And now that's over. Yes. Work was not just what I do, but who I am. Yes. And when I lose my job, I lose a fundamental part of my identity.

I thought I mattered because a younger generation. has been raised with a deep sense that they are important and that they matter, and I can, I'm totally dispensable. And nobody actually really feels responsible for making sure that I will have something to eat. I think what a pandemic does for work and for personal is it rearranges your priorities. It makes, you know, a pandemic is an accelerator. Every disaster is an accelerator of relationships. It's an accelerator because, it brings mortality to the forefront or loss, loss of job as well. And at that moment, you basically say, what am I waiting for?

I'm going to go do what's really important. So I actually think that there's going to be a burst of creativity as well, where people are going to say, if I can't do the traditional route, and I went and I studied something and I prepared myself or I worked very hard and I hoped I would climb the ladders and all of that, if the promise of the traditional system doesn't hold, then I can go and try something completely different. There is a rearranging of priorities and a reach for the essence

that accompanies situations of disaster. And I think that's what we are seeing as well. You know, people are having much deeper conversations with their colleagues at work. People understand, you know, they see home. They've never seen where their colleagues live. They're in their living rooms. They're in their kitchens.

They're in their bedrooms. Who is with you? Who are you taking care of? Who's your salary meant to feed? You know, there is actually a level of depth that is resurfacing that is very beautiful, you know. So I think in the relational sense, I would say that a pandemic, a disaster, often will highlight the cracks. and it will also highlight the light that shines through the cracks. Is that the same thing for, you know, there are predictions that divorce rates will be, will rise?

Do you think that that's true too? Yes, because when you say, you know, what am I waiting for? It can mean life is short. Right. I don't want to wait. I want to be with you. Let's move in. Let's get together.

Let's have children. Let's, you know, let's do the things that we've been wanting to do. But it can also say life is short, I've waited long enough. And I'm out of here. And I just, I don't want to compromise. I don't want to accept things that the brevity of life doesn't allow me to accept anymore. And so I have to ask, therapist, how are you doing through all of this? I think I mirror what I describe in the world and often told of my parents.

because thinking about prolonged uncertainty and living with a deep sense of unknown and when is this going to end is what they would talk about. They talked about it, but also people who were living in hiding during World War II, who spent years, years in a ditch, in a closet, in a haystack, and you wonder how do people do it. And the spirit is so strong that they are actually there to tell us, at least some of them. And so I really began to listen to those stories. You know, what does it take to continue to wake up and to have hope and to give meaning to the hope and to give hope to the meaning, as Victor Franklin used to say? And what is it?

I mean, in my case, I think if I'm helpful, if I can do somebody, something for someone else, I feel less helpless. And then I have a reason to get a reason to. up. It's, it's ultimately, it's your relationships to other people. I still want to see them one more time. I want to hold them one more time. I, I don't want to let go of the meaningful relationships I have and the meaningful things I do. I think ultimately that's what gets everybody up. That's therapist, author, and speaker, Esther Perel, we are so grateful to her for spending the hour with us. Her podcasts are where should we begin and how's work. And you can hear her two TED TED Talks at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week with Esther Perel on

building resilient relationships. To see hundreds more TED talks, check out TED.com or the TED app. Our TED Radio production staff at NPR includes Jeff Rogers, Zana's Meshkinpur, Rachel Faulkner, Diba Motisham, James Delahoussi, J.C. Howard, Katie Bonteleone, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Christina Kala, and Matthew Cloutier. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feelein, and Michelle Quint. I'm Manish Zamorodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.