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Hey everybody, it's Meredith.
For today's episode.
I wanted to share a conversation with you that I had with someone who's definitely been a big help to me over the years and maybe to some of you as well.
It's Esther Perel.
Esther is a psychotherapist, partnership expert, and all-around very empathetic person.
She wrote books, including The State of Affairs and Mating in Captivity, and she hosts the podcast Where Should We Begin, which many of you know is excellent.
I think Astaire is such an important voice on marriage communication, things like open relationships and why we couple up to begin with.
She's currently on a tour about the future of love and relationships.
She has a bunch of dates.
DC and New York are on the list, and I know many of you live in those cities.
Check out her websites to see if she's near you.
I got the chance to catch up with Astaire on Zoom before her Boston show this week.
We discussed everything from her love of live audiences to polyamory's resurgence in the zeitgeist, the pandemic's effect on relationships.
I even got to thank her for helping me in my own dating life in a way she didn't even know she did.
We'll explain in the interview.
Enjoy this bonus episode of love letters.
Voila, here we are.
How have you been since?
Wow, it's been a few years, huh.
Well, the pandemic will will do that right, i think.
I think it's been, at least in person, since before then.
So i'm so excited you're coming and Well, I have many questions, so I'll get going.
I know you have given talks in so many different places, different kinds of groups, and I wondered how geography can influence what you hear from people, the vibes of people,
Sometimes I've heard that people in Boston have a very different response to theater, for instance, like whether they or more open applaud it.
You know, I recently spoke to a director who said, you know, when we do this in LA, it's different.
And I wondered what you found even just giving talks and engaging with your community, how it changes depending on where you are.
I would put it to you a little different.
I mean, I have done a tour in Australia.
I was in London recently.
I've been in Paris.
I've been all over the world, from Turkey to Morocco, you know.
And I think what is interesting for doing a tour in the US is how much I bring out the multiple voices that live in that city.
So how many of you are from Boston is a question I may ask.
And how many of you were not born in the States or came from other countries is a question.
And then when you start to have 30 countries present in the audience, then Boston becomes a different Boston, even for the Bostonians.
So in Boston...
I should say in greater Boston there's a lot of talk about polyamory, partly because Somerville, which is right outside of Boston, became the first municipality to pass an ordinance.
Right.
So, and now other towns are following.
The first municipality to pass.
An ordinance saying that you could apply for more than one domestic partner.
And they did this during COVID because they said oh, we have a pretty strong polyamorous community in Somerville and we want to make sure people can visit each other in the hospital if they need to.
And now all of these towns around Somerville are saying we want to do the same thing.
And it has made a lot of people who might not think about polyamory say, well, what is it?
And is it something I should be considering or is it something I should fear?
And it's interesting.
When I talk to people, they are sometimes afraid to ask about it.
Don't know what counts, want to know more.
So many big media companies have also done stories about this.
Is this something that's coming up more for you?
Is it something where people are checking in with you to see how you feel about it?
I have to believe it's not that new and it's just that more of the people are finding out that it has always existed.
So I love the question, and there's three different ways to answer it.
First, I wrote about consensual non-monogamy and polyamory almost 10 years ago.
From the point of view of consensual non-monogamy, of how it helps us reconcile the improbable duality between independence and belonging, which means that it was one of the ways people are answering the fundamental dilemma of how do we straddle the need for security and the need for freedom or belonging, and independence or togetherness and separateness, all these same dualities.
But in addition, I think that polyamory more and more has become an answer to questions of community building and real definition a different way of thinking about the sense of belonging and you know i've i said before that we it's the nuclear model is too insulated and isolated i said before that we demand too much from one person to give us what a whole village used to provide I've said before that gay couples have long understood the difference between emotional monogamy and sexual promiscuity.
And they understood that monogamy is a primary commitment to a primary relationship that may or may not involve sexual exclusiveness, but doesn't per se mean that.
So, in a way, the queering of our society has made us look, consciously or not, models that the queer community has actually already long embraced.
To pretend that it's new is to deny that other smaller groups, by default or by choice, has been able to create models that were much more flexible in the definition of the terms and understood that A 20-year gap between an older gay man and a younger gay man who are living in a relationship in which they both are taking care of each other in particular unique ways, does not mean that they also expect that they would be sexual partners par excellence.
That is polyamory.
So the concept of linking polyamory not to unbridled sex but more to community building, to creating multiple systems of loyalty, to creating multiple parents for the children involved, and all of that is a very different way of looking at polyamory than the kind of breaking the rules around sex kind of thing.
It's much more grounded.
Now, at the same time, it's not for everyone, but neither is the other model.
What it really says is that We can't have a one size fits all.
And that certain models fits at certain times of our lives as well.
That doesn't mean we're going to live with one model for the whole life.
And that polyamory is a philosophy.
It's a practice.
It's a relational arrangement.
It's not just a solution to the mishaps of infidelity in which first I cheat on you and then I come to tell you we should open the relationship and I want to stay in touch with my lover, that it needs to be done in a context that demands enormous equality.
And it's not for the faint of heart, you know.
It demands an exquisite capacity for communication, for fluidity, for multi-pronged empathy and understanding of divergent sets of expectations and needs, like living in a community demands.
There is something hopeful to me I think that's the right word about an organized government in some way acknowledging that this way of living can be on the books, that it can affect your health insurance, that you know for a long time most of my life I've been very frustrated that you can live all these different ways, but yet policy is not recognized.
Yes.
Yeah.
Can't agree more.
By the way, Somerville is the first town where I lived when I came to America.
Really?
That's exciting.
OK, so you know it well.
At the time, it was it was more Portuguese than Polly.
But basically, yes, the idea is that the state recognizes that marriage is not the only legitimate.
This is true not just for poly.
This is true for PACs.
This is true for cohabitation.
And that involves property, and that involves inheritance, and that involves visiting in the hospital, and that involves wills, et cetera.
And absolutely there is.
At some point, when people began to separate and divorce, they understood that there is no way to divorce without also having a legal framework that structures this divorce.
That it's one thing to say.
You know, I am culturally emotionally, socially able to separate, but if I can't do it, if there is no full divorce, this is the same thing.
The making and the undoing of relational systems involve legal structures.
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This time, it really is personal.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
I am maybe alone in this, or in a minority about this, but I am still trying to figure out what those years of isolation did for me, how they changed me.
And I am feeling like we don't know yet how 2020 and the confusion after it affected our relationships.
I am constantly trying to figure out if the new way I feel about getting tired after having social engagement is because of the pandemic and or is it because I am turning 47 and I am four years older than I was, so I'm more tired.
So I wonder, as you look at partners, how they are, will they forever be affected by by what we experienced, and to what extent do you factor in that world-changing event into the conversations you have and and things you think about?
I include the pandemic a lot in my conversations about the state of the union and the state of relationships.
I think a lot of things happened in the pandemic.
The first thing.
I mean this is not in order of importance, but it's the one that appears to me.
The first jumps at me now is that we experienced a complete collapse of the roles of.
I sat in this chair and I was the mother, the supervisor, the therapist, the wife, the friend, the sister.
All in this one chair, without moving, without changing clothes, without going anywhere.
And this merging of the roles and collapse of the roles, blending all into one, without the transitions and the rituals that usually help you differentiate the various parts of your identity, was an amazing psychological experience.
With that came the exacerbation of all kinds of things.
There was a kind of a gravitational pull.
You know domestic gravity.
You couldn't go anywhere and you were trying to stay safe and you saw people as potential contaminants and you never were breathing the same air with them.
Which now you sit on a plane and it's like you know, you're half a minute looking at the ones with the mask and you say maybe they know, maybe they're right.
And the other minute you say, you know, they should take this off.
I see somebody on the street with a mask and I say, you know, outside you don't really need it.
I mean, and...
You couldn't be spontaneous.
That's another major aspect of life.
Spontaneity, serendipity, happenstance, the stuff that happens on the street.
And we have not recovered that.
We're not talking to the stranger on the street.
We're not talking to people in line.
We have accelerated the virtualization of our life and the digitalization of our life by umpteen.
And we didn't come back to work in person.
And by not going to work And being together.
I'm not talking about wasting your time in stupid meetings, talking about the stuff for which you go and you interact with other people to collaborate, to learn, to see other people handle conflict, all kinds of situations in the workplace, to be mentored, to have someone notice what you know to do well.
I mean none of this.
None of this can take place in a little box, on a screen, like we are looking at each other now, where we think we're looking at each other and we're not.
And nothing on a physiological level gives us the mirror neurons that eye contact normally should generate.
Number three the pandemic created a social atrophy in which we lost skills, the everyday skills that are the opposite of a contactless life where you say hello, where you say thank you.
People keep the door open.
When you walk in at this point and you are in your phone or you're talking to somebody through your AirPods and you don't even notice that somebody is holding the door and you don't even say thank you.
Or somebody needs for you to hold the door for them and you don't see them.
And we have gone inward.
We have gone so much inward that we don't see what's around us.
And this is just the people who hold the phone in hand.
So what will it be with the people who live with a headset on their head?
I know what people get when they listen to you.
I know what I get when I listen to you and the way we feel seen, understood, the way we learn.
I'm wondering when you get to be in a room full of people like this, what do you get from them, even if it's just them being across from you?
I get so much.
I mean, first of all, I was sitting at South by Southwest this weekend and I had a conversation with Trevor Noah and I had a conversation with Brene Brown.
And with Trevor we were talking about what it means to be in a room where people are actually responding to what you're saying.
You hear their, hmm.
You hear their, huh?
You hear their, never thought of it this way.
You hear them, not sure I like this.
You hear them, yes, totally me.
You know, you're not looking at a green dot.
I spent years lecturing in front of a green dot on my screen, pretending I was seeing people, when there was nobody there.
And And imagining that maybe I'm saying something funny, but I could never hear laughter.
And it was an amazing experience.
So both Trevor and I were talking about you know what does it mean to be in front of an audience and to experience the aliveness and to experience the coming together.
You know, one thing he was saying is there's a reason that in a comedy club, there are no windows.
And you sit very close because you're saying things that outside of the club would have a very different meaning.
And when you are doing standup.
And the same thing is true with therapy, right?
Outside of the office.
If people said the same thing as they say to me, it would have a very different meaning.
But this is true in reverse too.
Some of the things that are said in my office I think should not just belong to the office with a closed door.
It belongs in the public square.
One of the things I really want to create in the tour that I'm starting now is the experience of collective effervescence, what Emile Durkheim was calling the French sociologist, about how you create an experience with a shared sense of purpose and a shared feeling that gives you a feeling of belonging, like singing together or laughing together or, you know, witnessing somebody ask a question and everybody tries to answer that question together, even those who are not talking.
So all of that I receive.
I receive... a sense of relevance that what I'm talking about actually matters.
I enjoy the co-creation, the spontaneity in the moment.
You know, the majority of the evening is a co-created conversation between me and the audience.
And we basically like a good therapy session.
It's the one that you don't know in advance what it's going to be about.
It's when a patient comes in and says, I don't know what to talk about today.
And I'm thinking great, and then, when the audience come, i don't know what they're going to talk about, what questions they're going to have tonight, who's going to be the person, who's going to become the the marker of the evening, and then i become curious.
So to have an experience of curiosity and exploration that is communal.
Um, that's in part what the evening is for, whether you're single, whether you are on a first date, second date,
I'd love for people to come you know like that, rather than go and ask each other a set of boring questions in a noisy bar whether you've been in a long-term relationship.
And the real show is kind of after you leave.
Like a good session is not only what happened in the session.
It's what it produces in the relationship afterwards.
I think I asked you this the last time I talked to you, but I always like to update anything you're watching on TV, reading music, anything that you're using for escapism right now.
Any recommendations?
So what I'm watching now, actually, I began, it's called One Night.
Okay.
It's coming out soon by Emily Ballou.
It's basically a group of people who come back to a process where an event that they had experienced many years back together.
That's all I would say.
Okay.
All right.
Very good writer, poetic, you know, different kind of television.
What I've been listening to is a new podcast that I didn't know before that is called The Emerald.
Okay.
I just listened to one of the episodes that I thought was extremely thought provoking.
That was called The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized.
Because I'm very interested in the psychologization of our society.
Before I let you go, I will just tell you in lockdown I decided I would do online dating for the first time because I was bored and I knew I wouldn't have to follow up with it.
I could see what was out there and what people experience, without having any intention of seeing people.
And I did, over a period, wind up meeting someone, but I couldn't find that many pictures of me smiling, except for one where I'm interviewing you.
And I look so happy.
And it's the one all the guys liked.
And I always laugh to myself because I'm like no one would probably guess that on the other side of the couch of that photo is you.
And I have always said, I only look like that.
So anyway, thank you for inspiring me to look Present and happy, unlike every other photo I've ever taken.
So you know, if many people leave the evening with that kind of smile, you know you ask me what gives me pleasure.
That would give me enormous pleasure.
I love that.
Well, as always, thank you for your time.
I'm so excited for you to come and to see it.
And yeah, we'll be here being Boston, whatever that means.
Wonderful.
Wonderful.
Look forward to seeing you again.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
Love Letters is a production of the Boston Globe and PRX.
Today's episode was produced by Jesse Remedios and Scott Hellman.
Ned Porter does our audio mixing, sound design, and mastering.
Maddie Mortel does our audience engagement.
Special thanks to Linda Henry.
Our music is from APM.
And remember, Love Letters is also an advice column.
Send a letter about your love problem to lovelettersatboston.com or online at loveletters.show.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Thanks for listening.
