Name: Esther Perel | Modern Love and Relationships | SXSW 2018
Uploaded: 2020-03-07T21:21:19.000Z
Duration: 55 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - A2

These clips are from the podcast where should we begin?

I'm Esther Perel, and I am a couples therapist

For the past 35 years I've been helping couples and people navigate the challenges of

Until not too long ago. There was no such a thing as a couples therapist

Basically you got together with somebody you married, and that was it you were stuck for life

If you didn't like it well you could concern yourself with an early death

Not as we have it today as till love dies

Never before has the survival of the family dependent on the happiness of the couple and

This has made the couple such a central unit

The unit of relationships that is probably undergoing the most changes in a very short amount of time

never have we divorced or broken up more in the name of love I

Imagine a world in which we can experience

relationships with a sense of vitality and aliveness and vibrancy

the quality of your relationships is what determines the quality of your life and

The bonds and the connections that we make with other people that we established with them

Gives us a greater sense of meaning of happiness of well-being than any other

How many of you are in a relationship at this moment a romantic relationship, let's put it like that

And how many of you would like to be in a relationship

And now I would like some more light on the house for the next question

How many of you would like to be out of the relationship that you're in at least sometimes

You can leave the lights on at this moment

So we we can actually really relate to each other to

Relationships at this moment are undergoing such a massive shift

The norms are literally changing under our feet, and we have to make up the rulebook as we go

Our relationships were pretty simple because they were dictated by rules

Religion had clear strictures, and it had structure and it had incentives and it had

Social hierarchy was also very clear and it told us

how parents had to talk to the kids how children had to

Respond to adults her husband's had to talk to their wives and how wives didn't have to answer their husbands

All the decisions were made for us the big decisions

Who was going to wake up at night to feed the baby? Who has the right to demand for sex?

What you did is what you father did and at this moment we

have unraveled this system, and we have created a world of options and choices and

But as a result we have to negotiate everything. It's all up for grabs

It's no longer clear who's gonna be the breadwinner in fact whose career is gonna

Take priority at this time who's gonna wake up tomorrow morning to feed the baby

Who's responsible for anything sure initiating sex next time who's going to plan the date?

What gender should I be dating how many people should I be dating at the same time?

Am I ready to have children do I even want to have children should I move east should I move West?

Am I in mind my needs, but getting met in this relationship?

All these big decisions that have burdened the selfs like never before we have to figure it all out and

Conversations have become the heart of relationships

We have to talk about stuff that we've never talked about that

We don't know how to talk about that we don't have the vocabulary to talk about and most of the time

So I want to unpack this conundrum with you

The way I think is this I'm imagining you sitting there saying so what is she going to tell me?

You know and I'm gonna tell you right up front so that you can relax in your anticipation

I do not have three easy steps for what you need to do

because as you may have heard I have an accent which means that I'm not from here and

one of the things that non Americans sometimes say is that for some reason Americans think that every problem needs to have a solution and

I don't have a solution because many of these things are not a problem that we have to solve

but these are paradoxes that we need to manage.

For me to understand the confusions and the pains that we are experiencing in our relationships at this point

Demands that I kind of put it in context. How did we get there? What has happened?

What have been the big social and cultural shifts that are directly entering our sheets at this moment?

So allow me to take you on a quick tour in history

For a long time as social animals we lived in tribes. We lived in villages

We lived in communities and in those villages

we were told what to do and things were clear in return for allegiance and for obedience I

Would get a sense of belonging I would get a sense of continuity. I would get a sense of identity I

Got a lot of certainty. I got very little freedom, but I was never alone and

We moved to the cities and in our urban lives

we are for the first time so much more free, but also so much more alone and

For the first time we are turning to our romantic partners

To help us with that aloneness to help us transcend that existential aloneness

We still want all the same things that traditional marriage was about we want family life some of us we want

Companionship we want economic support we want social status

but now I want you also to be my best friend and my

Trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot and all for the long haul and the long haul keeps getting longer

What we have created in a romantic ambition is one person to give us once an entire village used to provide

As I have sometimes said you don't solve this problem with Victoria's Secrets

And since there is no victor secret. We all know where the responsibility has lied

The collective life where we had belonging

But very little freedom to where we have a lot of freedom, but everywhere we talk about relationships today

We hear about the fact that we no longer have a deep sense of

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Esther Perel | Modern Love and Relationships | SXSW 2018

literally

perspective

intense

massive