How to Resolve Conflict in Relationships: A Conversation with Esther Perel

John Donvan
This is Open to Debate. I’m John Donvan. Hi everybody. And as most of you know, this program tends to focus on debatable topics that are usually of a quite weighty nature. Things like foreign policy and economics and cultural trends, and philosophical political disputes. But that said, we also have a soft spot for Valentine’s Day. One time we debated around the question, are dating apps killing romances? Another time it was, should we have sex with robots? Well, that one was maybe more about artificial intelligence than about romance, but you get the idea. So Valentine’s Day has come around again, and this time we’re approaching it from a different angle instead of a debate. I’m going to have a conversation with psychotherapist, Esther Perel, host of the podcast, where should we begin? Who has also made a name for herself globally really in offering thoughtful and thought provoking insight and guidance around relationships, especially of the one-on-one kind that have a sexual or erotic component involved.

She’s even taking her insights on tour this spring and fall. She’s in cities across the United States where you can enjoy an evening with Esther Perel. But what does that have to do with what we do? Debating one word argument. We present arguments, lovers have arguments. Open to Debate is about bringing people with opposing views into the same room, figuratively, at least, sometimes literally. And to explore their differences in a way that involves thoughtfulness and self-examination and mutual respect. And above all, listening, listening to one another. These are the essence of good argument. And even in our hyper divided times, especially in these hyper divided times, we believe that good argument can actually cool the temperature and help us recognize that people who disagree with us are also part of that us that we don’t have to hate each other just because we have opposing views.

And we know that you’re here listening because you get that Esther Perel who zooms in on the person to person level also makes the case for constructive conflict. In fact, she thinks it’s critical to successful relationships. She has a course called Turning Conflict into Connection. So we wanted to learn more about what she means by constructive conflict. And as the moderator of the debates that we do, I wanted to see what insight I could pick up for my role as the person in the middle when we have two sides going at each other. And so with that, Esther Perel, thank you so much for joining us at Open to Debate. Welcome to the program.

Esther Perel
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

John Donvan
So when you use the term turning conflict into connection, I think we’re going to end up talking a lot about that. So let’s lay out what it is you mean by that. And at a certain level it’s clear that you’re saying, let’s face conflict. Let’s not try to avoid it.

Esther Perel
So first of all, even in your introduction, the idea that the use of argument, not the use, the situation of being in an argument is not in and of itself negative and that actually being able to manage conflict is essential to a healthy relational system, social system, political system is what you’re saying. I couldn’t agree with it more. And part of what I do is I use the couple and the way it handles conflict to extrapolate to larger groups and to the society at large, primarily because the couple is a very interesting unit, right? It starts out the romantic couple, it starts out getting along. It starts out agreeing on a lot of things. It starts out as a collaborative cooperative system. And when it turns on itself in and it becomes a distressed relationship, it experiences negative conflict. It experiences conflict that is no longer generative, but that can be destructive and we can learn a ton from looking at what happens in couples, people who once had great empathy for each other, who now can’t hear each other at all.

And the principles from couples work are applicable to many other situations of conflict. And to do that, you need to understand one most important thing is that the form is more important than the content. How conflict plays out, how people shut down, how they polarize, how they use totalistic language, how they kitchen sink and put everything into one argument, how they basically denied the validity of any other person. All of that, these principles and a few more are actually applicable for groups and even for people who do international conflict resolution that I just experienced this week and I had my first conversation with a person who works with groups and a person who works internationally, and we literally could see once you understand what is conflict and how it plays out, it kind of opens your vista on multiple relational systems,

John Donvan
Which makes it sound like all of this is just built into human nature that are in a fractal kind of way. We can have these stresses as a one-on-one couple and in a much larger pullback, the camera group against group, nation against nation, culture against culture.

Esther Perel
There’s a lot of it. Yes, there’s a lot to that.

John Donvan
Let’s talk about some of the things that you talked about. Kitchen sinking. What do you mean by that?

Esther Perel
Kitchen sinking is when you and I are supposed to be discussing something, but in the course of that I start to bring back my entire memory bank every other situation, and I start to add everything else that I’m upset about and everything else that I don’t agree about with you and every other time that you aggrieved me. And basically I put all the dirty dishes in the sink at the same time, which means I can’t wash any. That’s it. You’re basically trying to score, but you’re not trying to resolve anything and you’re certainly not protecting the relationship. Turning conflict into connection is basically being able to argue while preserving the relationship, and that means maintaining a level of enlightened self-interest.

John Donvan
What do you mean by that?

Esther Perel
It means that you don’t say the things that you want to say just because they make you feel better or they get it off your chest. You think what will this do to the relationship? What will this do to our history, to our connection, to what we are meant to do, to together? You have a higher purpose than just you. A relationship is the space in between the two people. It’s not the two people.

John Donvan
In the series of conversations that we’ve had on this program, one of my favorites was with a writer named Monica Guzman who has published a book called, I Never Thought of it that way.
And she makes the argument that one sort of antidote to our ability to demonize one another and to characterize one another as enemies is curiosity that she uses the example of stress she had with her parents where she’s, she’s of the left and her parents were people who voted for Donald Trump and she found this sort of not something that she found easy to accept until she sat down with them and explored with them their reasons. And she found that actually revealed that in significant ways they still shared a lot of values and that their non overlap area was quite small. Does your work find the same thing?

Esther Perel
Absolutely. So in a distressed relationship, you tend to flatten the other person. You make them one dimensional, so they voted X and that means that this is why they are Y. And you don’t look at the multiple connections between how they voted, what they believe in, what’s important to them, what has happened in their life, et cetera. In a distressed relationship, you tend to think that if you act meanly or not nice or whatever, you have circumstances. I’m in a bad mood, it means that there was a lot of traffic, something, put this me in this bad mood. But if you are in a bad mood, if you are not nice, if you are impolite, if you are not civil, it’s because that’s your character. So curiosity as you describe is the dissolver of all these rigidities.

John Donvan
Your goal I think is reconciliation or is it? I’ll ask you.

Esther Perel
No, actually it’s not. No. I think that the difference between constructive and destructive conflict and the opposite of conflict isn’t empathy, it’s differentiation. It’s actually the ability to live with differences, with multiplicities, with plural truths. It’s what we see in the natural world that we as human beings struggle with. So to differentiate is my ability to hold on to my own ideas, beliefs, practices, while being able to stay connected with you.

John Donvan
Yeah, so that’s very interesting to me because in our debate program, by definition, the debaters are in a somewhat competitive situation where they’re not going to yield to the other side. Sometimes that happens a little bit at the margins, but for the most part they come away with each side having stated its positions, explored the other side and they walk away not in for the most part agreeing with one another. There’s a third party to our debates, and that’s the audience and it’s the audience that I think that is informed by hearing the two sides of the arguments. But where I wanted to bring this back to you was saying, in our world the two arguments still exist and still have standing. Can a couple fundamentally not agree on some important issues and yet still remain a couple? And I think you’re saying that actually yes, they can

Esther Perel
Absolutely

John Donvan
That that’s the goal.

Esther Perel
We all understand that you can like classical music and I don’t

John Donvan
Exactly the situation in my marriage actually.

Esther Perel
Okay, then there is you may want children and I don’t. So there’s a scale here. What’s very interesting is that in highly differentiated couples, people can tolerate a very big dose of differences and they sometimes have a relationship with a small overlap. They agree on a few fundamentals, but they have a broad range of areas where they think differently, act differently, have different priorities, and others want a lot of overlap. They feel they need to agree on a lot of things to experience more harmony. It’s less a matter of subjects. There are plenty of people who voted differently their entire life, but they shared many other things and they understood, they see the world differently and they respected that what changes is if I experience your choice as a threat, to me that’s really where it’s at. It’s not in the nature of the difference itself, it’s in what it does to each other. And some people find it very difficult. I can have a person who says, I can’t imagine that I’m living with someone who likes cruises and that can create mass because I need you to be more similar to me or to who I aspire to be. And your preference I experience as taking something away from me. You don’t ask people what they’re fighting about. You’re asking people what they’re fighting for,

And you will see that most often people fight for three things. They fight for power and control, whose priorities matter most and who makes the decisions They fight for trust, which is care and closeness. Who’s got my back and who can I rely on? And they fight for respect and recognition, who values me and where do I matter? Power, trust and value is probably the majority of what people are actually having an argument about.

John Donvan
So your podcast, where Shall We Begin, is really not like any other podcast in that you bring excerpts of actual therapy where you have worked with people. So this is a clip of you working with a man and a woman who are having some challenges. So let’s take a listen to that.

Woman
What I want him to do is get a job and be functional and be independent and be interested in the world and curious. And that’s what I want.

Esther Perel
I know,I know. And you think he doesn’t?

It’s been such a long time. If that was me, if I didn’t have a job, I would freak out. I would be up all night and I would get one in two weeks. I don’t understand the relaxed nature of things, but if

Esther Perel
You steamroll him, you’re going to get the person who is all shriveled up next to you and you will think that it’s because he is a shriveled up nincompoop and you will not notice that you’re steam rolling at the same time.

John Donvan
The whole episode is so fascinating and that’s what you’re doing in this podcast is just so fascinating. And I have a bunch of questions. First of all, I want thank you for breathing new life into the word nincompoop, which was beginning to lose its currency. The first reaction I have is what’s the ethical clearance on using the recordings of these sessions? I mean, how did you work that out with your patients?

Esther Perel
They are not patients. Never were and never, never will be. There are thousands and thousands of applicants for every episode they apply with Vox, they are screened by the producers and they know that they’re coming in for a one-time anonymous three hour therapeutic conversation.

John Donvan
Okay, that’s a very, very big clarification and I appreciate it.

Esther Perel
There is no ethical breach and no mixing of the metaphors. When I say thousands, I’m talking about there are currently 8,000 applicants. You begin to get a good sense as to how often. So there’s an intake they write to us, then the producer called them and it’s a long intake that follows the model of what I would use if they were patients. And we call them because the story matters because we think there’s something to learn for many others by listening to this situation. And because I have a sense that in three hours I can do something. So I don’t take on a situation where I think it would be maybe even more damaging or certainly not useful because there’s too much.

John Donvan
Well, thank you for clarifying all of that about the process. But what I found most interesting about that particular selection was that you then we hear you reflecting on the process of your involvement in the therapy session.

Esther Perel
And as I’m listening to this again myself, I realized that I was doing to her what I was telling her she was doing to him. And that’s when I knew I’m inducted in the system. I’m talking to them with the same tone as they talk to each other. This is where I felt that I had lost some of my therapeutic stance.

John Donvan
So why that’s interesting to me is that in our debates, when we’re live on a stage with people who are arguing with each other, my role is to listen exceedingly closely to each of them and to move them to exploring more deeply their points of conflict, but without getting involved myself in the sense where I don’t enter the argument. And that’s a very, very tricky position to maintain. I work very hard at it and I think for the most part I will critique a debater not for the substance of their argument, but for the fact that they’re ignoring the point or that they’ve switched to another topic when we’re trying to discuss A and B. But it’s a very, very delicate position. And I heard you say in that one that you felt you lost the balance. And I’m curious about that, how you experienced that.

Esther Perel
So I was trained by having my teachers and my colleagues watch me behind a one way mirror. I was trained by watching hours of myself on video so that I could see because it’s so easy. What you do is really a very incredible skill to not get sucked in. You are listening to the process and the content. So am I. And here I noticed that in the process I began toold her in the way that she was scolding him. That’s what we call to be inducted and very important. I mean, I think it’s a skill as a therapist to just say, oh, I didn’t pick up on that. I went too fast here. I lost it there. What I said was important, but the way I said it now what happened is that I wrote to them, if you really want to know, and I said, I really want you to know, I noticed in listening that I did this and this and this, and I think that didn’t serve you very well. And the answer I got was to the contrary, actually, you were the first one who told us things as they were. And it was very helpful to actually have it be so direct now. Do I think it was a good way to do it? No, I still think I could have done it better, but it was amazing that they just said, what are you talking about? This was actually exactly what we needed.

John Donvan
That’s so interesting. Yeah, it doesn’t sound like it went off rails in any way. I have seen debates, not in my own involvement, but debates go off the rails when the moderator thinking that debater A has said something so wrong that the moderator will speak up and they go back and forth and it turns into a side debate, which is wastes a lot of time and gives the impression of a lack of something that’s important in this situation, which is impartiality. But I wanted to ask you also about just the nature of your clientele overall and what differences are involved. You mentioned culture being important in this. Is there something that you bring differently to a session with say a heterosexual couple and a same-sex couple or an Indian couple and an Irish couple? Do differences come into play in those things or is it you’re saying yes right away? I can see you nodding.

Esther Perel
Yes, yes, yes. I think that there is a range across cultures of the centrality of the individual. First of all, how important is the I the self versus how important is the collective? Is the group, the family, the harmony relationship, how much do people come with the notion of free will? How much do people come with the notion of I deserve to be happy, which is a rather western concept. What would you say, John? Were you raised for loyalty and interdependence or would you say that you were raised more for autonomy and self-reliance?

John Donvan
I would mix. You put four adjectives in there

Esther Perel
And

John Donvan
I think I would say loyalty and self-reliance and you put those on separate camps. But I did find boxes on the list that I would check.

Esther Perel
Now, of course, if we had the time, I would say, tell me more. So where was the self-reliance? Was it in the messaging or was it by the sheer circumstances in which you grew up and you had to learn to stand on your own two feet and it was

John Donvan
Messaging for sure. Yeah, I had a lot of support. Yep.

Esther Perel
What was the messaging around loyalty? Think about the effect of your behavior on others. Your family comes are, so these sets of values are very important and often very culturally reinforced and sometimes determined. I speak nine languages, so I translate very much. I get a sense what is the power dynamic around gender, around age, around birth order. These are very clear legacies as well that people bring. To what extent are you allowed to leave a relationship versus you have to make it work at all costs because that’s the value, that’s the belief. So it’s endless. Children, do they have a right to speak? Do you have a democratic system in the house? Does everybody’s opinion matter or is there a much clearer sense vertical line of authority? Are you allowed to express emotions and which ones is sadness permitted but not anger, is anger permitted, but not too much idleness because you have to be practical and busy all the time and productive. So it’s a whole range, it’s a big map. The cultural map.

John Donvan
Do you do research on the culture when you’re meeting people from a culture that you, I know nine languages covers a lot, but would there be specific instances where you would go out and read some books about the culture or talk to people who are in that culture really interesting

Esther Perel
Or talk to them or talk to other people or colleagues who are from that just to have a sense and are there practices, are there rituals? Are there certain ways of understanding grief? Are there certain ways of understanding trauma? Are there ways to understand repair? Since we are talking conflict, we have to talk repair. In your debates, people don’t need to repair that much afterwards. They say goodbye, they each go home to their own places.

John Donvan
Well, what’s interesting in some of our debates is afterwards, after they’re off the stage, only after in front of the audience.

Esther Perel
That’s when it really starts.

John Donvan
Still say, you actually made a really good point and I’m going to have to think about that in the future. But the performance sort of undermines that.

Esther Perel
So imagine that in a family or in a couple, right? When you’re fighting for your point of view, for your experience, for the recognition of what you think really happened yesterday night or what your mother really meant, and just to be able to say, I hear you, that diffuses things so powerfully. I made a mistake. I know I lost it. And this is on me. I mean these levels of accountability. You have a good point. I spoke too fast. Recognition of the other and recognition of oneself, responsibility, not shame, responsibility go a long way in working with conflict.

John Donvan
So I want to talk in a couple of ways about going beyond the binary of a man and a woman in a romantic relationship to some other kinds of relationships. So same sex couples. I’d like to talk about whether anything’s different in that regard within a singular culture or is it the same? And I’m also interested in your work in non-romantic relationships.

Esther Perel
Yes, I’m glad you asked

John Donvan
Mother to child, for example. So talk about those two for us.

Esther Perel
So I think the big difference in working with same-sex couples is that the norms that the legacies of norms that one receives in a heterosexual context are lesser. The scripts are not instantly available. So on the one hand you lack the institutional messaging, and on the other hand you have the freedom of being able to create more of your own power distribution, gender distribution, levels of identification, similarity. You don’t fall in the same traps, but fundamentally the different levels of distress or conflict in a relationship are not that far apart. Now when we talk about other pairs, I love to work with friends, I love to work with co-createors, co-founders and family members, all these relational systems. And in part it’s because I think that we have entered a period of social atrophy, partly reinforced through the pandemic, more so reinforced through our contactless existence at this moment where we have less and less direct face-to-face interaction with other people. Kids.

John Donvan
Would you say as we’re doing now, in other words, we’re not in the same city even right now, correct?

Esther Perel
Correct. And we think we have eye contact, but we don’t really. But I ask an audience, how many of you have grown up playing freely on the street? And depending on the age, a very large number of people will say yes. How many of you have kids and do they now play freely on the street? And a very small number of people will raise their hand. And what I’m saying is it used to be that you grow up and you have a host of experiences of social negotiations. You make rules, you break rules, you make alliances, you break them, you make new friends, you learn unprompted, un-choreographed, social negotiation, that’s gone. You go to the store, you don’t have a cashier, you have contactless existence. And that creates a situation where you are less and less prepared for conflictual situations. It’s a much more of a frictionless on demand app life, which is wonderfully efficient, but doesn’t help you in relationships. Relationships have been inconsistencies, relationships have contradictions. Relationships rub you. There’s friction in relationships and you need the skills to do that.

John Donvan
We’ve hosted a number of debates that are on the question of whether, what I would say the thing you’re talking about is the interposition of technology in the communication process and just sort of the waterfall of data, information, voices, opinions is actually destructive of cohesion in the culture. And a lot of debaters have argued very strongly that it is. I’m curious to know whether some of the stresses that we have explored in this area, polarization left versus right, democrat versus Republican, we’ve done debates in which people have made the argument that we we’re withdrawing even into our own cities, into our own hamlets to get away from each other because of these political attitudes. Do you find that those dividing lines actually interfere with one-on-one relationships? Have you seen an uptick in couples or pairs of people having stress over the political stuff that’s going on or disagreement over immigration rights or abortion rights, something like that?

Esther Perel
One in four Americans at this moment is cut off from a family member. That is huge. That’s gigantic. And that often has to do with political views, views around sexuality, gender views around the big issues of our time. Yes. I used to remember when somebody began to explore this with me, a situation where we would fight in my house over politics on Friday nights as we were having dinner. And we would scream, it was like I was a 16-year-old fiery. And then at some point somebody would say, the pastry is delicious. And we all remembered we’re at home in family and it’s in family that you can scream like this. And then the next day you still rely on those people as your family and you still want to help them and be there for them. And then for you, no matter what, this is not happening at this moment, there is cutoffs, there is a type of conflict avoidance, there is a sense that it’s not safe for me and I shouldn’t have to deal with this at this moment. There are clusters of people who no longer interact with each other just because you are part of this group or part of that group. And I think that it really fractures the society. And this is true inside families, and this is true in larger groups and in society.

John Donvan
Do you think that your course can help people address these kinds of differences?

Esther Perel
Yes, there are principles when you look especially on the extreme end, right? So the course basically says, what is conflict? What is the difference between conflict that highlights the uniqueness of each, the differences that we all need to have a diverse system versus destructive conflict that basically destroys the relationship. They’re not that different between two people and between two groups. And if you look at the research on intractable conflict, which has worked globally all over the world with political conflicts, it highlights what makes for polarization. I am right and you are wrong. I am in touch with the essence and you are totally off track. It’s dispositioning, it’s the contempt that people bring, it’s the competition that people bring. It’s the sense that if I recognize yours, then I am basically denying mine. It’s the fundamental attribution error in which you are just one dimensional.

But I understand the multiplicity of things. It’s those elements that make the conflict intractable. And every research says the same thing. You start by basically talking, there’s two points of view. You either talk by the one thing you actually have in common, you both worry about your kids, you both care about the neighborhood, you care about the state of the roads, that you care about the food desert. There are things you both care about. Or the other point of view says, don’t go instantly for dialogue. And this is true in couples too. Don’t try instantly for people to wave compassion and empathy and understanding. Let them argue and actually understand that this difference means that they care deeply about a few things. And highlight, don’t rush for dialogue. People are too angry to want to suddenly like each other. And if that’s true in couples, that’s true in neighborhoods too.

John Donvan
We are going to now bring in a few new voices to further the conversation. First up, I want to welcome Quispe Lopez, who is a queer journalist and lifestyle editor at Them. Them is Conde Nast LGBTQ+ publication. Quispe, thanks so much for joining us on Open to Debate and coming on in with your question, please.

Quispe Lopez
Yeah, of course. Thanks so much for having me. So Esther, I would love to circle back on the idea of relationship scripts just because I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the context of gender and relationship conflict over my many years of covering section relationships, I’ve often found that whether explicitly or implicitly the way we talk about conflict tends to center two ideas. One, everyone is straight and two men and women because those are typically the genders spoken about in mainstream relationship advice are inherently different and therefore conflict is impacted by that. So famously, Gen Z is the queerest generation today with nearly 20% of us identifying as queer, and we’re also credited for deconstructing and challenging our current notions of gender and gender roles. So I’m wondering if you think that the way we approach relationship conflict and how it may shift according to these trends, not just for queer folks, but also for people overall as people question their sexualities, genders, all of that and get further away from this idea that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

Esther Perel
You still remember that title? So Quispe, I think that if I was to say something about Gen Z and conflict maybe before looking at the queering and at the gender redefinitions, I would think that one of the first things that has changed the conflict is the digitalization of the life of Gen Z and the social isolation and the fact that relationships are started and broken up with online without ever having to see the face of the person without ever having to see the emotional consequences of what you do. And I think that that to me is a source of information about how conflict is handled more than some of, I don’t know if more, but it’s the first thing that pops for me. It’s kind of how do you have difficult conversations that I don’t know if I need a gender construction for that? Of course, people come with a different idea about what is aggressive, what can be said, what must be said, what are the circumstances on which you can say certain things like safety is a major need and framework for relationships for Gen Z.

Why is that so? Because we have lost the large frameworks lost. We also did away with some of them that needed to be done away with. But basically we have lived for centuries with large scripts, religion, hierarchies, gender construct that basically gave us very little freedom, but they gave us a lot of clarity and people knew how to understand things at this moment. I can create my own meaning out of everything, but that means that I need to do this alone. And the burdens on the self of Gen Z are way heavier to try to figure out what does this mean and how do I want to react in response to this because it’s all on me. So I have freedom, but I don’t have much certainty and I often have a lot of self-doubt, and that is also what enters into conflict. So that’s a different way of answering your question, but I’m curious how you hear that.

Quispe Lopez
I think that makes a lot of sense in terms of clarity and safety, those two things at odds with each other.

John Donvan
Thanks Quispe, we very much for your question. Next step, I want to welcome Lauren Vinopal. Lauren is a journalist who covers mental health and relationships. So Lauren, please come into open to debate. Thanks for joining us and the floor is yours.

Lauren Vinopal
Hi Esther. It’s good to be here. You’ve touched on this, but I wanted to ask more directly about how techs specifically smartphones have potentially made us a lot more black and white in our conflict. Specifically how being able to get immediate validation seemingly from our phones has maybe given us impractical expectations of human beings. Yeah, so I wanted to ask about that.

Esther Perel
So I think there’s a few things happening at the same time. On the one hand, we are more socially isolated. On the other hand, our expectations, especially of romantic relationships are unprecedented and have skyrocketed. We don’t just want economic support and companionship and family and a best friend and a confidant and a lover, but we also want a person that helps us become the best version of ourselves. And what also is happening is that we are basically told to our apps where to go, how to get there, what to listen to, what to watch, where to go to eat. We are more and more in a frictionless situation that is very polished and it makes it more difficult when we then suddenly find ourselves in interpersonal situations that are more conflictual. People have rejected each other for centuries. There’s nothing new. But ghosting is a different level.

Lauren Vinopal
To that point, our expectations of other people in conflict too high and maybe our expectations of ourselves too low just because we can get out of there real quick.

Esther Perel
I think our expectations are not too high, but they may be too high to put on one person. We need community, we need groups, we need friends, and we need different levels of friendship and different levels of acquaintances and different levels of associations and mentors, and we need a host of people. What’s really happening at this moment is that I’d say that one in four people in the US is disconnected from a family member, but among Gen Z and the younger you go, half the people don’t have a best friend. That is a very new social landscape.

John Donvan
Esther, you and I were both born in the 1950s, so that tells us where we are now in our life. We do have clear memories of a world before the technology. Lauren, my question for you is do you have a sense of there having been a time before when things were working better, did you experience that yourself or are you young enough that you didn’t live in that time and you look at it with nostalgia and regret?

Esther Perel
Well, the best question to ask is how old were you in 2008?

Lauren Vinopal
I was born in the eighties. So I am an elder millennial and I am in the interesting position of having had both, but having most of my sort of romantic relationships take place in the sort of technological space that we’re talking in. But also being able to see the difference in my parents and in my relationships throughout childhood too. So it is a very interesting place to be.

Esther Perel
So when you asked me Lauren about the lessening of personal accountability and responsibility, I have a card game that’s a game of stories and two of my favorite questions is who do I owe a phone call to and I owe an apology to.

Lauren Vinopal
Yeah, and I think a lot of people in my generation immediately go to who owes me an apology and who owes me a phone call and don’t take those other steps. So I think that’s a really great feedback,

Esther Perel
But it’s less technology or maybe not less, but technology is one thing. I think the level of individualism, the level of, since you write about mental health, it’s the focus on self-care. It’s the focus on the self

Lauren Vinopal
Yes.

Esther Perel
Has made it so that we are more easily saying who owes me versus who do I owe? It’s the same as when people say, I want to find a partner who is this and this and this, and I say to them, which partner do you want to be?

John Donvan
Lauren, thanks so much for joining us on Open to Debate. Really appreciate it.

Lauren Vinopal
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. My pleasure.

John Donvan
Before we move on to our next question, I just want to ask you about this card deck.

Esther Perel
Yes. The game is called Where Should We Begin: A Game of Stories, same name as the podcast, because I wanted not just to have therapeutic interventions, but playful fun interventions where people tell stories because stories are bridges for connection and they cultivate intimacy without having to sit in an office and talk to a therapist about intimacy. Just when you tell a story, you reveal a ton, but in a fun playful way. So it’s a box, there are 200 cards in it and a die that gives you a set of different prompts so that you never tell the story twice. You find it on my website, you find it on Amazon everywhere. You said in the beginning of the program the importance of curiosity in a debate. I think the next thing I would say, it’s all in the quality of the question.

John Donvan
That’s great. Aditi Shikrant is a reporter for CNBC. Aditi, thanks for joining us on Open to Debate.

Aditi Shikrant
Hi, of course. Thanks for having me. So my question is about you said that pairs are your favorite unit and you said a lot of conflict comes from us not being able to handle discomfort and handle differences between us and our partner. So a little tangential, but do you think that all this talk about non-monogamy has to do with a couple’s inability to not sit with discomfort in their own union? And even if that discomfort isn’t huge, yelling fights just maybe under stimulation, I just feel like there has been a lot of focus on non-monogamous structures in relationships lately, and I wanted to know why you think that might be.

Esther Perel
So I think that the quest for non-monogamy and polyamory at this moment is the recent one that starts in the sixties. If you want to follow a historical track, it’s part of a general social movement of dismantling, restricting structures and the power of disruption, the power of thinking outside the box, the power of renegotiating social systems and relationships is one of that. So this is where non-monogamy really proliferates. It puts the individual at the center and it says that self-fulfillment, personal development is of importance and the people who live by it have also actually embraced the ideas that it is good for the relationship. It makes you less reliant just on one person. It’s actually reinforcing the family. So it’s a very interesting breaking the norm on the edge, but with arguments from the conservatives at the same time. It’s very progressive but explained with actually quite conservative arguments as well. And the main argument is the importance of keeping a relationship fresh, of understanding that our emotional needs don’t necessarily match our erotic needs and that we need community, et cetera, et cetera. So all of these thinking goes inside non-monogamy more than just, I mean, boredom may be there or having to face the limitation of having chosen one person and not another, et cetera, et cetera. But there are many, many voices to the discourse about non-monogamy. I don’t think that it’s just a conflict avoidant maneuver. I think it’s beyond that.

John Donvan
Aditi, thank you for the thoughtful insight and thanks for joining us on Open to Debate and we have one more question and it comes from Monica Torres who is a senior reporter for HuffPost who writes about the workplace. Hi Monica, thanks for joining us.

Monica Torres
Hi, thanks for having me. You talk a lot about our need for posts ability and change a lot in your work to contradictory emotions, and I think that’s something a lot of us wrestle with at work. Studies have found that many of us are disengaged at work and secretly wanting to be somewhere else, and I wanted to ask what you would tell an employee who is wrestling with a big internal conflict of, should I stay at my job or should I go?

Esther Perel
And the next sentence would be, I should stay because, and I should go because

Speaker 7
I should stay because it’s like stability and I should go because new change.

Esther Perel
I think the first thing I do is I draw an echo map. Tell me about your life at this moment. Do you need stability? Do you need a steady income? Do you find that actually this has given you a structure to your life that was really necessary? If you’ve always done stability and not change, I may think that maybe you should go on the change, but if you’ve done change nonstop every six months and for the first time you’ve lasted 18 months somewhere, then maybe we talk about the stability. I basically don’t answer the question through the microscope with the question right in front of my nose because you can’t see your finger when it’s that close. You move it back a little bit and you bring in the rest of the person’s life. Are you taking care of people? Are you responsible for your siblings, for your parents? I basically won’t answer, but I will ask a lot of questions that will help you answer your question.

John Donvan
Monica, thanks very much for your question. We really appreciate it.

Esther Perel
It’s a great question.

John Donvan
Esther, we only have a few minutes left, but I’ve been wanting to ask you all along why this is your calling, why this is your work, where did it come from for you?

Esther Perel
I have been interested in human beings and in the way that we relate, in the way we help each other, we rely on each other, we betray each other, we abandon each other, all the beautiful things and the nasty things that people do to each other. I’m interested in the connection between the micro and the macro because I don’t know, maybe I often think that I’m a child of Holocaust survivors of two parents who were the sole survivors of their entire families and who basically survived because they understood connection with other people.

John Donvan
What do you mean by that?

Esther Perel
Meaning that you maintain hope because you think you’re going to be reunited with someone. You maintain hope because there is a person next to you who is suffering more than you and you’re trying to help them. You maintain hope because when you give, you have more for yourself because in the depth of connection giving and receiving meat, you need to rebuild hope after a world is destroyed. And so you become interested in how nations are facing each other. So I grew up in a very political house, but in a house that also really looked at the fundamental values of humanity. Relating in a relationship is one level relating in the bigger divides of today is finding a way to continue to humanize the others because that’s what maintains the humanity in yourself.

John Donvan
But you could have pursued the same kind of passions in law or medicine or as a writer or as an artist, and I know that in a way you’re doing all of those things at the same time, but you’re very, very highly specialized in psychotherapy. So what opened the avenue to psychotherapy and understanding the mind in all of this for you?

Esther Perel
I think it’s often the case for many of us as a teenager, you start to read the books that are meant to help you understand yourself and you study psychology to understand you, to understand. I also knew I had a knack. People would come to me very early on as kids. I liked to solve these types of problems. I don’t really do well reading legal documents, but I do very well reading people’s personal histories.

John Donvan
We’ve hit time. I just want to share because I’ve been wanting to do this also, some of the questions that come from the card game, just to give people an idea, I’m going to go through a list of what they would pull out of the box. Please talk about an experience that shaped who I am that few people know about. Please talk about the last time I was ghosted, talk about a risk I took that changed my life, my closest encounter with death. I need to fight harder for blank. Today I care a lot less about blank. My social media presence would lead you to believe. What’s your answer to that question Esther?

Esther Perel
My social media would lead you to believe that I actually spent a lot of time on social media, but it’s a public square that is very new to me and one that I am learning when it is the proper place to speak and to speak about what. I think it’s actually a space that is often very challenging for topics that demand complexity, that demand patience, that demand listening more than nine seconds…

John Donvan
I have to say, you did all of those things in this conversation to our betterment. I want to thank you so much, Esther, for taking part in this conversation with us on Open to Debate and to remind people that your course can be found at your website, estherperel.com. It’s called Turning Conflict into Connection. I also want to thank our questioners Quispe Lopez, Lauren Vinopal, Aditi Shikrant and Monica Torres. But one more time to you Esther Perel. Thank you so much for joining us.

Esther Perel
Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

John Donvan
And I want to thank everybody out there for listening to Open to Debate as a nonprofit that’s working to combat extreme polarization through civil debate. Our work is made possible by listeners like you by the Rosen Krantz Foundation and by supporters of Open to Debate. This show is generously funded by a grant from the Laura and Gary Lauder Venture Philanthropy Fund. Robert Rosenkranz is our chairman. Our CEO is Clea Conner. Lia Matthow is our Chief Content Officer. This episode was produced by Alexis Pancrazi and Marlette Sandoval, Editorial and Research by Gabriella Mayer and Andrew Foote, Andrew Lipson and Max Fulton provided production support. Mili Shah is Director of Audience Development. The Open to Debate team also includes Gabrielle Ianucelli, Rachel Kemp, Linda Lee, and Devin Shermer. Damon Whittemore mixed this episode, our theme music is by Alex Kliment, and I’m your host, John Donvan. Thank you so much for listening. We will see you next time.