How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships | Esther Perel - Huberman Lab  ## Metadata - Author: **Huberman Lab** - Full Title: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships | Esther Perel - Category: #podcasts ## Highlights - **Dual Needs in Relationships** - Romantic relationships satisfy dual needs: security and freedom, togetherness and separateness. - We seek identification and differentiation, creating a dialectic that challenges and expands us. Transcript: Esther Perel I think it is both, completely both. We meet an other in order to find ourselves, and we meet an other and want to be surprised by the self we haven't known. I think that all of us come into this world with a fundamental set of dual needs. We need security and we need freedom and adventure. And we need togetherness and we need separateness. So in the relationship, you come in order to create that identification, but also that differentiation. It's a dialectic all the time. But what's interesting is even if I choose you because you represent sometimes the parts of me that ([Time 0:08:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/39580055-8354-413f-803a-2ee941f5e1e9)) - **Relationship Redefinition** - Focus on redefining relationships to keep them alive, not just to prevent them from dying. - It involves changes in power dynamics, interdependence, erotic charge, and connection to the outside world. Transcript: Esther Perel It's about helping people to feel alive. And the redefinition of having the same relationship with the same person, it has to be alive, not just not dead. And if sometimes that alive means recreating a new, you know, going to a new person, a new country, a new city, a new social circle, a new profession, a new, a lot of things that we today Have access to, to change things that people did once. You know, when I ask an audience, if your grandparents grew up in the same neighborhood or in the same town and worked in the same company, I mean, most people raise their hands. And then I go down the generations. And then now it's like, how many, how many of you have had three jobs in the last five years? So this notion that we can create new things for ourselves is actually one of the greatest things that has happened in the realm of relationships. We can marry in our 60s for the first time. We can live in a treesome. There's a plasticity, if you want to use a word, to the world of relationship today that is extremely rich and expansive, but demands a set of skills to negotiate, to understand the uncertainty That comes from having to make so many decisions. At the time in the past, none of us made decisions about most of these things. They were handed down to us. ([Time 0:23:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d1a4e285-70d5-41ba-8b93-b87f6f6981b5)) - **Sexuality as a Window** - Sexuality is a window into society, relationships, and individuals, inviting deep listening. - Modern sexuality focuses on performance, but Esther Perel suggests viewing it as an experience and a place to explore. Transcript: Esther Perel So sexuality is a window into a society. Sexuality is also a window into a relationship and into a person that invites deep listening. One of the big challenges is that modern sexuality has been, I mean, traditional sexuality was identified with procreation. Modern sexuality is identified with performance and outcome. Sex is something you do. To which I say, let's drop the performance and outcome for a moment and let's think of it as an experience. So now you're going to start to see the choreography I draw. When I think of sexuality as an experience and I say sex isn't just something that you do, sex is a place you go. So my question to you is, where do you go in sex? Inside yourself and with another or others? Do you go to seek deep spiritual union, a deep intimate connection, transcendence? Do you go to a place for vulnerability, a place to surrender, a place to be taken care of, a place to be safely powerful, a place to be naughty, a place to have just plain fun, a place to abdicate Your responsibilities of good citizenship because sexual desire is quite politically incorrect. Where do you go in sex? What parts of yourself do you try to connect with? What is it that you're expressing there? Sexuality is a coded language for our deepest emotional needs. Our ([Time 1:22:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e206a1b8-f6a8-44c8-923c-5e8ebd2199c6))