(BEST OF) Esther Perel: Protecting Your Relationships During Chaos

We Can Do Hard Things

Treat Media and Glennon Doyle

Relationships, Education, Self-improvement, Society & Culture

4.8 • 42.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2026

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The stress, fear, and uncertainty of the world right now are seeping into our closest relationships. When collective pain goes unprocessed, it often shows up as distance, resentment, or disconnection with the people we love most — at a time when we need closeness more than ever. In this conversation, Esther Perel helps us understand how stress and trauma drain our relationships of aliveness and desire, why resentment grows when life becomes all duty and efficiency, and how to stay connected and loving in hard times. - Why your relationship isn’t broken — it’s exhausted- How resentment grows when efficiency replaces intimacy- Why desire disappears under responsibility - Why your partner can’t be your whole village- What “behind every criticism is a longing” really means About Esther: Psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author Esther Perel is recognized as one of today’s most insightful and original voices on modern relationships. Fluent in nine languages, she helms a therapy practice in New York City and serves as an organizational consultant for Fortune 500 companies around the world. Her celebrated TED Talks have garnered more than 30 million views and her bestselling books, Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs, are global phenomena translated into nearly 30 languages. Esther is also an executive producer and host of the popular podcasts Where Should We Begin? and How’s Work? Follow We Can Do Hard Things on: Instagram — ⁠https://www.instagram.com/wecandohardthings⁠

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. So today we are going to share with you an episode that we did with
0:09.1	Esther Perel. The reason that we are sharing this episode right now is that we have been hearing
0:15.3	from many people, from our friends, from family, from ourselves, that the chaos and pain and stress of living in
0:26.4	the world we are living in right now is permeating into our relationships. Of course it is.
0:33.3	When we watch and listen and hear and participate in what's going on in the world, our bodies have responses and unprocessed.
0:41.9	Of course, all of that stress and anxiety comes out within our closest relationships, which is painful because that's the last place we want to be creating more disconnection.
0:56.3	We've never needed the people we love to be close more, and it's never been harder to feel safe enough to let people close. So we thought
1:04.3	today might be a good day to revisit this conversation with Esther Perel, where we discussed
1:10.0	how to be in a time and a place where we are
1:16.3	shaken by fear and anger and uncertainty and still hold our relationships close. My favorite poet of
1:26.2	all time, Andrea Gibson, would talk a lot about how to be in hard times
1:31.7	and still say stay soft. How do we love through pain and not make the pain worse by isolating ourselves?
1:41.2	All right. Let's try to learn that. Here we go.
1:52.4	Okay, everybody, welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. I have big hopes for today's
1:59.6	episode. So listen Pod Squad. We have been listening to every
2:04.4	voicemail you leave us. And one of your most repeated themes is this. At this point in this
2:11.0	unbelievable endless abyss of COVID and Delta and world-shaking politics and fear and anger and numbness and stuckness,
2:20.9	our relationships are suffering. If you are struggling in your marriage or parenting or
2:31.8	extended family or work relationships, I just wish that I could play you the
2:37.8	voicemails so you could understand how very not alone you are. As I listened this weekend,
2:45.3	I kept thinking of that old poem by Baba Fareed that pretty much sums up all my work,
2:50.4	and it goes like this, I thought I was
	...

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