Esther Perel is a psychotherapist, a best-selling author, and the host of the podcast Where Should We Begin? She’s also a leading expert on contemporary relationships. This column is adapted from the podcast — which is now part of the Vox Media Podcast Network — and you can listen and follow for free on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
For this special episode of Where Should We Begin?, Esther Perel invited Miranda July, the author of All Fours, to take her bundle course on sexuality and desire. Then, the two of them met in Los Angeles to discuss how All Fours, much like Perel’s Mating in Captivity, explores the tension between the domestic and erotic, between our need for safety and our need for adventure, between stability and aliveness — especially for women ages 45 to 50 who may be experiencing a narrowing down of the libido and who are wondering, Is this it?
Miranda July: 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.
Esther Perel: Oh, wow. When did it come out exactly?
Miranda July: May 14. And then I went through a period of intense exhaustion, such that I’ve really laid low. I actually canceled everything. So the whole experience of it coming out has been alone in a way, through wonderful emails and messages and stuff. Friends have reported back, like, “I saw someone reading it” or “They’re having these conversations.” This is actually my first conversation with someone I don’t know who’s read the book. Also with my having had the experience with the world, which of course changes it from when you’re just talking about a theoretical book that no one’s read.
Esther Perel: Are you surprised? Do you feel recognized not just as a person, but also in terms of what you captured?
Miranda July: It’s what I hoped for. I felt like I was consciously risking but knowing I wasn’t alone. And so the whole bet was—
Esther Perel: That this represents the lives of many.
Miranda July: Yeah, that I’m not just being risky 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. The risky feeling that this was 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? — but 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 were living according to other people’s rhythms and that as you come into yourself — 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 secret agony that you just bear. Because what is it? It’s nothing. It’s just you complaining. You know what I mean?
Esther Perel: That moment where one of her crowdsourcers basically says, “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.”
Miranda July: Yeah, that you didn’t blow up your life. Which, doesn’t that sound sort of like sound advice? “Don’t be erratic. Don’t be messy. Don’t be a basket case.” There’s so much shame for women around intuition or actual change. I mean, we are erratic.
Esther Perel: It’s actual change that is selfish. It’s change that suits her. It’s not change in and of itself. It’s the change where she puts herself at the center rather than her care and worry for the well-being of others. Which is actually part of the definition of motherhood, which is why so many women struggle to retrieve the woman behind the mother. 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.
Miranda July: Right.
Esther Perel: It’s less, less categorical than that, but a woman comes with autonomy, comes with freedom, and the mother—
Miranda July: Right. And if you don’t have children, one way you can show you’re good is by caretaking in other ways.
Esther Perel: Yeah, “children” can be elderly parents, can be the parents of your partner, can be your alcoholic brother.
Are you being accused by the moral police of trying to influence women to—
Miranda July: I worried about that. Right before it came out, I was having real anxiety that didn’t make sense to me because I was like, “I’m excited, I have this sense this is going to go well. What is the anxiety?” And I was like, “Oh, I’m going against my dad, a whole patriarchal structure of good men,” you know? What happens when you do that? Like, I literally thought, Am I safe here? I mean, it’s still early days.
Esther Perel: So you didn’t treat this book as a novel? When you speak like this, the auto-fiction part of the book — it’s as if you took responsibility for your characters.
Miranda July: As far as I can speak to the relationship to my own self — it is something I thought about a lot. Because I didn’t name the character; you could map my career onto hers. Initially, she was a writer. Her name was Marian. And I think after a while, I was like, “Well, 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.” It doesn’t take very much reality to make something come alive. It’s like red food coloring or something — you just need a little drop, and suddenly the whole thing is pink. And that’s kind of where we’re at with fiction and selves and social media. Everyone is already so busily constructing themselves that it just seemed like, “I think we’re sophisticated enough to handle that this is fiction,” but that I haven’t gone out of my way to prove that.
Esther Perel: There was a woman yesterday who asked a question. She had divorced after years and she was in a new relationship, but she was constantly worried that she would lose herself again. Which 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 onto another, often stands in opposition with holding onto oneself. What do you think of that?
Miranda July: Right. So me and my girlfriend both came out of long marriages and I remember the beginning of our relationship as just this joyful, pleasure state. For some reason, that made me think of this one day, maybe a couple months into the relationship. You know, it’s going so well, it’s so new, and she said something in an offhand way but I had this like, “Wait, do I even know this person?” feeling. And then I did what I do, which is kind of turn off. It was like these bright lights that had been shining on us just went off. I was like, “Why did I think this was like this great new thing? This was just like a drug state and now it’s worn off and this is just nothing. I’ll go home and just live my life. This is sort of awkward now.” It was such a dramatic drop, and I was so sad about it. I had this nagging feeling of “I’ve 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 gonna force myself to just say this.” And I did. I was nervous because in the past …
Esther Perel: Like somebody who’s been swimming out in the ocean and suddenly realized they’ve kept swimming and they’re very far?
Miranda July: Well, I just didn’t care about her suddenly anymore. I just turned off.
Esther Perel: So you disconnect.
Miranda July: My experience was just like, “Fuck, I built this person up and now I don’t feel that way anymore.” 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” — the person would’ve been like, “Well, that makes me feel pretty bad. 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: “I don’t know what to make of this, but I’m just gonna 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? Vulnerability — that’s why I shut off?”
Esther Perel: Because I scared myself. That’s what I meant by “I swam so far.”
Miranda July: Right, you got it. And then I turned her, because she’d been so into me.
Esther Perel: That has very little to do about her and a lot more to do about us.
Miranda July: Yeah. Right. And she’d been so into me — that’s also part of why I turned off. Then I said to her, “Do you ever feel this way? I know this is a thing about me. I can be hot and cold.” 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.” I was so gleeful, felt so in love. I was like, “You’re kidding me!” She was like, “Yeah I was like, Maybe I’ll just never call again.” And I just loved her so much. That was sort of the beginning of realizing there can be trust. I am 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.
Esther Perel: It really joins what I began to answer the woman yesterday. I broadened it and said that there’s often a tension — in the good sense of the word — in the relationship between one person more afraid of losing the other and one person more afraid of losing themself. We all feel both. We often outsource one side of the fear to the other person: One person is more afraid of abandonment and one person is more afraid of suffocation.
Miranda July: Right. And I’ve been more afraid of suffocation. But it can flip around, can’t it?
Esther Perel: Yes. I think flexibility in a relationship is when in fact people can go back and forth. 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.
Miranda July: Right, kind of outsourcing that.
Esther Perel: You outsource the part that makes you more vulnerable than the one you keep.
Miranda July: Oof. We do that all over the place. Right?
Esther Perel: So once 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 gonna drop you off and never call you back.” So suddenly, the part of you that doesn’t want to lose her comes out.
Miranda July: Right, I’m gonna be abandoned.
Esther Perel: Yes. Exactly. So now you are in both places. I can be cold, but I also don’t want you to leave me. Now you are experiencing both parts of what I think we all have. We all need security and we all need freedom. But you can experience freedom better when the other person doesn’t threaten you with their freedom.
Miranda July: Wait, break that down for me.
Esther Perel: Okay, I’ll break it down. I love your metaphor, so I’ll try to give you a metaphor. The little kid sits here on your lap. It doesn’t have to be your kid. A kid. And at some point, that child gets up and goes into the world to explore, to play, to discover. And at some point, they turn around.
Miranda July: “Are you still there?”
Esther Perel: Yes. And when they see that you are there, what do they do?
Miranda July: They can go a little farther.
Esther Perel: Exactly. That’s it. Your freedom doesn’t exist on its own. It feels that it can go further into playful, un-self-conscious, carefree risk-taking because there is a solid base here that you can come back to when you’re done. If this base goes and does the same, that is often scary for people.
Esther Perel: Do you use the words “erotic” and “sexual” interchangeably?
Miranda July: No. I guess “sexual” to me means you’re going to get into it more, whereas there can be a sort of turned-on feeling that just lives that’s maybe playful in some moments, like with your partner throughout the day, but maybe it’s not something that has to be acted on.
Esther Perel: 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. Your character is in search of aliveness. 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. I mean, women have done that for centuries. So I make a point of saying sexuality and eroticism are two different things. Sexuality is the pivot. It’s the basic instinct. But eroticism is sexuality transformed by the human imagination. It’s the poetics of sex. It’s what gives it meaning. And then it means that it’s about equality of vibrancy, vitality, curiosity, playfulness. That’s what makes it erotic, makes it alive.
When I wrote The State of Affairs and 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. Some of them had had once, some of them had had a lot. But “alive” was the word. Alive and vibrant, vital, energetic. Something reconnected with oneself. What do you think of that?
Miranda July: I like that so much about your course. That it’s not just this thing in bed, it’s in all of life and you cultivate it. It’s something that can be in you all the time. I wanted to get that across in the book. She has this kind of 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. 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. We’re talking about such ephemeral things; there’s no real reason why that’s true.
I do think there’s real reasons built into the structure of marriage or what people don’t realize they’re agreeing to. And you have to re-agree to other things. But I guess it’s not putting it all back in the box when she goes home that creates the problems. Because it’s tremendously painful to be faced with how little space you’ve given yourself moment to moment to feel alive.
Esther Perel: The fascinating thing for me is what, that you call it an emotional affair.
Miranda July: Yeah, maybe it’s not. I think I got that from other people.
Esther Perel: This is a real cultural conversation. In the United States, there is a real desire to make a distinction between a sexual affair and an emotional affair.
Miranda July: Yeah. I feel like I’ve had affairs with people when I’ve only touched their hand. I’ve always joked that I’m a bit Victorian, but I think it’s also that sex can be a lot of things. I mean, I’ve also had repeated intercourse that didn’t really seem very … you know?
Esther Perel: Exactly. I think of it sometimes as puritanical hair-splitting: There was no penetration, then it’s no longer a sexual affair, but there were feelings, so there was an emotional affair. When, in fact, you can have a very erotic experience without touching. It’s like Proust’s famous line. “It’s not the other person that’s responsible for love. It’s your imagination.”
So the character has a very erotic experience in this room. To me, it’s as sexual as they come. I think one of the things I try so hard to do, especially in my work with heterosexual couples, is to decouple sex from intercourse. 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 sidestep much more easily. But it is so entrenched that this is where sex starts and and then it becomes so narrowly focused on those genitals. When those genitals are not as available, people don’t really know what to do.
Miranda July: Yeah. I know, I do feel like all the little comments throughout the day are sex to me.
Esther Perel: Yes. Foreplay starts at the end of the previous orgasm.
Miranda July: Right. I love that.
Esther Perel: That’s the thing, right? Yeah. It’s the ways that you keep that energy, that you continue to eroticize your partner, that you sexualize your partner. That doesn’t mean you’re constantly thinking about having sex with them. It means that you see them as a sexual being rather as your partner in management, and then at the end of the day, you think that you can just roll around and suddenly be all hot and sweaty. You live together?
Miranda July: No.
Esther Perel: Do you think that that structure by definition allows for the preservation of that energy that setting up home, living together, paying bills together, maybe having children together, being a couple — even without the legality of marriage — within a system doesn’t?
Miranda July: I know plenty of divorced moms who went on to find a new person, and that became a new family unit. I didn’t want that. I wanted to get to live alone with my child and figure out what my home was like. Almost start from scratch, like, “Here’s who I really am. Sorry it took so long, but I’m just going be me day and night.”
Esther Perel: It didn’t take so long. We get to know ourselves better. We develop confidence. We may even have had those thoughts 20 years before. But that didn’t mean that we had the confidence to live by them. I think it’s developmental. I don’t think people at 20 or 30 know necessarily who they are.
Miranda July: I agree. I’ve had to tell myself when I think about my child kind of going through all this, “Well, I’m showing them change. I’m modeling. You get to change, you get to grow and change your whole life and become more yourself as you get older.”
Esther Perel: How old were you when you started to write the book? How long did it take you?
Miranda July:. I started at 45 and finished at 49. Now I’m 50.
Esther Perel: I think I started Mating around 42.
Miranda July: Oh, wow.
Esther Perel: I wrote it over two years. I actually had never thought about what stage I was in when I started to write it. That I began to think as I was reading your book. I thought of it as the stage of: my youngest is 5, I can finally start a project where I can read a book and remember the beginning when I reach the end, I am ready to, to do something new and creative. 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’d questioned. Promises about the meaning of sexuality in relationships. How do we interpret sexual stalemates in the context of the overall relationships? All these truths that I had 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. What is the nature of desire in a long-term relationship? Because 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. I think he’s a very important character.
Miranda July: In the book?
Esther Perel: In the book. And not spoken enough about. I’m a couple’s therapist, so I’m not just looking at the female partner. But in this case, he’s a man. I’m very interested in his character, in his energy, in his own fantasy life, in his relationship with Caro, which energizes him, which he seems to be able to bring home.
Miranda July: 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. And now we’ve changed everything. We’ve begun these conversations.”
Esther Perel: It’s exactly the goal of my courses. Very interesting. They really go together. It’s amazing how little people talk about this. Especially with the person they’re having sex with.
Miranda July: Yeah. It’s so hard. I see you with the course really brilliantly trying to figure out how to see around a corner that you just can’t see around, you know? I think it does begin with a lot of questions, like you were saying when you started writing Mating: Why are things the way they are? She begins to ask that in the relationship. It was really important to me that he’s a good guy; I didn’t want the book to be about him. If he’s doing terrible things or things you can’t live with, then it’s a less universal story. It had to be about her. In doing that, I sort of accidentally gave him more personhood because he’s not just the instigator, as often happens in a story.
Esther Perel: But he’s presented as less complex.
Miranda July: Well, she was going into her darkness and he was sort of content to have the darkness of women near him—
Esther Perel: Without having to go into his own.
Miranda July: Yeah. And that’s often the women’s role in this culture. Like, “I will contain all the emotional turmoil and complexity and badness sometimes, and you can remain an upstanding citizen of a world that frankly was made for you.” I mentioned some women have given the book to their husbands. There’s also been a lot of men who’ve written me who identify with the narrator, with the woman, and it kind of made me think, “Oh, just as my whole life I’ve read these hero’s journeys and gotten very good at being ambitious and brave and conquering and all these things that we attribute to the masculine.” I’m great at those things. I’m a great archetypal man in a way. But the whole world of interiority that I have with my friends when we spend five hours in a row together — those men have no access to until it’s modeled. This is how intimately we’re allowed to talk as humans of any gender, you can talk in this much detail, you can feel this much.
The DMs I have been getting are as if they were deprived of that knowledge and they feel almost like they shouldn’t get to know about this kind of thought or conversation. But they are identifying it with their deepest selves, maybe not with their lived relationships, but with their own feelings. That isn’t what I was thinking about when I was writing, but it’s quite moving to me.
Esther Perel: 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 relationships that you write, there’s no winner. This thing is not working better for him than for her, 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. There’s a lot of indicators 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.
In terms of losing oneself, 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 worse for women than men. And in same-sex relationships, it exists no less. There’s something about the needs for creating the structure of the domestic. The way Stephen Mitchell puts it is we all have two sets of fundamental human needs. Security, adventure. Stability, change. Predictability, surprise. Familiarity, novelty. These two sets of needs actually spring from different sources and pull us in different directions. For me, the fate of desire in modern relationships is about reconciling these two seemingly opposing sets of human needs. So there is a certain context that is more likely to maintain desire, but what a love story needs is not the same as what a life story needs. This is the mystery for me.
Esther Perel: Yeah, tell me about your experience of the course. I’m really curious.
Miranda July: It’s really pretty remarkable. I feel like it’s one of those things — sometimes when you read, like, a great text when you’re young 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.” 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.
I had all these questions, but I was like, “Oh, she’s not going to want to talk in detail about her life.” I know what’s erotic for me or what’s foreplay for me. The writer in me wants some details from you. I want to know what you like.
Esther Perel: It’s not a direct answer to your question. It’s something that I was talking about before because you go to see the endocrinologist and she’s starting to talk with you about hormones. One of the very interesting findings about hormone therapy in women is that the placebo response is around 50-something percent. It’s astoundingly high. If half the women respond to a placebo, it says that if she goes to get help — because she wants to experience some arousal again, to experience the energy of the body that 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. 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. It’s a ton of different things. Sometimes it has to do with music and singing. I love to sing. You 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. The body just won’t dance when it is completely collapsed. I love both of these things. There’s probably not much else that can get me out of a mood than to move.
And then it’s about paying attention. I grew up above my parents’ clothing store, so clothes make a big difference. It’s also paying attention to making yourself feel good. Then it’s about laughing. I have a partner who has a phenomenal sense of humor and can really take me out of different situations. Humor is an exquisite form of intelligence.
Miranda July: Yeah, isn’t it?
Esther Perel: 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. It’s throwing ourselves into expansive and new situations, rather than settling on what is more cozy and familiar. 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. I’m an active seeker of those kinds of things. It’s a lot of different things.
Sometimes it could feel like, “Oh, you’re just an experience junkie.” And it’s really not. The reason I’m 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. I was fascinated by how one gets up after all of this and still finds 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, because aliveness is freedom, possibility, adventure, self-definition, self-determination. It’s not just excitement. And part of why I then hooked myself in it is because if you are the child of that legacy, you better do something with your life. And that meant I wasn’t going to have a little life. I wanted a rich life. Not money, not fame. Rich with people, with experiences, with meaning. And because I had to make up for all those who hadn’t had a chance to live. It’s from that place that my drive comes. It’s a very old drive, and I spent decades not connecting the dots.
Miranda July: Yeah. Isn’t that wild?
Esther Perel: So when you say, “Why didn’t I do it earlier?” Because earlier, you plant the seeds. But you don’t always know why. And then one day, I write my book like you wrote your book. I remember a conversation with Jack about that, where I just really understood that distinction. I’m not writing a book about sex — I see loads of people who have regular good sex, but that doesn’t make them feel alive. 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?
Miranda July: That’s so important because it also cuts through this idea that pleasure is connected to luxury or something. I feel like when I’ve been forced to contend with my body the most; it’s been out of suffering. That’s when I’ve learned to notice what it feels and wants. I think somehow, sex and pleasure got very divorced from the same body that feels pain. In a way, you need to understand both to understand either of them.
Esther Perel: Can you understand pleasure without understanding pain?
Miranda July: Right. And somehow, humor connects them too.
Esther Perel: Yes! Can you be happy without having known sorrow?
Miranda July: Humor’s the part that points at the wrongness of that. That it’s okay that they’re mixed up, the suffering and the pleasure and the pains. Pleasure isn’t this one creamy thing. You speak really eloquently about that in the course — it’s like a whole person, along with their childhood, their suffering is part of what they have to work with, pleasure-wise.
Esther Perel: You brought up humor and playfulness, but also the playfulness of the language. Sexuality is a very treacherous language. In itself, it is a very interesting language — as in vocabulary. Talking about sexuality, especially in this society, it’s either smut or sanctimony. So much of what I’ve tried to do is to provide a vocabulary for talking about sexuality that is neither of these extremes that helps to develop a comfortable metaphorical language to talk about one’s desire, one’s preferences, fantasies, fetishes, and frustrations, for that matter. You’ve got a ton of fantastic metaphors. The one that everybody quotes is the whistling tea kettle. It is an amazing image. You visualize it immediately. That’s what metaphors do. So I’m very curious about your quest for that language, your playfulness in the language. It’s not just that it’s raw and unvarnishedly direct. It’s more than that.
Miranda July: I guess I have to be interested and surprised by anything I’m writing for it to come alive. With any topic that’s been hit a lot, I go off the path in order to feel surprised and to feel it as it really happens in life. Presumably, all the sex in the book is worth writing about. I remember what that feels like, but it doesn’t 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, have my breath taken away. There’s a character who’s kind of a smaller character in the beginning and who comes back midway through the book, and the narrator spends a night with her. 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.”
Esther Perel: I think it’s a great place to stop. Thank you, Miranda.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
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