Each episode of Esther Perel’s riveting new podcast, “Where Should We Begin?,” is a recording of a real, unscripted consultation session with a real couple.PHOTOGRAPH BY DANNY GHITIS / NYT / REDUXLast Monday, Melania Trump was caught on camera flicking away her husband’s small hand as it reached for hers on the Tel Aviv tarmac. The swat seen round the world sent the Internet into a fit of speculation about the state of the First Union: Was it merely the residue of a marital squabble on Air Force One during the President’s first official trip abroad, or was it another piece of evidence in support of the #FreeMelania theory, a clue, like Mrs. Trump’s fallen face on Inauguration Day, that she would gladly give up her role as First Lady to resume a quiet life eating diamonds for breakfast and promoting her QVC line? On Tuesday, after Melania appeared again to reject the President, this time on the tarmac in Rome with a slick “down low, too slow” move, Pete Souza, President Obama’s official photographer, posted a photo to his Instagram account of Barack and Michelle tenderly holding hands in Selma, Alabama, a gesture that needed no interpretation.
The difference between the Obamas’ obvious intimacy and mutual respect and whatever is going on with the Trumps is enough to make any American despair about the state of modern marriage, along with the state of everything else. Fortunately, there is hope: “Where Should We Begin?,” a new podcast produced by Audible and hosted by Esther Perel, couples therapist extraordinaire. Since 2006, when she published her first book, “Mating in Captivity,” an investigation into the fraught topic of married sex, Perel has travelled the globe speaking about couples’ intimacy, or their lack of it. Her ted Talk “Rethinking Infidelity” has been watched more than 7.5 million times; another, on “the secret to desire in a long-term relationship,” is nearing ten million views. This following extends far beyond the ranks of the long-coupled. A source at a recent bachelor party in Brooklyn reported that the groom-to-be declared himself an avid fan.
Perel is small and blond, with an elfin face, intense, peppy charisma, and a Francophone accent that serves to bolster her psychoanalytic and erotic authority. She grew up in Belgium, got her master’s in psychology in Israel, and speaks nine languages. On the ted stage, she introduces her topics with provocative questions—“Why does good sex so often fade, even for couples who continue to love each other as much as ever?”—and dispenses advice that is surprisingly counterintuitive yet reassuringly practicable. To rekindle desire, stop counting on the magic of spontaneity, a surprise ravishing by the washing machine: “committed sex is premeditated sex.” Betrayal may spell the painful end of a chapter in a relationship, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole thing is done: “Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create a second one together?” (Her forthcoming book, “The State of Affairs,” expands on this theme.)
“Where Should We Begin?” is as raw as Perel’s stage appearances are polished. Each episode consists of a recording of a real, unscripted consultation session that she conducted with a real couple in her psychoanalytic practice in New York, edited down from three hours to forty-five minutes. Episodes are released on Fridays; four are already available on Audible. In the first, a Muslim-American man and his Russian Orthodox wife are dealing with the fallout of his cheating, which has revealed a greater rift in their mutual understanding. The lesbian couple in the second is suffering from an imbalance of affection; one partner feels neglected by the other, who focusses all her energy on their two small children. The third episode’s couple, a young man and woman, met in college, where they were both members of a Christian purity movement, and waited until marriage to have sex. At first, the wife thought that she was frigid, but she has since realized that she does want sex—badly—just not with her nice, passive husband.
Each of these problems—cheating, children, sexual compatibility—is familiar on its own. What is different, on “Where Should We Begin?,” is the form in which they are addressed. The closest analogue to Perel’s show would be an advice column such as Ask Dr. Ruth, or a call-in show such as Dan Savage’s podcast “Savage Love,” which has set the standard for frank public discussion of sex and romantic relationships of every kind imaginable in twenty-first-century America. But those discussions are, by design, one-sided. A person seeks help with a problem and gets advice based on what she reports. Is she being accurate, honest, fair? It’s up to the advice-giver to judge, and often the supplicant seeking validation will instead be prescribed a dose of cold, hard real talk. Consider a different perspective, the advice-giver admonishes. Think about how you may be in the wrong. On Perel’s podcast, that different perspective is sitting in the next chair, waiting for his turn to speak. The show’s drama lies not so much in the details of each couple’s situation as in their struggle to communicate about it, to get their two “I’s” to equal a “we.”
Perel is a master at what she does. She is preternaturally incisive and humane, alert to the sorts of ingrained fears and long-standing insecurities that clog communication. She guides and prods as she interprets, occasionally butting in with a joke or some good-humored chastisement, and, while she lets her patients know when she thinks they’re onto something, she also tells them when they’re way off base. “You have to be able to say, There is another adult down there, and she’s not a total nincompoop,” Perel tells the neglectful partner, in the second episode, when she confesses that she is so consumed with her children because she doesn’t trust her spouse to properly care for them. Meanwhile, the neglected partner worries that they are not having enough sex. “There is nothing that stands in the way more to a woman’s desire than a sense of caretaking,” Perel tells her. “If I have to think about everybody else, I cannot think about me.” In other words, ease off, but also help out. You’re right, but you’re wrong, too. Welcome to life as a couple.
The show has moments of lightness, and of unexpected humor. At the start of her session with the Christian couple, Perel asks if they would consider using a blindfold while they’re in her office, or going by different names. She wants to try to get them to change how they see each other, to shake them out of their habits. Sure, the wife says. She loves the idea of the blindfold. Sure, the husband says. His real name is Scott, but he already has an alter ego: Jean-Claude, a character he invented for his wife’s pleasure, who is as suave as Scott is awkward, and as sexually confident as Scott is insecure. “That is fantastic!” Perel cries. For much of the session, Scott inhabits Jean-Claude, speaking in charming, American-accented French as Perel serves as translator; at one point, she serenades them with an Edith Piaf song. There is hope for this couple, the listener feels. The road to understanding and satisfaction will be steep, but Perel has shown them how to take the first step and keep walking.
Things are less promising for the couple confronting cheating. The transgression itself is banal, but the sense of mutual abandonment and pain is profound. The angry wife protects herself with a bitter pose of resigned indifference; she has accepted that the relationship will never be the same, she says, that all men are betrayers, even as her husband tries to coax her into talking things over. Perel diagnoses them as “splitting the ambivalence”: one takes the positive position, the other the negative, until the suppressed pain finally boils over. The husband tells his wife that sleeping with her was like having sex with a corpse. “Come in five minutes then leave me—that is my sex life!” the woman retorts. They are in a deadlock, seething and hurt. “It’s very rare that I make blanket statements like this: your communication is terrible,” Perel says. She suggests that they create a private e-mail address that they will use only for one another, to begin to learn how to speak to each other again.
It’s riveting to get a look into this most private aspect of a couple’s life, one that is secret even to them. It’s also stressful as all hell. We are listening as people make discoveries about the partners they have known for years, and about themselves, too. Some bristle and lash out; others lay their souls bare. In the show’s fourth episode, a couple married for forty years confronts the husband’s serial cheating, which the wife has only recently discovered. Both partners feel that their marriage has been good, full of love and support, and that they still want to preserve it. But the past has been blasted away, revealed to be a bewildering lie. At moments like this, “Where Should We Begin?” can be almost excruciatingly intimate. What does Perel hope that listeners will get from hearing other couples struggle through their disappointments and pain?
“Truth,” she told me when I spoke to her recently, by phone. “People are hungry for truth in every sector of life. It’s the antidote, or the antithesis may be better, to the jolly faces that are promenading on social media.” Nobody ever knows what goes on in the life of another couple, she said, but, by listening to them, “you very quickly realize that you are standing in front of the mirror, and that the people that you are listening to are going to give you the words and the language for the conversations you want to have.”
Perel sees her show as a public service for a group of people badly in need of support. “The couple today is treated as the central unit of the family. And the only reason the family survives is if the couple is remotely content. Families are not held together by kids, by female oppression, by economic dependence, by legalities that prevent divorce,” she said. “And never has this one unit of two had to fill so many expectations. Because, today, we have to give one person what an entire village used to provide”—financial and emotional support, companionship, entertainment, friendship, familiarity, mystery, love, sex, the works.
Perel has worked as a couples therapist for thirty-three years. In that time, the makeup of couples and families has changed drastically—the series includes sessions with gay, lesbian, trans, and polyamorous couples—but the basic tenets of her trade have stayed the same. People still yearn for love and intimacy; they want to be desired just as much as they fear rejection. But the technological age has also changed the life of the couple, as it has changed life of every kind. The “send” button is a fickle thing. Recriminations fly back and forth by e-mail; a spouse suspected of straying can be put on trial by inbox. “It’s not like they find a little bit of lipstick on a collar or a receipt in a pocket. They find the digital archive of a relationship,” Perel said. People go to bed with their screens, in all senses of the phrase. “The last thing they stroke is their phone. The first thing they stroke is their phone.”
By now, we know the great promise of digital technology—that if only everything can be said, and every thought expressed, people will “connect” with one another on a deeper, more empathetic level than ever before—to be false. Less texting, more talking: that is the promise of Perel’s profession, and of her show. The conversations may not lead to any lasting solutions; we aren’t allowed to stick around long enough to know. But in our age of serialized, bingeable entertainment, with twist following twist in a bid to hold our waning attention spans, there’s something refreshingly bold and optimistic about a show made up only of beginnings. “There is no solution for any of them,” Perel told me, of the couples at the end of each session. “This is an American ordeal, the need to have everything resolved. I don’t have that pressure.” Still, it’s remarkable how much of substance people can say when it counts the most. Everybody wants to be heard. Perel’s show is a reminder of how good it is to listen.
SOURCE:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/esther-perel-lets-us-listen-in-on-couples-secrets?mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20(173)&CNDID=24223821&spMailingID=11154930&spUserID=MTMzMTgyMzI3OTY0S0&spJobID=1162689901&spReportId=MTE2MjY4OTkwMQS2(accessed 2.6.17)
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