Psychotherapist Esther Perel reveals the No. 1 skill couples need to survive in the future

Every fan of world famous psychotherapist Esther Perel — known for exploring the inner workings of relationships and her spot-on insights on human connection — has wondered what it would be like to step into her office and hear her voice in person. What would she tell you about your own relationship? Would you leave your session in a haze of reframed expectations and life-changing revelations?

Perel's podcast "Where Should We Begin?" is the closest thing to having her as your own therapist, she tells TODAY.com over Zoom. But attending her newly announced tour — "An Evening with Esther Perel: The Future of Relationships, Love and Desire," coming to the U.S. this spring — will bring you into her world in a different way.

"When you enter the theater, you’re entering my waiting room, and then when we start the conversation, you’re entering my office, and in this office are conversations that don’t happen anywhere else," Perel says. "They involve love, grief, betrayal, jealousy. It’s deep, it’s vulnerable, and it’s very human."

"There’s very few places on a cultural level where that conversation can take place in public," she continues. "It's like a public health campaign for relationships."

But why do modern relationships need CPR or maybe even a defibrillator to survive the future? Perel sat down with TODAY.com to discuss how relationships have changed, where they're going and the one skill everyone needs to work on.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

TODAY: Why did you decide to focus your tour on the future of relationships?

Perel: When I think about the future, I think where are we now and where are we going? And what can we anticipate based on what we're doing? The positive anticipations and the less positive ones.

So, where are we now and where are we going?

What I’m looking at is the unprecedented expectations that we bring to romantic relationships, the fact that we’re currently looking for a soulmate on an app. We are more and more living in a contactless environment. How is that going to affect the way we relate, the way we mate, the way we date and the way we break up for that matter? The rule book is literally shifting under our feet.

What are the skills that we need at this moment, particularly around conflict and disagreement and difference? Half of the young people in America do not have a best friend, and 1 in 4 is cut off from a family member. The way we live our relational life is greatly influenced by the way we experience our loneliness at this moment.

On the other hand, we have choices that are way beyond what we have ever known, certainly for women and queer people. Before, we used to have a lot of clarity, the rules were set, everybody knew exactly what they needed to do — who was going to wake up to feed the baby and whose income we were going to rely on, et cetera. We have lost the big scripts and the certainty that came with them in favor of a ton more freedom, but also self-doubt and uncertainty.

You've spoken a lot about how we expect more of our long-term partners than ever before. What are some trends you've noticed as a result?

The primary area where expectations have played out is in divorce. From the moment marriage became more emotional and not just material and women could survive on their own, they left in droves. Divorce is still initiated more by women in straight relationships.

The entire movement of consensual non-monogamy and polyamory is a response to expectations and to the need to create community. It’s not the quantity of expectations — it’s the fact that, for many people, the expectations are on one person, the lack of distribution.

Another response to expectations is to not marry. If you don’t need to marry to have sex or kids, or if you decide not to have kids, then what is the purpose of marriage, and what are the other forms of connection that people can experience?

There is a sense of staleness in the realm of intimate relationships — you are either among those very few people who can be together for more than X amount of years, or you are just fated for divorce. So there is a desire for fresh thinking for how else can we do this?

Where does this sense of staleness come from?

That's because of expectations, too. It is a rather new expectation to want your partner to help you become the best version of yourself. It's not that relationships were not stale before, but that's not what they were based upon.

For the younger generation, when you have grown up in a culture where everything is based on planned obsoleteness and you're going to be throwing it out the minute it no longer serves you or doesn't work as good as the next shiny thing, that seeps into your expectations of relationships, as well. You think, "I can do better."

But it goes both ways. Gen Z and millennials invest a lot more in the quality of relationships than generations before. Therapy is a preventative thing, you go to workshops, you read books. If you can't leave a relationship, you don't have to deal with the quality. If you can leave, then you have to have a good reason for staying.

What's the most important skill for people to learn to navigate the future of relationships?

The skill of how to have difficult conversations.

People are experiencing all kinds of social atrophy. It's weird if you start talking with somebody in a bar. Everything is mediated through tech. The more you live in cities, the less you talk to people on the street. Then comes a pandemic that makes every person a potential contaminant. Everybody's looking at their phones.

All of that is lessening the skills of how you interact with people, and even more so if you have to have a more difficult conversation. As a result, there is a type of conflict avoidance.

Sixty years ago, in a small community, people hated each other, but you had to continue to see them at church, at school, in the square. Now, you ghost someone, you never see them again. It's different. The issue is proximity. It's not that people didn't have conflict among them, but we're experiencing it with different ingredients.

General ticket sales for “An Evening with Esther Perel: The Future of Relationships, Love and Desire” start Jan. 26, 2024, 12 p.m. ET, on Ticketmaster.com.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com