How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships | Esther Perel

Andrew Huberman introduces Esther Perel as a psychotherapist and the author of "Mating in Captivity" and "The State of Affairs." He frames the conversation around identity: how people try both to hold on to who they are and to evolve inside a relationship. He opens with an abstract question. Is choosing a romantic relationship an extension of the self we already have, or a willingness, conscious or not, to become a different person? He links this to the idea that a relationship, like the body, has a developmental arc that starts with the first meeting, the first week and the first month.

Perel answers that it is "completely both." She grounds this in what she describes as a basic set of dual needs that people bring into the world: security alongside freedom and adventure, togetherness alongside separateness. A relationship, in her account, creates identification and differentiation at once, in a constant dialectic.

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.

She then describes how this attraction turns into conflict. People are sometimes drawn to a partner who represents parts of themselves they find hard, disavow, or prefer to "outsource" so they don't have to be vulnerable about them. The difference that first promises growth later becomes the source of friction, because people want change "up to a point. Not too much, and not on your terms." Her example is someone drawn to a partner who is stable, structured, reliable and punctual. Over time they start to see that partner as rigid, argue against the rigidity, and lose touch with their own wish to become more structured. The partner ends up as the "representative" of the change the person wanted, while the person disconnects from that wish.

Huberman restates the point: people seek others to start a change they want, then react with resentment or frustration when the friction actually challenges them. Perel adds "defensiveness" to his list. She widens the idea to systems in general. Relationships, systems in nature and individuals all balance a wish for change against a need for stability. These forces sometimes complement each other and sometimes "butt heads."

Every system straddles stability and change, and then grapples for homeostasis.

Huberman asks a practical question. Setting aside extreme pathology, and assuming both people mean well, what are the necessary but not sufficient things a person should have before seeking a romantic relationship? Is it a sense of one's own identity plus a clear idea of what one wants to change? Perel first points to a common line, "I want to be with you because you help me become the best version of myself," and asks what that version actually is.

She then separates two kinds of relationship. In a cornerstone relationship, couples meet in their early 20s and build the foundation together: they save their first money, get their first homes and grow up side by side. In a capstone relationship, people meet perhaps 10 or 12 years later, after they have already defined their values, aspirations and the life they want. The partner then confirms what each person has already built and is placed on top of it. Perel argues that this developmental arc changes the mandate of the relationship. Both building identity and expanding it are present, but which one comes first depends on whether people meet young or in their 30s.

Asked about couples with different ages, Perel says big age gaps are common. In gay relationships a major age difference often means something else, but it still creates differentiation. In straight relationships men are often much older than women, which she suggests, with an "I think," is rooted in evolutionary biology and fertility. She notes a newer pattern of older women with younger men, which she says has been very rare in most cultures. She treats it as an early signal and not yet an established trend: four current movies on the theme suggest "the crescent of a new cultural phenomenon," but "I wouldn't make it yet a phenomenon."

Coming back to what people need before they start a relationship, Perel names self-awareness, and says more is better. In her view, the best form of self-awareness is knowing one's limitations and being able to take responsibility for them "without blame and shame." She calls accountability "an enormous component of relationship." Everyone has wounds, frustrations, expectations, unexpressed needs and unfulfilled longings. What matters is knowing them, admitting them, and not pretending the problem is only the partner. She offers a vow she thinks would suit a wedding:

I'll fuck up on a regular basis, and on occasion, I'll acknowledge it.

She draws on almost 40 years of practice as a couples therapist. Couples often treat therapy as "a drop-off center": they come to hand over their problem, which they see as their partner, and offer themselves as experts on what is wrong with that person. She finds it striking how much insight people have into a partner's shortcomings while failing to see themselves as part of a system.

A relationship is a breathing, living system of interdependent parts.

Huberman links cornerstone relationships to neuroplasticity. He says that, as far as he knows, neuroplasticity exists across the lifespan but "tapers off significantly in one's late 20s," and that being "set in our ways" is a neuroplasticity phenomenon. Perel describes this as "the closing of the prefrontal cortex," and Huberman agrees: "Pretty much." He adds that reopening plasticity later takes more effort. He points out a tension: plasticity runs opposite to self-awareness. Younger people have less data about their own patterns, so a person in their 20s would find it harder to list their own issues than someone in their 40s or 50s who is being honest with themselves. Perel calls this a good point.

Huberman admits he has romanticized early relationships because his own life did not follow that path. Perel says they face their own challenge. When people grow up together, much of their energy goes into building the unit, which is then supposed to act as scaffolding from which two individuals grow and define themselves. People who meet later are already defined individuals and must instead create the energy to come together, "a different choreography."

For young couples who meet early in college, often with little or no prior relationship experience, the risk comes when each person starts changing individually. Perel asks whether the relationship can stretch enough to let both people emerge, "or is the jacket too tight? Is the vest too tight?" This often becomes a crisis because the couple was built on togetherness. Sometimes they manage it. Sometimes becoming an adult seems to require a different partner. This is why she says that people in the West now have two or three relationships or marriages in their adult lives, and some will have them with the same person, but only if the relationship itself changes.

It's like the person changes the relationship, but the relationship makes room for the person to change.

Huberman ties this to his field. In developmental neurobiology, he says, all of life is one developmental arc and not just a childhood phase followed by a fixed adulthood. Perel agrees. They bring in Erikson's life stages. Perel calls Erikson "the most articulate theoretician of stages of life" and mentions that his last stage is the generative stage. Huberman summarizes the theory as a basic struggle at each stage that a person either resolves or doesn't. He argues that people in their 20s, 40s and 60s and beyond are, in effect, different people, so the idea of three marriages seems to him both logical and consistent with what is known about the brain and the self. Perel replies, "A good metaphor is rooted in science."

Huberman notes that the three-marriages idea sounds romantic when it happens with one person, but for "more than half" of people, by his account, the first marriage breaks down and they either stay single or remarry. He asks what decides whether someone can keep finding and creating love, whether with the same person, a new one, or three different partners. Is it accepting that who they are at 50 will be very different from who they were in their 20s?

Perel moves the focus away from getting through crises. A couple can overcome a crisis, set it aside and stay the same. What she has in mind is the ability to redefine oneself and the relationship, which she calls "much more creative than problem-solving." The couple becomes a different unit: the power dynamic, the interdependence, the erotic charge and the connection to the outside world all change. She separates a relationship that is merely "not dead" from one that is alive, and says her work aims at the second.