✧ The full livestream is available below. We hope you’ll spend the hour with us.
Esther Perel and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh sat across from one another for a room-wide meditation on modern intimacy and the increasingly difficult task of staying connected to one another—and to ourselves—in a culture organized around optimization, prediction, and control.
Esther described desire as a willingness to remain in conversation with the unknown.
She moved seamlessly from long-term partnership to Gen Z dating culture, from eroticism and imagination to trauma, caretaking, humor, play, and the body’s relationship to aliveness. And she spoke about the difference between surviving and fully inhabiting a life. About why people often feel most disconnected precisely when they stop risking anything. About curiosity as the antidote.
The evening marked the 20th anniversary of Mating in Captivity and arrives ahead of Esther’s upcoming Sessions Live conference, Cultivating Aliveness: Desire & Its Disruptions, taking place May 15 and 16 in Brooklyn and online.
To learn more and purchase tickets, click here.
✧ The full livestream is available below. We hope you’ll spend the hour with us.
Prefer to listen? ⤵︎
Mating in Captivity Godmothers | Bookshop.org | E-book: Bookshop.org | Audiobook: Libro.fm
