Clash of the Titans: Esther Perel meets Bill Maher
There was some conflict (dare I say sexual tension) between the two heavy-hitters, and at the end it was difficult to say who won.
Everyone’s favourite sex and relationship therapist Esther Perel turned up on the HBO show of (not) everyone’s favourite comedian Bill Maher on the weekend, for a gripping conversation about how to keep long-term relationships hot, and how technology’s end goal of removing obstacles from our lives is killing imaginative love.
If you haven’t heard of Esther Perel you clearly haven’t watched … Ted Lasso?! That’s right, Ted Lasso writer/actor Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent) is a big Esther Perel fan (also of Brené Brown) and has managed to slip a reference to the Belgian-American psychotherapist into the odd episode. Her ideas likely also influenced his latest show on AppleTV+, Shrinking, but that’s a Substack article for another day.
As for Bill Maher and his weekly show Real Time, well, you either love him or hate him. I tend to love him, because while there’s plenty in what comes out of his mouth that I find tough to stomach, especially around Covid and vaccines, he’s one of a dwindling crowd that still calls things as they are and won’t kowtow to the supposedly liberal Twitter mob, most of whom weirdly share the same political affiliation as him (at least in name).
To see Esther and Bill squaring off in the show’s first interview segment, seated comfortably in office chairs as if in a therapist’s office, Esther initially seeming a little starry-eyed, and Bill intrigued and engaged but not nearly so smitten, was a bit of a thrill. As a fan of both, I was full of hopeful expectation and I wasn’t disappointed.
The following is pretty much just a description of the encounter as I saw it, because I think the whole coming together was worth writing down for prosperity.
Bill begins by saying he’s been anxious to have her on the show for a while because he thought they could have a break from the news cycle by talking about sex and relations, but then exclaims how even that subject’s become a crisis.
‘We’re more connected than ever,’ Bill says, ‘and yet there’s a loneliness epidemic.’
He quickly blames one of his longstanding bugbears, the smartphone, which he admits he blames for everything — and until someone can prove otherwise, he’s going to blame for the relationship crisis as well.
‘Am I wrong about that?’ he asks the expert, Esther, who’s looking lovely, by the way, in a tweedy thigh length jacket, and white pants and top, with a beautiful pendant consisting of eight small, white discs. She has distinctly European features and thick, arched eyebrows whose movement communicates as much as her eyes. When she’s not speaking, or smiling, she holds her lips firmly together, forcibly, as if she doesn’t want to let any of the data she’s consuming with her ears and her eyes seep out through any unnecessarily open orifices.
’No,’ she answers Bill — he’s not wrong about that. ‘Actually, no. There is a sense that modern loneliness actually masks itself as hyper-connectivity. So it's the phone but it's also every other technology that we are communicating through. It's basically giving us a sense of what I have begun to call “artificial intimacy”. It's distracted attention.'
She then describes the problem — when we’re communicating with an other over the phone, we know the other is distracted, scrolling, looking at other things. So it’s not intimacy at all. It’s multitasking.
I know this phenomenon well. There’s at least one friend I have who I don’t bother calling anymore because I know that when we talk he’s messing about on the computer, probably answering emails — I can hear the fool typing, for crying out loud. Then there’s the telltale panic when he realises he hasn’t been tracking the conversation and is about to be exposed. Well, moron, too late — you were sprung ages ago.
'We have a host of other technologies that are accompanying us,’ Esther continues, ‘not just the phone, that are all having the notion of being able to predict for us: where we should go, what I should listen to, what I should watch, who I should date, where I should go to eat. It’s assisted living.'
The audience laugh at that last comment, and so does Bill.
'And why is that a problem?’ says Esther. ‘Because each of these technologies that are supposed to help us become more connected, are actually making us more socially atrophied.'
Actual applause from the audience this time. And deservedly so. It’s a great observation. Count me as someone who’s become socially atrophied in the past few years. The loss of a business, the end of a friendship I was enjoying, the death of another friend, the pandemic, too much WFH (work from home), will do that to you. But ahh, my iPhone, my buddy that never fails me …
Bill talks about things being better in the (good) old days, when you actually had to meet someone in a bar, rather than over an app — because you can't get a reading of someone through a screen. Then he tells Esther, as if she needs him to elucidate, 'I can see you, I can see your eyes, I can smell you,' and the audience laughs, and as they laugh, Esther (gracious Esther) says, 'Smell is the essence of memory, so it's very important'.
She then points out that it's not just the difference between virtual and seeing.
'It's that there is a whole approach at this moment that is trying to erase the bumps of life; a technology that is meant to be polished, meant to be predictive, that is meant to kind of erase friction — you're asking me about sex; any good sex therapist will tell you that friction is an essential part of sex.'
Bill laughs, as does the audience, and says 'I knew I wanted to have you on this show.'
He has a bugbear about sex too, though. He says that it’s ‘down’, meaning average sexual activity between couples, even sperm counts.
Esther counters that studies have shown lower sperm counts are part of a broader environmental and dietary phenomenon and not just a social issue.
She says: ‘What I'm interested in is simply, there is a beautiful erotic equation that Jack Morin, a famous sexologist, came up with, that says attraction plus obstacle equals desire.'
A + O = D (remember that equation, it’s important!)
Bill points out that obstacles are the essence of every romcom movie. Esther agrees.
'The plot is the obstacles,' she says. 'The obstacle is what fuels the desire. This is part of sexuality as well. When I say erotic equation I really don't just mean sex. People can have sex and feel nothing.'
'Well ...' says Bill, about to disagree, and the audience laughs. But Esther persists.
'You can. Women have done it for centuries,’ she says.
Esther pushes through the laughter to make her most powerful point so far.
'It's actually not the focus on doing it,' Esther says. 'When you say people are having less sex, you fall a little bit in the trap of sex as a performance thing, as something you can measure that needs to be done. But the essential piece is the erotic quality. What does that mean? Your experience of aliveness, of vitality, of curiosity, of imagination, of playfulness — it's that that makes it interesting, otherwise, why bother?'
To which Bill says that’s the very reason he never got married, and he wonders how people can keep that sense of curiosity going for 40 years.
'Because you have a lot of obstacles,' Esther counters.
Touché.
But Bill won’t resile that easily.
'You've been married a long time, right?' he says. 'What are the obstacles that keep it so hot for you?'
And Esther’s answer, which I’ll cover next time, is the key to loving relationships, of all kinds, that are capable of transcending the malaise that accompanies life when you’ve done it long enough to see its natural enthusiasms wane.