Before We Got Together I Identified As Gay
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None of the voices in this series are ongoing patients of Esther Perel. Each episode of Where Should We Begin is a one-time counseling session. For the purposes of maintaining confidentiality, names and some identifiable characteristics have been removed, but their voices and their stories are real.

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in terms of their experience together. And they're a young couple in terms of where they each are at in their lives. Their studies, defining themselves, finding their path, and dealing with the legacies of their family that is still so present for them, individually and also as a couple. So they're defining themselves and they're defining their relationship.

I think one of the unique facets of our relationship is us working through what it means to be queer and me to be straight. Until we got together, I identified as gay. It's been really difficult for me and my identity to figure out what this means for me personally. They seek clarity with each other, but they don't always have the clarity with themselves. I've floated the idea of some sort of non-monogamy.

He's really, really not down for that. I come to a stopping point in conversations about polyamory because it feels uncomfortable to me. I want to feel more comfortable committing and being able to freely be myself. And I just feel confused about the whole thing.

So much of what we're going to do is define the terms, but also step outside of the terms that have become too stale and too hermetic and open up conversations, as is often important to do in a relationship and especially a relationship in transition.

They are at the verge of moving into a new phase, having moved in together, potentially moving and living close to his family. And so the compromises of the present will have implications for the future. And all of that is coming to a head right now in this session. So what are the pronouns? I use they, them, and I use he, him. Okay. Just tell me a little bit.

the story of your relationship. So we met when we were both working at the same preschool. I was working at the desk and doing after school stuff. And he was a teacher in the room right next to the desk. I was extremely hung over every single day. I was in the bottom of my addiction. And like at the school, he was like the golden child teacher. Like everyone defers to him. You know, what do we do? Like,

We're having a hard situation in this. Oh, let's bring this kid to this one, to this guy. It's true. It's true, right? Sometimes they would. Sometimes. That's a lot of credit, but thank you. You undersell yourself. Yeah, and then there was an end-of-the-year staff party. But so do you. I don't have things that I can... He's like this totally golden person. And I've got this, like...

rap sheet of this is when I was hospitalized the first time. This is when my parents blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

And for so long, this seemed to have been the primary features of my self-presentation. And the way that I defined myself and still define myself at that time. It's just through that lens of... Which was? Of... What was the definition? It was just the routine of...

how much I drank, how horrible I would feel, and then shaming myself for continuing that cycle, not knowing how to get out of it, so continuing it. I didn't have a lot of a social life. Starting at what age? I started drugs when I was 13, and then when I was in high school, just like it got really intense. And then in college, ironically, I didn't have as much access to drugs in college as I did in high school. So I relied a lot more on drinking.

And then I just couldn't get out of it. And I would do these things with myself where I would say, if I can go this long without drinking, or if I can go this many nights drinking only this amount, then I've succeeded and like, I don't have a problem with it. And then if I could do that, which I rarely could, I would congratulate myself by letting myself just go, just no limits at all. And then perpetuate the cycle of

alcoholism and addiction running my family on both sides. Who worried about you? Who watched over you? I mean, I did. Like, I had to... I was the one who decided I needed to go to rehab because he was either that or I was going to die. And I felt like I was dying every day, and I felt resigned to that fact. My brother was drinking a lot. My stepmom was drinking a lot. And those were the people in my life. My dad died when I was 16.

I had been in college for a week and he died. And he was the most stable parental figure. And then my mom has always been very unpredictable. Did you just search for a nice word? Yeah, maybe. I don't want to be hyperbolic, but I also... I think that she has traits of a narcissistic personality disorder. And along with...

substance abuse herself. So she would pass out every night on the couch. And that was just part of us growing up. My parents were divorced and she would kind of lure us into spending time with her by giving us alcohol too. Yeah. So after my dad died, that was like the anchor person was gone. So I had to like watch out for myself, but I didn't know how to do that. And I was not very good at it until I

made myself ask for help. The act itself of knowing I need help and I need other help than what is available around me here is a real sign of strength. I hope you've been told that. Yeah, I've had to work hard on becoming proud of myself. When I say it's not so simple that if you were able to find treatment, if you were able to seek out help, that too is a strength.

I hear that they didn't really absorb it. There is something about them after years of being in treatments and in detox centers and in rehabs that has strengthened their identity as a patient. Part of what I'm trying to do is help them see that they're not just a patient.

they're also a person with lots of resources. It is a more hopeful and more generative view of themselves. And I wish I had been able to do a little more of that. And I had been able to really show my empathy and my compassion for the challenge, but also my challenge for the acceptance of the perennial role as the patient. And when I listened to my conversation with them,

I felt that I had missed that. How many years are you together? Two and a half. And may I ask how old you are? I'm 29. I'm 24. Alcoholism is just in your family or that's a thing you share? It's definitely a shared thing. I've had alcoholism on both sides of my family and my father is...

an alcoholic. He was a kind of a yelly person. Yelly? Yelly? That's such a nice euphemism. In my... Say it as it is. Um...

There's a smoothie incident that stands out as kind of a good example where one of the morning rituals for a while in my household was my dad would make us smoothies. And at one point, as children do, a fight ensued with my brother and I about who would get the first smoothie or something. And my dad's response was to take the smoothie and throw it, which we kind of laughed at at the time.

Laughter as a counter to fear? Yeah, no. And I think a lot of the way that we dealt with things was either the approach of like leaving the house and sneaking beneath the windows so that he couldn't see that we were going somewhere. Just this fear response and like treading very carefully and giving a wide berth so that nothing blew the dynamite. And then mom packed up the kids and just... I mean, first my mom was...

very upfront with my dad and had sat down and had a conversation of, this is what I'm seeing. Like, I'm noticing this tendency to get aggressive, to get manic, to get really loud and unforgiving of your children. That conversation was met with a lot of like pushback and denial and no, that's not me. And so we, after that, we began to feel more afraid. And so we left.

while he was on a work trip. So yeah, my relationship with alcoholism is mostly adult children of alcoholics and they have a bucket list of things that a child or an adult child of an alcoholic might be characterized by and I was going down that list and like

wow, this is me. I feel the need to be careful with my performance and hold things together and be kind of both the curator of things and also the manager in a way. Because? In part, I'm an oldest sibling and

For me, that meant like I need to model for my siblings how to deal with some of the hard things that we're seeing as children. And in... I have to keep it together. Yeah. And... Yeah, but then he's the one who like has never smoked weed, like dare worked on you. Yeah, but...

Meaning that I... Don't do drugs, have never done drugs, have never taken risks like that. No. You see, he became one alternative to those similar circumstances. And you became another alternative. And you're two shadow sides of the same circumstances. You get mad. He doesn't know where to put his anger. Mm-hmm.

This episode is sound designs with the help of the sounds of New York City. Subways, motorcycles, shaking buildings, sirens. Welcome to my office. You lose the sense of boundaries. He constrains himself with boundaries. You are the choices he never made. That doesn't mean he's not intrigued by them.

In ways I think that's accurate, but from my vantage, that looks like a dichotomizing of productive choices versus harmful choices or something like that. Or that, I don't know, I feel like I definitely made choices that were harmful in their own ways. I don't want to seem like your choices were bad. Listening to that description, I didn't think of your description as bad.

Like, I'm going to constrain myself. I'm going to push these things together, hold it together, make sure all the rules are there. And you internalize that as like, that's the good one. Yeah, true. Yeah, the dichotomy comes from you. Sorry to say. Yeah, she didn't say either or. These are often the extreme versions of the kinds of choices people make when they're faced with that kind of chaos. Mm-hmm.

chaos, neglect, need to step up, parent your own parents, be parentified children, all those things. But I don't have a higher and lower order here. I mean, it's true. I watch it as a contrast, not as an either or, but as two common choices to this kind of situation. Each one comes with their consequences, period, you know. And it's harder when we have

things together or making big decisions, which is happening a lot. They understood my use of the word choice. But what I was really aiming for was the notion of adaptation. They each had adapted to the circumstances of their childhood. The neglect, the sense of being left to their own devices, the rampant alcoholism around them.

And each had adapted differently. And that difference between the in control and out of control, between the one who became very responsible and the one who chucked their responsibilities, there was a complementarity. And in a way, what he was saying is, it looks all right, but I am hurting inside no less than them.

And I want you to know that even though it looks well put together, it has internal turmoil that may not be that different from theirs. So there is complementarity in the coping strategies and there is similarity in the deep wounding that each of these two people experienced growing up. So what are the big decisions? We're thinking of moving near his family.

And there's just, there's so many options and there's so many unknowns about how that's going to work. How are the logistics going to work? Even if we were to stay where we are, how would the logistics work? It feels insurmountable because then there's, we know we have to do this thing. And then... And like...

broader spectrum too for me like we're emerging or hopefully emerging from a pandemic and I felt so disconnected from other community and I know like community is important to me and I know being around people like you is also important to you. People like you. People like you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean and then there's this...

For me, I ruminate on the fact that we're making such big decisions on our own. Or not on our own. Together. We're making these big decisions together and what that means about our relationship as a whole. And we keep making these huge decisions as a couple. Does this mean we're going to have to get married? Like, that's my fear. And I don't want to end this relationship. Where are we going? Geographically? Relationally? What else? Monetarily. Um...

Family-wise, children-wise, like job-wise, structure of family, structure of house, like geographically at the end. And relationship structure-wise too and meaning. I mean one big thing that we haven't talked about or we have talked about that doesn't have a solution that we can find so we don't talk about it very often is...

My uncertainty and drive for newness and for connection to the queer parts of myself. This is the first straight person I've ever been with. And it's weird. And I didn't think it was going to go anywhere. I thought I was going to go on a date with a nice guy because...

You're nice and I like you. And you liked sushi. And I liked you. But I was like, I don't know in what way I like you. And I didn't know in what way you liked me. And I was gay. So... Present. I mean, yeah. Like, I still... I don't know. Was? I don't know. Like, I still... It feels disingenuous to call myself gay when I'm with a cis guy. Cis straight guy. And I feel really connected to that community still. And all my friends are gay. And like...

I do not want to end our relationship and I don't want to move away from our relationship and I fear that I won't be able to connect with that side of my life anymore or again. So we've talked about are there ways in which we can structure our relationship differently? This is also the most monogamous relationship I've been in. And so we've talked about non-monogamy. That's just been sort of a recurring conversation that comes up every few months.

and we have a lot of emotions about it, and then we put it down. Both carry a lot of trauma of the early years around neglect and unpredictability and the sense of aloneness that they each felt and the lack of structure in their life. One of the ways to look at the complementarity is that

Through them, he can loosen the grip a little bit. This grip that became his survival strategy, but that he has longed to be able to loosen a little. And through him, they can become more anchored, more grounded, without having to live in an unraveled situation of addiction and excess that constantly tries to rein itself in, but doesn't know how.

And in that sense, they can give each other so much to help each of them transcend the legacies of their family. Support for Where Should We Begin comes from Babbel. The year is already halfway through, and soon enough we'll all be looking back at our New Year's resolutions and taking stock. Well, if one of your goals this year was to practice another language, there's still plenty of time, especially if you try Babbel online.

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For me, a lot of it, it comes from a time when I'm feeling particularly trapped, I think. And it doesn't have to be trapped in the relationship, although it does mean that. But it means trapped in other ways in my life, too. Like I'm feeling particularly isolated or depressed or haven't seen my friends in a long time. Don't feel like I have community. Don't feel understood or whatever it may be. But I'm feeling disconnected.

You're talking about the queer part. Yeah. You're mixing two things. Yes. Yeah. You're mixing two things. It's one thing to say, when I feel disconnected, lonely, cut off from my friends, trapped, depressed, I think non-monogamy. That's one conversation. It can be monogamous and exclusive and it can be non. Yeah. The queer part can be poly and it can be mono.

So these are two different things. And the one thing I noticed is that when you start a conversation, you link it to everything. One conversation is about how do I integrate my queerness into this relationship? Does it have a place? What would it look like? The other conversation is I noticed that I bring up monogamy, polyamory, non-exclusivity.

when I experience things that actually have nothing to do with the monogamy. But it becomes the, you know, this is the place where I suddenly can put all my trapped feelings. And that was a very insightful comment. It actually has not much to do with our relationship when I bring this in. That doesn't mean the conversation isn't in itself important as well. So part of what makes these conversations difficult between the two of you is that you don't stick to something. Well, we don't want to try anything.

That too could be. But what I just heard here is so much is put into one breath that you don't know what you're talking about in the end. So we want to talk about monogamy. We want to talk about queer woman with cis straight guy. We want to talk about the fears of long-term relationships. We want to talk about what is the move that we want to make, you know, which piece.

If we have all of them in one, we can't have any. What do you think? The conversation, for me, the conversation about polyamory is one that brings up at least three things. One is a reminder of how important your identity is to you as a person who is queer and as a person like...

always growing in your understanding of relationships. That's one part. On my emotionality side, it's extreme fear and reticence and also like a similar catastrophic feeling of like,

not only like engaging in polyamory or like initiating a polyamorous relationship, but also the conversation itself is rupturous. My mind always takes me to inadequacy and like we can talk about how those things are not connected. Like my adequateness as a partner does not have to do with your queerness. That's the feeling. But like that's where my heart goes. Like it's really hard.

And I know this. Yeah, we've talked about it a lot. It's not even a question of how do we talk about polyamory. It's like, how do we talk about talking about polyamory? I've also never seen a long-lived relationship with a polyamorous couple. I've never seen a model. And my models for it are also polyamorous.

media. Like, House of Cards is one model. Like, it's a terrible model, but that's... Well, we know. I mean, I guess you don't know. But there's other examples, but like not... I haven't seen it work. In your circle. In my circle. In your young circle. Yeah. In his young straight circle. I know so many people who it works for in my young queer community.

I feel like with the straightness comes a lot of other stuff where it's like, this is how things are. There's not as much questioning of how things are. And that's kind of how I've lived my entire life. People in straight relationships have a much longer historical legacy of how things should be done. Less creativity. More continuity, less creativity. And sexually too, like...

Well, also less disclosure about how things work in a relationship. At least the way I've seen things play out forever. There's plenty of monogamous relationships that really don't work. But I asked you what gets you worked up. You said something about the conversation itself. It gets me intensely worked up. Yeah, it's adequacy. It's feeling like if I am not... The way...

society tells me to be is as a romantic partner, you have to be this, this, this, this, this. You have to, as a romantic partner, you have to be so multifaceted. And if you, if you aren't like lover, counselor, family, pick your role, um, to your partner, it, you're not functioning right. And when I think about polyamory, it's as though if, if we don't function properly,

right, it's just going to disassemble. If like somebody else comes into this, like your interest in them is going to like pass your interest in me. And I try so hard to do everything the best I can. But if you think of others, then it will mean that the best wasn't so good. Yeah. And it's not true. Like, like,

I know that like intellectually I know that but emotionally I can't get past that and it's like and then not being able to talk about it with you like it's great and terrible like I want to talk about it with you but I don't know like feel how inadequate it feels. I wish you would talk to me about it and I know you don't want to feel that I just want to find more peace around it and I don't know what that looks like I don't want to force you to do anything

I bring it up because I want to talk about our relationship and what feels good and what doesn't feel good. And it's not even really about our relationship. It's not about you. It's not about you. And then I feel stupid for bringing it up because I don't like making you upset. And because I love you and I don't want to lose you and I don't want you to think that you're not enough. So then I drop it for the next few months until these other things push it up.

And we've done this cycle before. Like we've said all this. Their associations to the word polyamory are vastly different. For him, it's a conversation on an emotional level about rejection, about inadequacy, about not being enough. And he knows that there is another conversation to be had about polyamory, but he can't access it.

For them, the conversation about polyamory is about community. It's about queerness as connected to creativity, exploration, curiosity, non-normativity. And that conversation becomes difficult because they realize that every time the subject comes up, they may hurt him and they may lose him.

And so they are tied around the impossibility of talking about what they think is a conversation about polyamory. But the entrance may have to be, first of all, a conversation about community, about newness, about non-normativity, about what queerness has meant for them and about what being the chosen one

in the family has meant for him, which is now coming with him into this relationship. And this identity as the chosen one who was going to save the family when his mother took the children and left the alcoholic father has become a burden but also an identity. We're trying to understand why is this conversation so painful? Because the poly challenges us.

The concept of chosen. Even if the chosenness is something he wants to free himself from, he doesn't know how he would ever feel whole without it. The piece that I hear that you share is that you're saying, how can I be authentic to myself? How can I be authentic and even consider this conversation?

What will it say about me if I change? But you're saying the same thing. I'm gay, and if I stay with this cis-straight guy, what does it say about me? It's like, in order to be together, it feels to each of us that there's a part of us that can't come with us. And is this so? Or is this the way we've...

created the story. This is not a conversation about polyamory. It's a conversation about the way that you've structured your life, your whole psyche. This, I have got it and I'm the center of it all. And everybody turns to me and I solve all the problems. I am the steward. I am the

You know, it is true with my mother, with my siblings, and it's true. And so the very thought of polyamory doesn't have anything to do with polyamory. It just instantly becomes, I am not the person that I thought I was. So it becomes a very loaded, scary conversation. And, you know, polyamory for you is the door to the queer part of you. Yeah, it...

it feels like our identities are clashing. And I'm the one right now who's sublimating all of that. And the idea of not doing that, of saying goodbye to those parts of myself forever is what comes up for me. And that's really scary. When we both get catastrophizing, we both catastrophize what, I don't know, the future of our relationship is in any regard.

The terminus is close. To me, it doesn't feel like we're at a breaking point. And I think we've both said that. You've kind of acknowledged yourself as the more willing to change for the two of us. And I think that's true. I mean, in a lot of ways, it's not. But I think that I'm more acclimated to just like fast shifts. When I think of them as part of a larger structure or a larger narrative, that's when it scares me.

We've moved in together. We have a dog. These are huge things. What you just said is very important. When I think of the decisions that we make together as part of a larger narrative, that's when it scares me. Like I can make quick adaptations as long as I don't think they are forever. Yeah. When I listen to him describe their triggers as catastrophizing, I try to look for...

a metaphor, an alternative narrative that could be helpful to them to see from a different point of view what it means to have parts of your identity in a relationship and maybe other parts of your identity in other relationships, but without triggering the fears that come to the word monogamy or polyamory. And so I just wanted to try this out.

and see if it would bring some fresh air into a conversation that had become so charged and scary. Just to add other images, other associations, and try and emphasize. Can I suggest something? I don't know if the metaphor is going to work, but I want to try one. Because I'm a foreigner. I spend a lot of time with foreigners.

immigrants of all sorts. We all have parts of us that our closest people sometimes have never known. And they all know that we have other parts to us. But we live with certain parts of us in that relationship. And we live with other parts of us with other relationships. You could call that polyamory, right? We bring those other parts with others who speak our languages. And we go back to

We travel home. And sometimes we travel alone so that we don't have to live in translation. But you can be in the relationship with certain parts of you and know that. That doesn't mean that it's a truncated self. It's a flexible self. It's a self that made choices about certain parts of itself and was willing to live with the loss, to live with the compromise, to live with the longing.

And somebody else would say one should never do that. But many people do make commitments with people outside of their culture, nationality, language, continent. Does that metaphor add something? Yeah, it does. I feel like that explains how I feel. It's always hard to verbalize it because it centers it around like, in our relationship, blah, blah. But it's really in other relationships, I can flesh that part of myself out. I can breathe that part.

And do you maintain a connection to that community? All of my friends are part of that community. Okay. And do the two of you spend time in that world too? We don't overlap friends, like at all. In general? Yeah. Not as a rule. It just hasn't happened. Right. So that may be something that needs to change.

If you want to be with him and you want to maintain a connection to that world, he needs to visit that world with you. Visit is a nice word. He needs to spend time there, live there, speak that language, look at the norms, be at ease, you know, and be the foreigner on occasion if foreigner is the right image for you, you know.

It's just, yeah, I don't know. The people that I know who have examples of really successful polyamorous relationships, I don't know are people that you'd be friends with on your own. I mean, we have... No, but on his own is not the criteria. The criteria is not that those are people you would have met by yourself. Those are people you each bring to each other.

And if that component is missing, that's a piece that can be developed because that will become a step in between. That's a bridge. Part of why you can't imagine what that life would look like is because it's based on a very tiny sample, some of which is not even real people. You have to visit.

It's one thing to know and to say, I know there's a whole other person here, but you don't live with it. It's like when you go with your partner and the partner is actually speaking another language with a bunch of their locals. And for once, you're the foreigner. And that's a dance that foreigners, mixed couples, U.S., non-U.S., to localize it here, experience daily. So it's an active part of

Even though that person isn't living in that country, that person brings parts of that country into the relationship. That country, that religion, that culture. Yeah, it's super helpful for me. And that is a part that you need to bring in in a more active way so that it doesn't become, I'm with you and I lose it, or I go to that and I lose you. Anything that becomes this kind of either-or where both options feel intolerable

will make you not have the conversation. Seems like that's a theme of black and white thinking. I can't even think about the conversation itself because all I'm thinking is, you know, my inadequacy. There's no place to move in that. You will choke, you will cry, you will both look at each other, it will feel impossible, you will feel like you don't want the relationship to end.

And then you will bury the conversation. And then you will be, what I like to call, in bliss, but stuck. Everything is fine. Everything is fine. But we avoid this big issue. We avoid this big issue. And then when we talk about the big issue, or when we even think about having to talk about the big issue, we both become so completely panicked at the thought of what this may mean to the dissolution of our relationship, which we don't want, so we don't talk about it.

Then we get down, then we forget about it, and then we go back and we are in bliss, but stop. Meanwhile, life takes us forward, and now we have moved in, and now we have a dog, and now we're thinking about moving closer to his family, and now I'm wondering, does that mean I'm going to have to get married too? And then you start to feel like life is happening to you. Yeah. Yeah.

And the purpose of today is to put these subjects on the table and to make them feel less tense, impossible, choking, to the point where they have to be constantly suppressed. If we manage to give you a little more of that flexibility or to open this up, this is the open of today, is to open up the conversation, not what you're going to do with your whole life. We're not going to do that in one session. Yeah.

But if you can open the conversation so that you don't every time feel when it comes up that it feels so choking and scary, then you will have left with something important. The goal is not to create an analogy between immigration and polyamory. It is not my role to decide with them about monogamy or polyamory at this moment in their relationship.

My goal is to open up the conversation. No matter which way they go, before they can talk about opening up the relationship, if that's what they ever choose to do, they both need to feel that they can open up the conversation. So, how does all of this fit with sex? It was an adjustment for me.

To have sober sex or to have sex with a cisgender straight guy? Both. Both. And I think having it be sober sex made it a lot better and a lot easier for me to feel connected, physically connected, like in my body. That's not something that I was used to. And it was just really hard. It was hard to...

shift in that way and there were things that I wanted to try or wanted to do that he wasn't comfortable with isn't comfortable with and that's okay I don't want I'm not gonna make you try things um but that's another aspect of like I guess I'm a person who wants to like try everything once and and we get into this thing of how do you know that you don't like this thing or how do you know that you wouldn't like it if you tried it he's like I don't need to know

And that doesn't compute with me. I'm like, I need to know. I need to know if I like it or not. I need to know by trying it and doing it and getting all of these experiences so I can have like an index. I like to try in order to know. I need to know before I try. Yeah, I agree. But that trying and not trying is not necessarily queer-straight related. It can be, but it exists now.

among two people period. Yeah I don't think that it's inherently queer and I do think that for me it's part of my queerness is that sort of experimenting with relationships and experimenting with sex and like different ways of living and different like different ways of being with another person or other people. So queerness became a part of you and a space where

playfulness exploration was much more prevalent than in the straight part of the world. Yeah, and that's coming from an outside view because I didn't have a straight relationship. Like I never... That's what you imagined the straight world to be. It does it the same way all the time. Right. Because that's how they, in this case, he has done it all the time. Yeah. But it's an interesting thing.

You drive uncertainty and yet you find yourself this person. And this person's one thing that they bring to your life is your ability to tolerate more uncertainty and not as a negative experience. And exploration and curiosity and playfulness and mystery are all active engagements with the unknown.

And the unknown in your life has been a source of great stress and anxiety and sadness. But there's a part of you somewhere that would like to explore this with positive anticipation. And that's where they come in. And if you say no in advance, because why should I? Because I already know because I don't want to. When you don't know.

But that's the system that's been put in place to make sure that you could carry all this responsibility that was put on you from such an early age over all the people in your family. You couldn't explore much. It's the positive anticipation thing that really struck a chord with me because it's like, there's definitely anticipation, but it's hard for me to frame it as... That's correct. That's correct. It's usually seen as, you know...

And this is where they come in. This is one of the gifts they will give in your life, sexually speaking as well. You can start with the sex because it's a playful arena to be in the sandbox together. And we don't always know why we pick someone, but there's always a reason. And it's not always an obvious one. They focus on their self-destructive side, but they could also focus on their more exploratory side.

Talking about the self-destructive side is beginning to be old. It's also a part of you you know well and have talked to every shrink about. So I know how to talk about it. Yes, but one feels that you've done that many times. One knows this is a rehearsed story. This doesn't mean it's not an important one.

But it's a familiar one. And you don't say it without feeling it. Right. Versus the exploratory one, the one that is more nimble, the one that can make these quick adaptations. It's the very thing that you couldn't conceive of it for the life of you. What they will do with you are things that you cannot even imagine doing with them. Sometimes there's only one person who can do it. They have that nimbleness. They have that adaptability.

including the queer person living in a straight world or in a straight relationship. But you don't have to be a straight relationship. You can become your own relationship that's multilingual. Esther Perel is the author of Mating in Captivity and the State of Affairs and also the host of the podcast How's Work? To apply with your partner for a session for the podcast or for show notes on each episode, go to whereshouldwebegin.esterperel.com.

Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel is produced by Magnificent Noise for Gimlet and Esther Perel Productions. Our production staff includes Eric Newsom, Eva Walchover, Destry Sibley, Hyweta Gatana, and Julia Natt. Recorded by Noriko Okabe, Kristen Muller is our engineer. Original music and additional production by Paul Schneider. And the executive producers of Where Should We Begin are Esther Perel and Jesse Baker.

We would also like to thank Lydia Polgreen, Colin Campbell, Clara Sankey, Ian Kerner, Alma, Courtney Hamilton, Nick Oxenhorn, and Jack Saul.