Hello, and welcome to another episode of IWave with Jemila Jameal. I hope you're well.

I am okay. I'm feeling a bit better this week. I want to thank you for all of your lovely messages about some of my more personal intros about what I've been struggling with of late.

It's not only your kindness that means a lot, but also how many of you are going through the same thing. Now while I wouldn't wish that on anyone,

it really does make you feel less alone, and I'm just grateful to you for sharing that with me, because it's never an easy thing to do, even though it should be an easy thing to do,

and it shouldn't be something that we consider, tebba, or difficult still, but our society has continuously failed us, so that's why we're still a little bit behind there.

But it is a magical part of sharing the way that you feel as that you never know who you might find a community with, and so I appreciate you for that.

And out speaking of mental health, which is why I'm sort of loosely referring to, I can't fucking believe who I've got on this podcast this week.

I love her so much. I think she's so cool, and I'm so excited for you to hear our conversation.

I have the excellent Esther Perrell. On my podcast, she is a psychotherapist, and she is someone who I guess at her work in relationships and sex,

and love have really, really kind of, I don't know, made her a world famous icon in this area.

And so I decided to put a load of questions out to you guys, and see what it is that you're curious about at the moment, and then kind of pull together which ones came up the most, and then used those as my line of questioning.

And I do that because especially when I'm interviewing an expert, I want to know what you want to know about, not just what I want to know about. This is our communal learning experience.

And so I hope that yours is a question that kind of got loosely answered in this episode.

But regardless, she's so fascinating and her way of talking is just so it's like it's intimidating. She's intimidatingly good.

You'll hear me being shy and weird as I was with Jane Fonda and a bunch of other people maybe even Adam Bucks in last week. When I get overwhelmed with someone else's excellence, sometimes I am turned into a dithering child.

So I apologise if for the first five minutes I seem a bit shy and a bit posh. I do calm down. I promise.

In this episode, we talk about our expectations on what marriage is and how it's changed over the past hundred years. We discussed polyamory and why it's still unreasonably feels taboo and how it offers creative alternative.

So the heteronormative family structure. I tell everyone about my living arrangement and family structure and relationship, not into much detail, but just enough for you to realise that I live a bit weirdly, a bit unorthodoxly, but it kind of works for me.

We talk about infidelity and why it's not necessarily the death of a relationship. And generally we just get to hear from an icon who has seen it all, who is just something so comforting about her.

The way she talks about things like the nuance that she brings to every single subject. She's so enlightening and fair and makes you feel like maybe just maybe everything is going to be okay.

She has a new season of her amazing seminal podcast, Where Should We Begin is out now on Spotify, go listen to that, but not until you've listened to this.

This is me, absolutely losing my shit for the absolutely extraordinary, Este Peral.

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