It’s safe to assume that Esther Perel never set out to be a celebrity. When her debut book, Mating in Captivity, was published in September 2006, her subject matter was still something discussed mainly among friends after several drinks, or between psychology professors at bourgeois parties. Thanks to Carrie Bradshaw and Tony Soprano, sex and therapy were technically in, but the erotic, in its deeper interrogation of sex and relationships, was still esoteric; the couch was, if intriguing, still something of a taboo.
Perhaps most importantly, “non-monogamy” was still called cheating, and the idea that such behaviour could be “ethical” was lost on all but those at the fringes of society who were one swingers party away from a Louis Theroux documentary.
Twenty years on, and Perel is, at least for the emotionally literate and terminally online, virtually a household name, with an estimated net worth of $15m. As Mating in Captivity celebrates its milestone with a special anniversary edition, it has grown its reputation from cult bestseller to self-improvement must-read, and Perel has become the poster-woman for enlightened modern love.
Her rise to fame has happened alongside both the growth of “therapy culture” and the explosion of celebrity culture into something well beyond straightforward showbusiness. These changes have been instrumental in shaping her career – and she has herself had an enormous impact on how we view ourselves and our relationships.
Perel has written extensively on affairs, reframing infidelity as not necessarily a fatal blow for a marriage but an opportunity to explore the underlying dynamics that led to it. This purported removal of the “villain and victim” narrative has proved controversial; some people have argued that her work in general enables bad behaviour and encourages people – particularly women – to stay in relationships they’d be better off leaving.
Yet, by the same token she has also helped us to empathise, to make better informed decisions and to deepen our understanding of ourselves. Many more people idolise her as the ultimate relationship guru, listening to her podcast, buying her books and following her online. Her influence has also seeped into art: in 2017, she advised on the drama The Affair starring Dominic West and Ruth Wilson; more recently she acted as a consultant on Olivia Wilde’s sticky portrait of two marriages, The Invite, and she worked on the development of the upcoming drama Let Love In.
“Art can do things that therapy cannot,” Perel told the New York Times – yet here she is, a therapist, with a seat in the writers’ room.
Mating in Captivity sold well in its first decade, but it wasn’t until seven years later that it became a global phenomenon. In 2013, Perel gave a TED talk – then the ultimate platform for experts – on “the secret to desire in a long-term relationship”. The video on YouTube went viral. It summarised the book’s core argument that the security and familiarity of marriage is fundamentally at odds with the separateness necessary to fuel desire – and that to sustain eroticism over a long period of time, couples must look to create not more closeness, per se, but more mystery.
If a Belgian psychotherapist talking publicly about sex did not, in the early 2010s, seem like the most marketable prospect, she had soon captivated people from all over the world, including married couples facing the issues she was talking about, but also including a generation of young adults beginning to learn that images of Hugh Grant, Colin Firth or Ryan Gosling kissing you in inclement weather were not realistic depictions of a romantic relationship.
This burgeoning interest in emotional intelligence coincided directly with this and the rise of social media – two things that, in their quests for self-actualisation, are themselves directly related. In turn, social media enabled a market for both ideas and people on a scale previously unseen. Over the course of the 2010s, the book’s popularity – along with Perel’s – skyrocketed.
Perel’s podcast ‘Where Should We Begin?’ was revolutionary in broadcasting real voices from the therapy roomPerel’s philosophy is now so ingrained in the way many of us think about relationships that her ideas might seem obvious. Along with the need to maintain difference in a relationship, and the idea that infidelity does not have to be a death knell for a marriage, Perel has written and spoken extensively about the idea that the modern monogamous couple is under more pressure than ever before to be everything to one another. We ask of our partners what we might once have asked of a village – because our societies are increasingly atomised and devoid of traditional community, we project onto our partners not only our childhood traumas and primal desires but our fundamental lifestyle needs, causing relationships to buckle under the weight of expectations.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say Perel’s popularisation of all these ideas has revolutionised how thousands of people think and talk about relationships: she has enabled more understanding, more connection, and, doubtless, a lot more sex. It is perhaps no coincidence that in the past 20 years it has also become commonplace for couples to be “open”, that is to say non-monogamous, or even fully polyamorous – a trend that connects with the “village” idea but also, of course, with rethinking the meaning of infidelity.
Perel’s incredibly successful podcast, Where Should We Begin, was revolutionary in broadcasting real voices from the therapy room: couples would see her for a one-off session, which would then be condensed into an episode and spliced with her retrospective insights. When it first came out in 2017, it was thrilling: the juiciest parts of reality TV combined with expert commentary and a lens through which we could consider ourselves and our own relationships.
Perel said at the time that the podcast was like a “public health campaign for relationships”. Such access to the inner workings of couples therapy – again, once reserved for a particular kind of literary set, or only the most broken relationships, and now so popular it might as well be your first Hinge date – was unprecedented.
‘Couples Therapy’ features real couples therapy sessions with psychoanalyst Orna Guralnik (Photo: BBC/Showtime)Its success speaks to an entertainment culture in which fact and fiction are often blurred, real people providing the drama once afforded us by fictional characters. Now, of course, we have gone even further than the podcast, with Couples Therapy, the Showtime documentary in which we not only hear but see couples’ therapy sessions with the ever enigmatic and poised psychoanalyst Orna Guralnik (who has herself become an internet icon in the seven years since the show first aired), multiple sessions unfolding over the course of a season. A Netflix knock-off, Blue Therapy, came out last year (but it originally started on YouTube as a web series in 2021).
Perel said of her podcast that couples therapy was “the best theatre in town”, and of her 2017 book The State of Affairs, that infidelity was “the entire human drama, and I thought, except for the opera, where does one go for this?” There is now plenty to choose from for those for whom the opera isn’t enough.
It would be unfair to suggest that Perel’s motivations were cynical or that her work had not helped thousands of people. And she has charisma in spades: that ambiguous accent and those piercing blue eyes make everything she says captivating, before she’s even got to the juicy stuff. Yet, it’s also striking how, in the environment of social media, she has become a celebrity – the main character of modern relationships. Her personal brand is so strong that it can threaten to eclipse the actual substance of the ideas; her actual brand, the part that makes her money, somewhat dilutes the therapeutic atmosphere. “My new betrayals content will include repair,” goes a recent Instagram caption. “Comment WAITLIST for VIP access.”
Esther Perel at at live ‘Where Should We Begin?’ event at SXSW Conference & Festivals in Austin, Texas earlier this year (Photo: Mike Jordan/ SXSW Getty)Though her podcast is fascinating, I have come to find her style a little didactic, jumping in to narrativise or condense client statements into stories that feel to me almost too neat. If those who dislike her for her cheater-apologism feel she uses nuance to give people too much grace, for me it’s almost the opposite: the well-worn grooves of Perel-ism – you feel this, she feels that, desire, the “dance” – have become rather prescriptive templates, and, spoiler alert, the algorithm loves it.
Perel wrote in Mating in Captivity that in a public discussion “the most complex issues tend to polarize in a flash, and nuance is replaced with caricature”. You only have to read the takedown pieces about her to know that that’s true – but being very public herself, can she truly stay in the grey?
Now in the sixth series of Couples Therapy, Guralnik has talked about the projection that happens on a collective level as a result of the show, particularly for the couples who come in for the new season. They’ve almost all watched it before, which affects their expectations for what she will provide. The same is true for followers of Perel, though unless you’re calling in for one of the podcasts – she’s also expanded into Esther Calling, short calls with an individual, and How’s Work, which interrogates the altogether less scintillating world of professional relationships – most of us don’t form an actual therapeutic relationship with her.
What we do, though, is project onto her the fantasy of a person who has all the answers to difficult and complicated questions. “She was incredibly helpful in terms of my own personal growth and understanding of relationships and really kind of blew my mind. I’d never met anyone like her,” said Olivia Wilde, echoing, no doubt, the feelings of many, many people who have never met her at all.
‘Mating In Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence’, special 20th anniversary edition, is out now
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