Say More - Miranda July and Esther Perel on The Rebirth of Desire AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel

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Episode: Say More - Miranda July and Esther Perel on The Rebirth of Desire

Author: Esther Perel Global Media
Duration: 00:55:41

Episode Shownotes

This week, Esther is in a borrowed bedroom in Los Angeles, the perfect place to talk about desire and the novel on every bedside table, All Fours. The writer, director, and artist, Miranda July, joins Esther to examine the erotic and to explore how love and desire relate and how

they conflict in modern relationships. They discuss the tension between the domestic and erotic through the lens of Esther's new desire course, which Miranda had a sneak peek at. For more details on Miranda July's book, All Fours, visit https://mirandajuly.com/all-fours/ If you are interested in Bringing Back Desire or Playing With Desire in your relationships, then click the link below for more on Esther's course The Desire Bundle: https://www.estherperel.com/course-bundles/the-desire-bundle Want to learn more? Receive monthly insights, musings, and recommendations to improve your relational intelligence via email from Esther: https://www.estherperel.com/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Summary

In this episode of "Where Should We Begin?" Esther Perel converses with Miranda July about the complexities of desire and love in modern relationships. They discuss themes such as the tension between safety and freedom, the interplay of eroticism and personal growth, and the emotional dynamics within partnerships. July shares insights from her novel 'All Force' and reflects on how emotional detachment, vulnerability, and societal expectations impact women, particularly during midlife. The conversation emphasizes the importance of open communication in navigating the fears of abandonment and suffocation, ultimately shedding light on how love and desire can conflict yet coexist in relationships.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Say More - Miranda July and Esther Perel on The Rebirth of Desire) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_04
I just read All Force, the new novel by Miranda July, and it's a real tour de force.

00:00:08 Speaker_04
It's actually touted as a manifesto for a generation, the generation often of women, 45 to 50, who are in the next biological clock crisis, which is the narrowing down of the pinnacle of their libido, and who is wondering,

00:00:31 Speaker_04
Am I going to live like that for another 20 years? What's now? I read the book and I thought, wow, this is a book, a fiction version of mating in captivity.

00:00:43 Speaker_04
It explores the tension between the domestic and the erotic, between our need for safety and our need for freedom and adventure. between stability and aliveness. And I thought I would love to have a conversation with Miranda July.

00:01:00 Speaker_04
I am releasing a course on sexuality. It's a desire bundle. It's a dual course set.

00:01:08 Speaker_04
For all the people who sit in my office, day in, day out, talking about the dilemmas of desire, about the stalemates that they are in, about the sexual gridlocks they are experiencing, about the spark that has gone.

00:01:21 Speaker_04
And I thought, how about if I read her book and I invite her to take the course, and we have a conversation about desire in relationships, particularly more so from the lens of the woman. I invited her here in Los Angeles.

00:01:39 Speaker_04
So I thought, since the book takes place in a room of her own, a la Virginia Woolf, I am going to invite her not in a studio and not in an office, but I'm going to invite her in a bedroom, which is beautifully designed and where we can talk very fluidly between her and her characters.

00:02:01 Speaker_04
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00:02:21 Speaker_04
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00:02:31 Speaker_04
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00:02:47 Speaker_04
It's not always easy to find the right gift for someone, but it feels really special when you do get it right. Saks.com has a holiday gift guide that can make it all easy.

00:02:58 Speaker_04
You can surprise your sister with a Chloe bracelet bag or your partner with a new scent from Gucci. You can even warm up your home with some new décor or warm up yourself with a new scarf from Totem.

00:03:10 Speaker_04
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00:03:18 Speaker_02
Well, this is the first conversation I've had publicly since the book came out. So if you can imagine, everyone else I've talked to in a public sense was before the entire experience with other people.

00:03:36 Speaker_04
When did it come out exactly?

00:03:38 Speaker_02
May 14th. And then I actually kind of went through a period of intense exhaustion, such that I've really laid low. I actually canceled everything.

00:03:50 Speaker_02
So I've, the whole experience of it coming out has been alone in a way, like has been through, you know, wonderful emails and messages and stuff.

00:04:00 Speaker_02
But I think in a way, friends have reported back and also with my having had the experience with the world, which of course changes it a bit from when you're, Just talking about a book theoretical book that no one's read and yeah, are you surprised?

00:04:19 Speaker_04
Do you feel?

00:04:20 Speaker_02
Recognized not as the you the person but also in terms of what you captured It's what I hoped for I felt like I was Consciously risking but knowing I wasn't alone and so the whole The whole bet was, OK.

00:04:41 Speaker_04
This represents the lives of many.

00:04:45 Speaker_02
Yeah, that I'm not just being risky to risk or to place precarity in my life, but actually to be able to have this conversation for the rest of my life. So that, in fact, it wouldn't be a big risk. It would actually be a form of creating security.

00:05:07 Speaker_02
In a way, the risky feeling that this was a secret or shameful or that something bad would happen if you spoke openly the way you might with your best friend about marriage and desire and domesticity and not just those things, right?

00:05:24 Speaker_02
We've talked about all those things, but a kind of,

00:05:29 Speaker_02
a fear that the way you feel inside has no place in life, even in what seems to be a very good life, that somewhere along the way, or maybe from the very start, you are living according to other people's rhythms, and that as you

00:05:50 Speaker_02
come into yourself, start waking up, growing up. For me, this was during perimenopause, another big secret, that that not fitting into your life feeling might become so great that It's a sort of secret agony that you just bear because what is it?

00:06:14 Speaker_02
It's nothing. It's just you complaining or, you know what I mean?

00:06:18 Speaker_04
It's so easily- That line, that moment where one of her crowdsourcers that basically says, just swallow it for the next five years, you'll come out on the other side and you'll be happy that you didn't jump ship.

00:06:31 Speaker_02
Yeah, that you didn't blow up your life, which, I mean, doesn't that sound sort of like not from you?

00:06:38 Speaker_02
That sort of sounds like sound advice, like, because I think also, especially as women, like, don't be erratic, don't be messy, don't be a basket case, right? There's so much shame around kind of intuition or actual change. I mean, we are erratic.

00:06:57 Speaker_04
It's actual change that is selfish. It's change that suits her.

00:07:03 Speaker_02
Yeah, right.

00:07:04 Speaker_04
I think it's that. It's not the change in and of itself. If they all move to Paris tomorrow.

00:07:09 Speaker_02
Changing schools. Yeah. We've done that a lot of times.

00:07:11 Speaker_04
It's the change where she puts herself at the center rather than her care and worry for the well-being of others.

00:07:19 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:07:20 Speaker_04
Which is actually part of the definition of motherhood, which is why so many women struggle to retrieve the woman behind the mother.

00:07:30 Speaker_04
because motherhood has to come with a certain chastity, a certain sacrifice, a certain abdication of oneself for the well-being of all the others. And so a mother that is selfish is a woman.

00:07:45 Speaker_04
I mean, it's less categorical than that, but a woman comes with autonomy, comes with freedom, and the mother,

00:07:57 Speaker_02
Right, and in some ways, if you don't have children, one way you can show you're good is by caretaking in other ways.

00:08:03 Speaker_04
You know, children can be elderly parents, can be the parents of your partner, can be your alcoholic brother.

00:08:10 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:08:11 Speaker_04
Are you being accused of, by the moral police, of trying to influence women to... I worried about that.

00:08:22 Speaker_02
I actually, yeah, had right before it came out, I was having real anxiety. that didn't make sense to me because I was like, well, I'm excited. I have the sense this is going to go well, you know, like, what is the anxiety?

00:08:35 Speaker_02
And it's like, oh, I'm going against, like, my dad, my, you know, just like a whole sort of patriarchal structure of good men, you know, like, and there was the the feeling like what happens when you do that?

00:08:54 Speaker_02
Like I literally thought like, am I safe here? I mean, I guess it's still early days, but.

00:08:59 Speaker_04
So you didn't treat this book as a novel. Well, when you speak like this, the auto fiction part of the book seems to be it's as if you, you took a responsibility for your characters.

00:09:13 Speaker_02
I mean, as far as I can speak to the relationship to my own self, if, you know, it is something I thought about a lot, because I didn't name the character and I, her job, you know, you could map my career onto hers.

00:09:31 Speaker_02
And that was, initially she was a writer. Her name was Marion. And I think after a while, I just was like, well, this,

00:09:43 Speaker_02
This is a book about the body, partly, and rather than conjuring up this fictional body, it seems more useful to generously loan some parts of myself to this narrator. And it doesn't take very much reality

00:10:02 Speaker_02
to make something come alive it's like red food coloring or something you just need like a little drop and suddenly the whole thing is pink and I thought I think that might be interesting and that's kind of where we're at with fiction and selves and social media you know everyone is already so busily constructing themselves that it just seemed like I think we're sophisticated enough to

00:10:26 Speaker_02
to handle that this is fiction, but that I haven't gone out of my way to prove that, you know?

00:10:33 Speaker_04
There was a woman yesterday who asked a question that she had divorced after whatever years, and she wanted to know how she could start a new relationship in which, or she was basically in a new relationship, but she was constantly worried that she would lose herself again.

00:10:53 Speaker_04
Which I think is a question that I don't hear as often from male-identified people. I hear it more from women. This notion that coming close to someone, holding on to another, often stands in opposition with holding on to oneself.

00:11:15 Speaker_02
What do you think of that? Right, yeah. I'm thinking about the beginning of my, so me and my girlfriend both came out of long marriages. And I remember the beginning of our relationship as just this joyful pleasure

00:11:40 Speaker_02
state and then I'm for some reason that made me think of just this one day where maybe a couple months into the relationship you know it's going so well so new and she said something in an offhand way but for some reason I had this like wait do I even know this person feeling and then I did what I do

00:12:04 Speaker_02
which is just kind of turned off. And in the turning off, it was like these bright lights that had been shining on us just went off. And I was like, oh, why did I think this was like this great new thing?

00:12:17 Speaker_02
This was just like a drug state, and now it's worn off. And this is just nothing. And right, I'll go home and whatever, just live my life. And this is sort of awkward now. And it was such a dramatic, drop and I was so sad about it.

00:12:37 Speaker_02
And I had this nagging feeling of like, I felt this before. Throughout my life, I've had this utter disappointment. And because we'd done pretty well at talking about things so far, I was like, I'm going to force myself to just say this.

00:12:53 Speaker_04
And I did, and I was nervous because in the past- Like somebody who's been swimming out in the ocean and suddenly realized they've kept swimming and they're very far?

00:13:04 Speaker_02
Well, I just didn't care about her suddenly anymore. I just turned off.

00:13:10 Speaker_04
So you disconnect.

00:13:11 Speaker_02
Yeah, I just, well, what my experience was just like, fuck, like I built this person up and now, yeah, I just don't feel that way anymore.

00:13:23 Speaker_02
In the past, if I'd said something along those lines, even if I said it with self-awareness, like, this is kind of weird. This just happened. I'm not sure what to think.

00:13:31 Speaker_02
The person would have, in the past, been like, well, that makes me feel pretty bad. Like, here I am. We're driving along. I thought we were having a great day. But there was somehow this new thing about her. And so I just said it.

00:13:45 Speaker_02
I just said, I don't know what to make of this, but I'm just going to be honest. This is what is going on inside me, why I've been quiet for the last few miles. And she said, yeah, it's really scary, isn't it, vulnerability? And I was like, what? What?

00:14:05 Speaker_02
Like it hadn't occurred. I was like vulnerability. That's why I shut off. Because I scared myself. Yeah. That's what I meant by I swam so far. Right. Yeah. You got it. And then I turned her because she'd been so into me.

00:14:18 Speaker_04
And it has very little to do about her and a lot more to do about us.

00:14:21 Speaker_02
Yeah. Right. Right. And she'd been so into me. And that's also part of why I turned off, and then I said to her, well, do you ever feel this way? Like you, you know, you don't. I know this is a thing about me. I can be hot and cold, whatever.

00:14:37 Speaker_02
And she was like, oh yeah, when I dropped you off the other night, I thought, maybe I'll just burn this whole thing down. And I was like, I'm so gleeful, like just,

00:14:48 Speaker_02
like felt so in love I was like you're kidding me you were gonna she's like yeah it's like maybe I'll just never call again and I just loved her so much and that was sort of the beginning in a way of realizing like oh there can be trust like

00:15:06 Speaker_02
I'm neither going to lose myself nor disconnect to a degree that I can't be found again. But it's all still very new to me. It's been a little more than a year and a half.

00:15:22 Speaker_04
It really joins what I began to answer the woman yesterday, you know, but I broadened it and I said there's often a tension in the good sense of the word in a relationship between one person more afraid of losing the other and one person more afraid of losing themselves.

00:15:42 Speaker_04
We all feel both, but we often outsource one side of the fear to the other person. So one person more afraid of abandonment and one person more afraid of suffocation.

00:15:53 Speaker_02
Right. If you... Yeah, no, and I've been... more afraid of suffocation but it can flip around, can't it?

00:16:04 Speaker_04
Yes, yes. I think flexibility in a relationship is when in fact people can go back and forth.

00:16:11 Speaker_04
What often happens is that people take on one side of the equation and they project onto the other person the part of the equation that is more challenging to them.

00:16:23 Speaker_02
Right, yeah, kind of outsourcing that, yeah.

00:16:26 Speaker_04
But you outsource the part that makes you more vulnerable than the one you keep.

00:16:30 Speaker_02
Right, and we do that all over the place, right?

00:16:34 Speaker_04
So when she tells you, I do this too, for one, your fear gets diffused. The extent of, oh, I can disconnect to such a level gets a little diluted because you've got someone else who said, I thought I was going to drop you off and never call you back.

00:16:49 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:16:49 Speaker_04
And so suddenly the part of you that doesn't want to lose her comes.

00:16:53 Speaker_02
Right, right. I'm going to be abandoned. Yeah.

00:16:55 Speaker_04
Exactly. So now you're in both places. I can be cold, but I also don't want you to leave me.

00:17:01 Speaker_02
Right.

00:17:02 Speaker_04
Now you're experiencing both parts of what I think is what we all have.

00:17:08 Speaker_02
Right.

00:17:09 Speaker_04
We all need security and we all need freedom. Right. But you can experience freedom better when the other person doesn't threaten you with their freedom.

00:17:22 Speaker_02
Right. Well, wait, break that down for me. OK.

00:17:29 Speaker_04
I'll break it down in like, I love your metaphor, so I'll try to give you a metaphor. The little kid sits here on your lap.

00:17:37 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:17:38 Speaker_04
It doesn't have to be your kid, a kid. And at some point, a child gets up and goes into the world.

00:17:44 Speaker_02
Right.

00:17:45 Speaker_04
to explore, to play, to discover.

00:17:47 Speaker_02
Right.

00:17:48 Speaker_04
And at some point, they turn around. Are you still there? Yeah. Yes. And when they see that you are there, what do they do? Go a little farther.

00:17:57 Speaker_05
Exactly.

00:17:58 Speaker_04
Right, right. That's it. Your freedom doesn't exist on its own. It feels that it can go further into playful, unselfconscious, carefree, risk-taking, because there is a solid base here.

00:18:12 Speaker_02
Yes.

00:18:13 Speaker_04
that you can come back to when you're done. If this base goes and does the same, that is often scary for people.

00:18:31 Speaker_03
We have to take a brief break. Stay with us.

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00:20:40 Speaker_04
Do you use the word erotic and sexual interchangeably?

00:20:45 Speaker_02
No, I guess sexual to me means like you're gonna

00:20:51 Speaker_02
get into it more, whereas there can be a sort of turned on feeling that just lives, that's, you know, maybe it's playful in some moments, like with your partner throughout the day, you know, but maybe, yeah, but it's not something that has to be acted on.

00:21:15 Speaker_04
So I'm curious what you think of that. I often think that modernity has reduced eroticism to sex, and that in the mystical sense of the word, eroticism has been about aliveness. And your character is in search of aliveness.

00:21:40 Speaker_04
It involves sexuality, but it is not the most central element. Eroticism is what gives sexuality meaning. You can do sex and feel very little.

00:21:50 Speaker_02
Right? Oh, yes.

00:21:51 Speaker_04
Right? I mean, women have done that for centuries. So I make a point of saying sexuality and eroticism, two different things. Sexuality is the pivot. It's the basic instinct. But eroticism is sexuality transformed by the human imagination.

00:22:08 Speaker_04
It's the poetics of sex. It's what gives it meaning. And then it means that it's about a quality of vibrancy, vitality, curiosity, playfulness. That's what makes it erotic, makes it alive.

00:22:26 Speaker_04
And when I wrote The State of Affairs, and I went around the world talking to people who had affairs, The one word that they all shared was, I felt alive. They didn't talk about the sex.

00:22:40 Speaker_04
Some of them had had once, some of them had had a lot, some of them that really wasn't the center, but alive was the word. Alive and vibrant, vital, energetic, something reconnected with oneself. What do you think of that?

00:22:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, I like that so much in your course that it extends out of, it's not just this thing in bed or something, like it's in all of life and you kind of cultivate it, you know, it's like something that can be in you all the time.

00:23:18 Speaker_02
I did, yeah, I wanted to, get that across in the in the book and that that's why you know so she has this kind of affair emotional affair but the reason why it's so hard to go home is Because once you've been alive, it's really hard to go back.

00:23:40 Speaker_02
And she's made one thing very alive. This is where I can be alive, in this room or with this person. And then this home is not where I feel alive. And I think it's like, since we're talking about such ephemeral things, there's no real reason why.

00:23:57 Speaker_02
that's true, you know? There's no, I mean, I do think there's real reasons kind of built into the structure of marriage or what people, you know, don't realize they're agreeing to and you have to kind of re-agree to other things.

00:24:13 Speaker_02
But I guess it's not putting it all back in the box when she goes home that creates the problems because that's tremendously painful to be faced with how little space you've given yourself moment to moment to feel alive.

00:24:29 Speaker_04
The fascinating thing for me is what that you call it an emotional affair.

00:24:34 Speaker_02
Yeah, maybe it's not. I think I got that from other people.

00:24:37 Speaker_04
Yeah, but this is a real cultural conversation. I mean, in the United States, there is a real desire to make a distinction between a sexual affair and an emotional affair.

00:24:49 Speaker_02
Yeah, I don't actually myself, I realize, like, I feel like I've had affairs with people I've, you know, only touched their hand, you know, and I've always sort of joked that I'm a bit Victorian, but I think it's also just that sex can be a lot of,

00:25:08 Speaker_02
I mean, I've also like had repeated intercourse that didn't really seem very, you know.

00:25:14 Speaker_04
Exactly. So I think of it sometimes as puritanical hair splitting. Because there was no penetration, then it's no longer a sexual affair. But they were feelings, so there was an emotional affair.

00:25:27 Speaker_04
When in fact, you know, you can have a very erotic experience without touching anything because your imagination, you know, it's like Proust's famous line, it's not the other person that's responsible for love, it's your imagination.

00:25:41 Speaker_04
So the character has a very erotic experience in this room. To me, it's as sexual as they come. And I think one of the things I try so hard, especially in my work with heterosexual couples, is to decouple sex from intercourse.

00:25:57 Speaker_04
That if there is no penis entering a vagina, then that meant there was no sex. Which is actually a thing that two women can really sidestep much more easily. But it is so entrenched.

00:26:13 Speaker_04
that this is where sex starts, and then it becomes so narrowly focused on those genitals, which when those genitals are not as available, people don't really know what to do.

00:26:27 Speaker_02
Yeah. I know. I do feel like all the little comments throughout the day are sex to me, you know?

00:26:39 Speaker_04
Yes, foreplay starts at the end of the previous orgasm. Right, I love that. That's the thing, right? It's the ways that you keep that energy, that you continue to eroticize your partner. You see, you sexualize your partner.

00:26:53 Speaker_04
That doesn't mean you're constantly thinking about having sex with him. It means that you see them as a sexual being And rather than you see them as your partner in management, Inc.

00:27:03 Speaker_04
And then at the end of the day, you know, you think that you can just roll around and suddenly be all hot and sweaty.

00:27:11 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:27:12 Speaker_04
You live together? No. Do you think that that structure, by definition,

00:27:19 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:27:20 Speaker_04
Allows for the preservation of that energy in a way where setting up home, living together, paying bills together, maybe having children together, you know, being a couple even without the legality of marriage, but being a couple in a system.

00:27:39 Speaker_02
Right. Yes.

00:27:41 Speaker_04
I mean... Rather than you are a couple outside of a system.

00:27:45 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, I know plenty of divorced moms who went on to find a new person and that became a new family unit, right? I didn't want that. I wanted to get to live alone with my child and kind of figure out

00:28:05 Speaker_02
what my home was, like what, like just sort of almost start from scratch, like here's who I really am. Sorry it took so long, but just, we can just, I'm just gonna be me day and night.

00:28:16 Speaker_04
It didn't take so long. Life, we get to know ourselves better.

00:28:21 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:28:21 Speaker_04
We develop confidence. I know. We may even have had those thoughts 20 years before, but that didn't mean that we had the confidence to live by them. And I think it's developmental.

00:28:31 Speaker_04
I don't think people at 20 or 30 know necessarily what you call who they are.

00:28:38 Speaker_02
I know. I really, yeah, I agree. And I've kind of had to tell myself with my, you know, when I think about my

00:28:46 Speaker_02
child kind of going through all this, it's like, well, I'm showing them change, like I'm modeling, like you get to change, you get to grow and change your whole life and become more yourself, like as you get older.

00:29:01 Speaker_02
And how old were you when you started to write the book? How long did it take? Yeah, I started at 45 and finished at 49. Now I'm 50.

00:29:12 Speaker_04
So I think I started meeting probably around 42. Oh, wow. You know? And I wrote it over two years. I actually had never thought about what stage I was in when I started to write it. Wow. That I began to think as I was reading your book.

00:29:32 Speaker_04
I thought of it as the stage of my youngest is five, I can finally start a project where I can read a book and remember the beginning when I reach the end. And I am ready to do something new and something creative.

00:29:47 Speaker_04
And so I took a year to write the initial article, and then the book project came out. But I didn't associate it with where I'm at. I just thought about all the things that I had learned, professionally too, that I questioned.

00:30:06 Speaker_04
Premises that we were instructed with about the meaning of sexuality in relationships. How do we interpret sexual stalemates in the context of the overall relationships?

00:30:18 Speaker_04
All these truths that I had kind of learned, and I began to question them one by one. And that's when I said, okay, love and desire, they relate, but they also conflict. And therein lies the mystery of eroticism. That's what I want to probe.

00:30:35 Speaker_04
What is the nature of desire in long-term relationships? Because in effect, you don't challenge the love of your relationship. You challenge desire and you challenge a certain experience of deadness. that creeps up in you and in him.

00:30:54 Speaker_04
And in him, I mean, he's actually, I think he's a very important character.

00:30:58 Speaker_02
In the book.

00:30:59 Speaker_04
In the book and not spoken enough about.

00:31:04 Speaker_04
Well, I'm a couples therapist, so I'm not just looking at the female partner, but I have, in this case, he's a man, but I'm very interested in his character, in his energy, in his own fantasy life, in his own relationship with Carol, which energizes him, which he then brings.

00:31:23 Speaker_04
He seems to be able to bring it home.

00:31:27 Speaker_02
I mean, it's interesting. I've gotten so many messages and emails from women who said, I never would have been able to say all these things to my husband, but I gave him the book and somehow he was able to understand it.

00:31:49 Speaker_02
And now we've changed everything. We've begun these conversations. And I think in some ways... It's exactly the goal of my courses. It's very interesting. Companion.

00:31:59 Speaker_04
Yes, they really go together. It's amazing how little people talk about this, especially with the person they're having sex with.

00:32:08 Speaker_02
Right.

00:32:09 Speaker_04
OK, keep going.

00:32:10 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's so hard. I mean, I see you with the course really brilliantly trying to figure out how do you... It's like seeing around a corner that you just can't see around, you know?

00:32:21 Speaker_02
And I think it does begin with a lot of questions, like you were saying, when you... started writing, mating, like, why are things the way they are? And she begins to ask that in the relationship. And it was really important to me that he's a good guy.

00:32:42 Speaker_02
Like, I didn't want the book to be about him in the sense, like, if he's doing terrible things or things that are, you know, you can't live with, then, like, well, of course, it's a less universal story in a way.

00:32:56 Speaker_02
It had to be about her, and I think in doing that, I sort of accidentally gave him more personhood, because he's not just the instigator of her, you know, as often happens in a story. But he's presented as less complex.

00:33:15 Speaker_02
Well, she was going into her darkness and he was sort of content to have the darkness of women near him. Without having to go into his own. Yeah. And that in some ways, that's often the women's role in this culture.

00:33:33 Speaker_02
Like, I will contain all the emotional turmoil and complexity and badness sometimes, you know, and you can remain like an upstanding citizen of a world that frankly was made for you.

00:33:49 Speaker_02
And I guess, I mean, it's been interesting as the book comes out, like I mentioned, some, you know, women have given it to their husbands and so forth. There's also been a lot of men who've written me who just identify with the narrator.

00:34:03 Speaker_02
and with the woman, and it kind of made me think, oh, just as my whole life I've read these heroes' journeys and learned and gotten very good at,

00:34:17 Speaker_02
being ambitious and brave and conquering and all these things that we attribute to the masculine or whatever. I mean, I'm great at those things. I'm a great archetypal man in a way.

00:34:32 Speaker_02
But the whole world of interiority that I have with my friends, like when we spend five hours in a row together, those men have no access to.

00:34:44 Speaker_02
And until it's sort of modeled for you, like, this is how intimately we're allowed to talk as humans, you know, of any gender. You can talk in this much detail. You can feel this much.

00:34:57 Speaker_02
The emails I've been getting, or the DMs, I should say, are like as if they were deprived of that knowledge. And they feel almost like they shouldn't get to know it.

00:35:10 Speaker_02
You know, they shouldn't even get to know about this kind of thought or conversation, but they are identifying it with their deepest selves, you know, not maybe with their lived relationships, but with their own feelings.

00:35:24 Speaker_02
And that's, I didn't, you know, that isn't what I was thinking about when I was writing, but it's quite moving to me.

00:35:32 Speaker_04
It's interesting, when you talk about the institution of marriage and you say that it was created to serve men, yes, there's a lot of that, but I also think that when we look at the kinds of relationship that you write, there's no winner.

00:35:48 Speaker_04
This thing is not working better for him than for her.

00:35:52 Speaker_02
Right.

00:35:52 Speaker_04
Even though men are more social if they are in a relationship, they are less likely to be in a bad health situation. They're more likely to live longer.

00:36:01 Speaker_04
I mean, there's a lot of indicators that say that the well-being of men in the context of a relationship goes up and the well-being of women goes down. But that's really by choosing certain kinds of indicators. I think

00:36:15 Speaker_04
in terms of losing oneself, in terms of disconnecting from one's own sense of pleasure, from one's desires, from one's sense of aliveness. I don't know that the situation is by definition

00:36:30 Speaker_04
worse for women than men and in same-sex relationships, it exists no less.

00:36:37 Speaker_04
There's something about the needs for creating the structure of the domestic that exists somewhat, well, the way that Stephen Mitchell says, it's like, we all have two sets of fundamental human needs.

00:36:53 Speaker_04
security, adventure, stability, change, predictability, surprise, familiarity, novelty. And these two sets of needs actually spring from different sources and pull us in different directions.

00:37:09 Speaker_04
And basically, for me, the fate of desire in modern relationship is about reconciling these two seemingly opposing sets of human needs.

00:37:18 Speaker_02
Right, right.

00:37:19 Speaker_04
So it's always like there is a certain context that is more likely to maintain desire, but it is not the same context that is more likely to, you know, what a love story needs is not the same as what a life story needs.

00:37:36 Speaker_02
Right, right.

00:37:37 Speaker_04
And this is the mystery for me.

00:37:46 Speaker_03
We have to take a brief break, so stay with me and let's see where this goes.

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00:41:18 Speaker_02
In your course, there's lots of stuff about- Yeah, tell me about your experience of the text. I'm really curious. Yeah, no, it's really pretty remarkable.

00:41:26 Speaker_02
I feel like it's one of those things, like sometimes, you know, when you read like a great text when you're young or at a certain point in your life, you read it but it doesn't really click and then you might continue living your life and suddenly you're like, oh, that's what she was talking about.

00:41:41 Speaker_02
Like, you know, like people should feel reassured that even if they don't feel like they're doing it well or getting it all it's all going in and it's now a resource so they can recognize it in their life.

00:41:54 Speaker_02
You know I had all these questions but I was like oh she's not going to want to talk in detail about her life but I guess like I wanted to know like I know what's erotic for for me or what's foreplay for me like I could

00:42:12 Speaker_02
And the writer in me wants some details from you. I want to know what you like.

00:42:20 Speaker_04
You know, it's interesting. It's not a direct answer to your question, but it's something that I was talking before, because you go to see this endocrinologist and she's starting to talk with you about hormones and all of that.

00:42:33 Speaker_04
One of the very interesting findings about hormones therapy in women is that the placebo response is around 50-something, 52, 54, if I remember well. Can't be the exact number, maybe, but it's astoundingly high.

00:42:49 Speaker_04
So you ask yourself, what does that say? If half the women respond to a placebo, It says that if she goes to get help, because she says, I want to experience some arousal again, even spontaneous arousal.

00:43:08 Speaker_04
I want to experience the energy of my body that I used to know and not just feel completely numb. If she thinks about herself, if she attends to herself, if she pampers herself, All of those things will have an effect comparable to the hormones.

00:43:28 Speaker_04
Or in other words, in your case, if you give her a new plot, sometimes she doesn't need hormones, just give her a new story, a story that motivates her, engages her, ignites her. That to me is a very important piece.

00:43:48 Speaker_04
For me, it's a ton of different things. Sometimes it has to do with music and singing. I love to sing and I love to dance. Now, the difference is that you can sing and be very, very sad. But you cannot dance and be sad.

00:44:03 Speaker_02
Yeah, sometimes.

00:44:05 Speaker_04
The body just won't dance when it is completely collapsed.

00:44:09 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:44:09 Speaker_04
And so I love both of these things. Yeah. Anytime. I mean, there's probably not much else that can get me out of a mood than to move.

00:44:20 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:44:21 Speaker_04
And then it's about, you know, paying attention to, I grew up above a clothing store, you know, and I grew up in a clothing store of my parents, so clothes make a big difference, you know, to paying attention, to making yourself feel good, it's that.

00:44:41 Speaker_04
Then it's about laughing. I mean, I have a partner who has a phenomenal sense of humor and can really take me out of different situations. And I find humor is an exquisite form of intelligence.

00:44:56 Speaker_04
And then a lot of it is doing new things together with my partner, things that we haven't done, from travel to art to projects that we do together.

00:45:06 Speaker_04
It's throwing ourselves into expansive and new situations rather than settling on what is more cozy and familiar

00:45:17 Speaker_04
It's like, you know, the friendship part of a relationship loves to be cozy and comfortable, but the erotic part of a relationship wants to experience novelty and mystery and surprise. So I am a very active seeker of those kinds of things.

00:45:39 Speaker_04
So it's a lot of different things. And I think because sometimes it could feel like, oh, you're just an experienced junkie or something else. And it's really not.

00:45:50 Speaker_04
The reason I'm actually really, really interested in eroticism is because I grew up in a community of people who had experienced massive trauma. They were all Holocaust survivors. They all had lost pretty much their entire family, their entire life.

00:46:05 Speaker_04
And I was fascinated by how does one get up after all of this and still find the taste to live and maybe even a joie de vivre. So that's why my interest came up and why I keep thinking about aliveness.

00:46:22 Speaker_04
Because aliveness is freedom, possibility, adventure, you know, self-definition, self-determination. It's all of that. It's not just excitement. Yeah, I know. You know?

00:46:35 Speaker_04
And part of why I got then hooked myself in it is because I thought, if you are the child of that legacy, you better do something with your life. And that meant I wasn't gonna have a little life. Whatever I defined as little, I wanted a rich life.

00:46:53 Speaker_04
Not money, not fame, rich. Rich with people, with experiences, with meaning, with meaning. And because I had to make up for all those who hadn't had a chance to live. And it's from that place that my drive comes. It's a very young, old drive.

00:47:13 Speaker_04
And I spent decades not connecting the dots. Yeah, isn't that wild? You know, so when you say like, you know, why didn't I do it earlier? Because earlier you plant the seeds.

00:47:26 Speaker_02
Right.

00:47:27 Speaker_04
But you don't always know why.

00:47:29 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:47:30 Speaker_04
And then one day, I write my book, like you wrote your book. And I, and I remember a conversation with Jack about that, where I just really understood that distinction. I'm not writing a book about sex.

00:47:46 Speaker_04
I see loads of people who have regular good sex, fine, but that doesn't make them feel alive. And I know people who have not that much sex anymore, but they have an energy in their relationship that spark, that je ne sais quoi, what is it?

00:48:03 Speaker_04
That's what got me interested.

00:48:05 Speaker_02
Yeah, oh that's so important because it also, it sort of cuts through this idea that pleasure is kind of connected to luxury or something, you know, that there's a, like I feel like when I've been forced to contend with my body the most, it's been out of suffering, you know, and that's when I've been kind of most

00:48:30 Speaker_02
in my body and learn to notice what it feels and wants. And I think somehow sex and pleasure got very divorced from the same body that feels pain. And there really is all the same and in a way you need to understand both to understand either of them.

00:48:57 Speaker_04
Can you understand pleasure without understanding pain?

00:49:00 Speaker_02
Yeah, that's sort of, right. And somehow humor connects them too, right? Yes, yes.

00:49:09 Speaker_04
I mean, it's the same as can you be happy without having known sorrow?

00:49:13 Speaker_02
And humor is the part that's like points at kind of the wrongness of that, you know, and that that's okay, you know, that they're mixed up, the suffering and the pleasure and the pangs and the different, the pleasure isn't, this one creamy thing.

00:49:31 Speaker_02
I mean, you, you speak really eloquently about that, of course, but that it's like a whole person, you know, along with their childhood and all their, you know, all their suffering is part of what they have to work with, and pleasure wise.

00:49:48 Speaker_04
So the one thing that I was thinking about that, you know, you brought up humor as well, and playfulness, but also the playfulness of the language. Sexuality is a very treacherous language. In itself, it is a very interesting language and vocabulary.

00:50:09 Speaker_04
And talking about sexuality is often, especially I have to say in this society, it's either smut or sanctimony. Right.

00:50:21 Speaker_04
And it's very, I mean so much of what I've tried to do is to provide a vocabulary for talking about sexuality that is neither of these extremes and that just helps to develop a comfortable

00:50:35 Speaker_04
metaphorical language to talk about one's desire, one's preferences, fantasies, fetishes, and frustrations for that matter. But you bring, you know, you've got a ton of these fantastic metaphors from the one that everybody quotes of the

00:50:53 Speaker_04
the whistling tea kettle to, but it is an amazing image. You kind of visualize it immediately. That's what metaphors do. So I'm very curious about your quest for that language, your playfulness in the language.

00:51:09 Speaker_04
It's not just that it's raw and unvarnishedly direct and all of that. It's more than that.

00:51:16 Speaker_02
I mean, I guess I have to be interested and surprised by anything I'm writing, you know, for it to come alive.

00:51:29 Speaker_02
with any topic that's kind of been hit a lot, you know, it's like I go off the path in order just to feel surprised and to feel it as it really happens in life.

00:51:44 Speaker_02
Because, you know, when it's interesting, presumably all the sex in the book is like worth writing about, you know, then you want to come up with like, well, what's, like, I remember what that feels like.

00:51:55 Speaker_02
you know, but it doesn't, it's not going to work just to write something that happened in my life because I'm not surprised by that anymore. So I have to be surprised all over again, you know, like have my breath taken away. I remember the point,

00:52:14 Speaker_02
there's a character, I don't want to give stuff away or whatever, who's kind of a smaller character in the beginning and who comes back midway through the book and the narrator spends like a night with her.

00:52:29 Speaker_02
And I was so, I kind of knew this night was going to happen in some form, but I was so shocked that it was her. And I was like, oh my God, she was there all along.

00:52:43 Speaker_04
I think it's a great place to stop. Thank you, Miranda. And Miranda Julay is the author of All Fours, and Tour de Force, and an artist that you absolutely want to discover. So it's a pleasure. Thank you. Such an honor.

00:53:02 Speaker_04
If listening to my conversation with Miranda July inspires you to want to learn more, I invite you to read All Force by Miranda July, and I invite you to explore my course, The Esther Perel Desire Bundle. It has two parts.

00:53:20 Speaker_04
bringing desire back for if you are really stuck, and playing with desire for if you actually want to take the flicker and see to what extent it can become a more heavily burning flame.

00:53:40 Speaker_08
Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel is produced by Magnificent Noise. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with New York Magazine and The Cut.

00:53:49 Speaker_08
Our production staff includes Eric Newsom, Destry Sibley, Sabrina Farhi, Kristen Muller, and Julian Hatt. Original music and additional production by Paul Schneider. And the executive producers of Where Should We Begin are Esther Perel and Jesse Baker.

00:54:06 Speaker_08
We'd also like to thank Courtney Hamilton, Mary Alice Miller, and Jack Saul.

00:54:18 Speaker_01
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00:55:02 Speaker_07
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