Love Psychology- How to sustain desire in a relationship

In her talk on Ted called “The secret to desire in a long-term relationship”, psychotherapist Esther Perel talks about sustaining desire in a long-term relationship through a balance of security and adventure. In love there is security, predictability, safety, dependability, reliability, permanence. In desire we have adventure, novelty, mystery, risk, danger, unknown, unexpected, surprise, journey, and travel. Many long-term relationships encounter sexual problems which are due to a lack of desire in the relationship even when there is good intimacy involved. She says that the crisis of desire is the “crisis of the imagination.” She says that today we do not have sex in order to procreate or for maintaining societal roles, but we have sex out of our own desire. She then goes on to say that love is to have where desire is to want.

Her curiosity about eroticism has led her to ask people all across the world when they found themselves the most drawn to their partners (not sexually). The responses she received were when the other person was away, when they saw their partners doing things that made themselves happy independently, and novelty. These answers surprisingly have everything to do with the concept of desire and not love. She then goes on to say that neediness decreases eroticism in relationships, and neediness happens to be associated with love.

Perel is very fascinated by the topic of erotic intelligence because unlike other species, we consider sex as a language and a place you go…