Ever wondered what it would be like to be a fly on the arm of a therapy couch? Now you don’t have to: Esther Perel, psychotherapeutic guru and eroticism expert, has a long-running podcast which functions as that fly.
You may know Perel from her 2006 self-help smash Mating in Captivity, which explored the challenges of maintaining sexual desire in the domestic sphere and offered some solutions for married couples stuck in missionary. The Oprah-anointed Ted Talker has also been populating podcast feeds for some six years now and her showWhere Should We Begin? recently launched its sixth season.
The gist is that couples agree to have their one-off sessions with Perel recorded – names and other identifying elements removed, obvs – and over the course of 40 minutes or so, they talk through some major obstacle they’ve encountered in their relationship. And, by God, there are some real sticky issues out there. What would you do, for example, if you found out the father of your child had donated sperm to a friend you also know whose two children turned out to be his? Oh, and then he lied about it for 10 years? Or how about if you found out your partner was cheating on you when a doctor diagnosed you with an STD? Ooh, what about if your husband of decades turned out to be having paid sex the entire time?
And, sure, these situations may often seem outside the realm of common experience but in each of them there’s a germ of learning about relationships in general and no better woman to sift it out. Perel can take a conversation about the difficulties navigating a polyamorous relationship and drill it down to insecurities born from repressed anger and having to navigate a white world as a black man. A Belgian-American Jewish woman whose parents both survived Nazi concentration camps, she’s keenly attuned to family and generational trauma and also aware of the limited lens of her own experience. But, boy, can she cut through a conversation to find everybody’s secret, deeply human place.
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“That’s beautiful,” she’ll often tell her couples in delightfully accented English, then bring out some no-bulls**t second clause along the lines of: “but your wife is telling you she doesn’t want that.” She is both empathetic and validating – it’s therapy, innit – but also astoundingly astute and unafraid to call out the nonsense as she sees it.
Listening to these deeply personal, fraught recountings of people’s feelings can feel a little voyeuristic – and it’s a certain level of dishy to be absorbing such tales of people’s infidelities and sexual proclivities – but it’s rescued always by its host’s insightful take on what often translates to a surprisingly relatable grappling with the stuff of life. Perel’s podcast feed also includes her bite-size Esther Calling podcasts, which involve one-on-one phone calls with individuals navigating particular problems. You’ll even hear some Irish voices among them.
With the production values you’d expect from a woman with one of the highest profiles in her field, there’s clearly plenty of behind-the-scenes editing that gives each episode the kind of narrative arc that rarely exists in messy, as-it-happens therapy sessions. All this helps in the storytelling and lends emphasis to the solutions provided by Perel. In short, there’s plenty to learn here about why we do what we do and how we love, regardless of where we are. And about how we hide our truths even from ourselves. Good luck hiding any of those from Perel, though: turns out there’s no flies on her.
