The American edition of Perel’s new book has a tamer cover than some European editions. Perel’s new book, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity (Harper), challenges the quick condemnation of the unfaithful and posits the idea that cheating in certain circumstances can be-emphasis on can-a liberating, even brave, act.įorgive me if you already know what ring-bracelets like Perel’s are called, but when I Googled, I found these names: “belly dancer bracelet” “harem bracelet” and the discomfiting but still often used “slave bracelet.” Her intimate, you-are-there podcast of actual couples therapy, called Where Should We Begin?-“It was like having sex with…a dead body,” one husband miserably tells his wife about their years of obligatory intercourse-became a sensation last summer. But am I crazy? Am I projecting onto this marquee couples therapist? She wrote the much-admired 2006 best-seller Mating in Captivity, about the competing human desires for safety versus adventure and how monogamy too often exalts the former over the latter, extinguishing sexual vitality. Something about this piece of jewelry, a version of which she was wearing each of the three times we met, screams sex to me. From it trail delicate gold skeins that caress the back of her hand-a shower of fireworks, a waterfall-captured in a bracelet around her wrist.

Ensconced with Esther Perel in the velvet-cushioned luxury of the Soho Grand Hotel, I can’t stop looking at the exquisitely slender gold-chain ring on her left middle finger.

Esther perel books