Esther Calling - Four Affairs, Four Divorces. Why Do I Keep Doing This?

Speaker A
You know, I've been reflecting on my past relationship. I've been thinking about all the challenges I faced, and despite my desire for a stable, fulfilling partnership, I find myself like repeating patterns that have led to pain and failure. I've been married four times. I'm 46 now, and each marriage ended in divorce. In my first marriage, I experienced physical abuse, and in my third, emotional abuse.

My second and fourth husbands, they were good men whom I deeply respected, and yet I still betrayed their trust through infidelity. I ended all my marriages by cheating on my husbands.

I was not happy in my sexual life with any of them until my current relationship, which is with a married man who became my affair three and a half years ago when I decided to quit my fourth marriage. Now he is on the way out of his marriage and it kind of gets serious between us, and I feel that I start to create problems for us because, as I understand myself, fear to make this relationship serious because I'm afraid that I will step into the same pattern as I had before. Despite my longing for a life partner, I questioned really my ability to maintain a healthy and stable relationship. And I question why I ended all my relationships before by cheating.

Speaker B
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Speaker C
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Speaker B
Did you know that I have a subscription on Apple Podcast and it's called office hours with a stir parel? And here's why I did this because I wanted to have an additional place to have conversations that I really like to have on the podcast, but couldn't have on the regular. Where should we begin? I also wanted to be able to share with you the follow ups to the session. So often people ask me what happened to them?

Did they stay together? Did they have the kid? They work it through. This allows me to share with you because I actually do know and get notices from the people. And then thirdly, for any of you for whom this matters, this is the way for you to get an ad free listening of a session, the way that it really happens in the office.

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Speaker D
I've realized that this is a pattern, like maybe already when it was a second marriage, because it always started the same and it continued the same with different, totally different men. What do you mean by it started the same? I mean it started nicely, bright and with feelings. And like every time I was hoping that, yes, that's the mystery, right? Looking back, I understand that I was choosing my next man as a contradiction to the previous one, because the previous one didn't happen to be happy marriage.

And it's really hard to say, but I feel I was always looking for love, the love which would give me a feeling that I don't have to fight for it, or that I don't have to prove I'm good enough to be loved. My childhood was not easy. My mother was sick with cancer all my childhood, and my dad was always working. I was alone lots of hours every day, entertaining myself, and I escaped home when I was 18. So I ran away, basically because I had more restrictions and things which were forbidden at home than those things which were allowed to do.

So I really wanted freedom, but I didn't go free. So I ended up in the relationship with a man who was older than me. And basically I was going from one relationship to another. And I started, of course, to question, like, is it something I'm desperately looking for and cannot find? Does it exist, what I'm looking for at all?

Something is wrong with me that I do not manage to go for. Like, to search properly, or, I don't know, how shall I say it, like, where am I failing? And why can't I just see that it's not going to work within like a short period of time? Why do I dedicate years for such relationships? Why do I go for marriage?

And why I choose going for a fair to end it up? So it feels like I can't actually go and say, okay, let's divorce, it's not working or let's break up so I'm making myself a bad guy at. The end so you find Mister Wright but you become misses notright? Yeah, looks like it.

Speaker B
And what comes first? Extricating yourself through the affairs or deciding that you want to end and then finding the best sure bet to do. So I think first I decide that it's gonna end. Yes. And I think that for me I was catching myself on the thought that if I actually can look at another man it means that yeah, my feelings are over.

Oh really? Do the lovers become your next husbands? No so the lovers are just exit strategies? Yes. So it was always very short term.

Speaker D
Yes. So except for this last one. Yes, this last one is very special. Yes but you are basically. If I understood you well, saying to me as we now have a clear slate to be with each other, I am so afraid that I'm gonna mess it up.

Yes. That I would rather he not be available. Yes. Me choosing this relationship which I have now, I was very conscious when I was going for it so basically I opened computer and I didn't know that such sites exist, websites, you know, for married people. So I really didn't know.

And I just googled website for married people for sex or something, I don't remember how did I type it but suddenly it appeared and I was shocked. How many people are there, married people looking for affairs. And I spent just two days on that website because I became overwhelmed of the attention and amount of messages I was receiving on the day when I was already like on the way out I just scrolled down and stopped and that was it. I didn't have sex with my fourth husband for three years before actually I went for this. And when I realized that, okay, I just need to figure out, am I frigid?

Like something is wrong with me. So. And I thought that I don't want to go find someone who is not married because it may cause troubles for me and that it's better on the safe side that we both are married. So that was the idea which I had that in my head it started like very symmetrical so we both wanted the same and it was an escape for both of us. I have a very sick child, my second daughter is a handicapped child and my relationship at home was difficult despite of the fact that my ex husband is a very nice man.

But we just. It didn't work between us. We were not talking almost at all. And as I mentioned, we didn't have any sexual life for years and it was approximately the same situation in his sight. So when we were meeting each other once per week or once per two weeks, we just had a very great time escaping.

Then in some months, it started. So we started to establish feelings for each other. And it became more and more serious. And that was very first long affair for both of us. I think we both somehow tried to fight this.

Because I had my fears, he had his fears. They are where we are now. So it feels that it can become something. But I have this fear inside me that am I certain that this is going to work, or is it going to fail again? Is it that, or do you have.

Speaker B
I was waiting to see how you're going to finish the sentence. Because the four marriages, the constant factor is you. There may be four very different men, but there's four times the same woman. And you probably can begin to identify what are some of the things that happen to you when in the relationships. I don't know how long they last.

I don't know what happens when you check out, when you give up, when you start to feel like I have to escape, like you left and escaped home. When you start to feel that you are talking to these men, experiencing them like you experienced your father. When you start to think, you know, will this succeed? You have no idea. You're right to think.

I'm not sure of anything. You shouldn't be. But you have questions about what's it with me? I mean, you don't seem to have a challenge finding people. But every time you find yourself running and bolting, that's probably the first question for me.

Because what you're asking me is what's inside of me that's driving me. Is there something broken? Is there something that I'm not aware of? Is there something I should watch out for? Because I'm my worst enemy at this point.

Yes, I undermine myself. And I could go on, I could do six, seven, eight. But it's not like I don't pay a price.

And I do meet, and I do fall in love, and I do go into la la land, and I do marry every one of them. And, of course, they all marry me, too. And I don't know what they think when I tell them about the previous ones, but every single one of them thinks that maybe they'll be different or I'll be different with them. And so everybody is in magical thinking land. There's a lot of fiction here.

And now there's someone that you care about deeply who's leaving his family to be with you, and you kind of say, I don't want him to destroy all of that for me. If it's going to be another short term investment, we have to take a brief break, so stay with us and let's see where this goes.

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Speaker C
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Speaker E
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Speaker E
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Speaker B
So what do you know? What do you know about your experience? Not so much about what you do. The affairs is the strategy. The affairs is the symptom.

The affairs is not the cause. What happens to you in those attachments that you form and in the way that you need to sever them very abruptly? I never had many relationships. These four relationships, they have been long, all of them. They took me years.

Speaker D
So it's been five, seven, five and five. So I've been really trying to save all of them, despite of the fact that usually in approximately one or two years, it would be already obvious it's not going to work. And when you say it's not going to work, or even when you say I'm looking for love, you're looking for what? What's the fantasy that every single one of these men is going to, what? Rescue you from what?

I don't think I actually was looking for rescuing, but I think I was looking for freedom. Looking at all them four. They actually put me in prison, but in another type. So the first one was really dominating. Dominating badly.

Like, he was eight years older and I was 18. He was trying to change me by all means, you know, like, change me what my mother made of me and change into something else. But I don't think I really knew who I am, because I was not allowed to say no. I was not allowed to say, I don't want to do this or that. I was punished.

I was bitten. I was not used to actually express my desires. I'm not sure that I actually knew what my desires are. I was so used to do what I was told to. And that's why this first relationship, I felt even comfortable in it, like, because, yeah, it was another person who was saying to me what I should do.

Speaker B
Like your dad had done. No, my mom. My mom. My father was working a lot. He's actually a great person.

Speaker D
And I was. But I didn't know him really, when I was a child. So we found each other much later in my life when my mom died and we started to talk more. And now we are quite close. But during my childhood, I even didn't remember him.

And not very long time ago, I asked him, where have you been? Like, why don't I remember you? And he said that, well, yeah, he traveled a lot. He was working, basically constantly working. And my mom, she was dealing with cancer and with two children.

Speaker B
And your mom is the one that put the restrictions. Yes, yes. So every time I met a man, I thought I would finally experience freedom. But every time I found myself back in another version of the prison that was familiar to me, in which somebody dictates to me either through soft power, either through overt power, either through being a perpetrator, either through being a victim. Exactly.

Speaker D
Because if I take my last marriage there, my ex husband became basically my teenage child. So he was a very nice person, but he didn't manage to take care of himself, really, while we were together. And I had him, I had two my children, where my youngest one is a handicapped child, and his son from the first marriage, first wife died of cancer as well. And so I got suddenly many kids whom I had to take care of. And I've been constantly working.

I've been arranging activities for children, buying clothes for everyone, including my husband, ordering hairdresser visits for him as well. And then I realized, okay, that's not life. I remember I came home after work late and he was very good at cooking, so he loved taking care of kids and making food. So I felt we switched the rules and I stopped feeling myself as a woman. And maybe that's why our sex life stopped as well.

Because you cannot have sex with your son, basically.

And that's a horrible, horrible, terrible feeling. And I remember I was on the couch in front of the tv and I thought, okay, and that's it. So this is how my life is going to be. And I really loved life all my life, despite of everything what happened to me all the challenges I had. And I just wanted so much to at least allow myself to think, can it be different?

Speaker B
But interestingly, you come to me, asking me, why do I cheat repeatedly? Why do I leave my marriages with the affairs? Or why do I resort to affairs, period? And then why do I resort to affairs as a marital escape? And I have another question.

I mean, it actually is quite obvious to me. That doesn't mean it's true. But that's the thought that came to me. That if in every marriage you find yourself either the mother or the daughter, then leaving with an affair is leaving as a woman. Oh, that's so beautifully said, isn't it?

Speaker D
Now you suddenly made me not feeling guilty.

Speaker B
But that's not my goal, is not about cleansing your conscience. My hope is to help you make sense. If there's a question, it is, why do I find myself continuously hoping to leave the relationship I had with my mom, but actually recreating it in all its glory, in multiple colors and forms? That's the question. The fact that I use sex and infidelity to leave, because it's actually more sex than anything else, is because once I become sexual, I feel free.

Once I am sexual, I am not in a child role either. Restricted, beaten up, abused, clamored. And I'm not in a motherly role, because as a mom, I'm also not having sex. So it takes the form of the affairs, and your partners will experience it as such. But if you ask, what is the meaning?

Why is this my strategy? Why don't I leave simply saying I want out? Because I don't feel free enough to leave. So basically, they end up saying, we're gone. I mean, I am the one instigating it, but they're participating, and I live through the use of sex, because sex represents for me being a woman, not a child or a mom.

And being free, even if it's short. Term, it makes sense. Yeah. The real question is, why am I trapped in constantly putting myself with the same kind of people? They may be different in color, race, religion, language, etcetera, but the relationship I develop with each and every one of them always lands me in the same spot.

That's the question. Yeah. The question is about how do I enter, not how do I exit? What do you think of this? I think it's very, very true.

Speaker D
You are absolutely right. In two marriages, I felt myself as a daughter, and in other two marriages, I felt myself as a mother. They all started that I felt myself as a woman. But when we moved together, so the situation started to change. But the question which remains is, was it me who influenced those men to become either children or my fathers or.

It was something what I didnt saw in the beginning of the relationship, this relationship which I have now, it hasn't been six months or one year. It has been three and a half years, when usually all my previous relationships would end, basically almost. I've been really learning myself during the last two years, trying to work on my traumas, my childhood traumas and such. I worked with a therapist and spent time on learning what do I really like and what gives me pleasure, really trying to meet myself, because I felt that I've been trying to please everyone in my life. First I try to please my parents, then my husband, my employers.

In this relationship, I don't have to. So we are in a very, quite amazing partnership. And that feels very good. And this is something what I so afraid to destroy by some move which I will not even understand.

Speaker B
Such as? That's a good question. What's your fantasy of the fatal blow? It has always been a moment when feelings started to get weaker with everyone. And I cannot say what exactly happened, which brought me to the point that feelings started to fade away.

It fades from what to what? I start stopping loving. And I feel what instead? Emptiness, irritation. I want to isolate myself to be on my own, to have my own space, to not be around.

Speaker D
But very often first, what I stop wanting is physical connection. Physical sex? Yes. And what do you think that represents? I don't know.

Help me, please. How old were you when your mom died? I was 30. 30? 330?

Yes. So she's been sick for 25 years, basically. So she had some remissions, but cancer would come back and like three times, I think it has been three rounds. And what was the soundtrack that would go in your head when you would think of her? You are so sad.

You are so angry. You are so gray. You never smile. You never want to celebrate a birthday. You are never happy about Christmas or New Year's Eve.

You never want to have presents. You never want me to be around. You like my friends more than me. You call them nice names and you never called me that. So I can continue.

Speaker B
Keep going, keep going.

And I feel. I feel sad. I feel so sorry for small me because I understand that she had a very tough life. Most of her life, like many years of terrible sickness and having two children to raise. We didn't live in a very easy environment that time, because I was 13 when the Soviet Union collapsed and we had no food for a period of time.

Speaker D
So it was long queues and just to get food home. That was a big problem. I understand she's been through a lot, but I feel that it damaged me. I didn't learn how the love looks like, really. I haven't seen that between her and my father.

And I didn't experience how the love looks like between a parent and a child either.

Speaker B
And when you start to distance and to remove yourself and to shut down sexually and to withhold your own affections, what precipitates it, what inside of you predisposes you to that cut off? Well, I guess I'm looking for calmness. Like to be in my own world and to be safe, to like when I'm with myself, I'm safe. What is it that you notice a year into your marriages that is giving you the cue? Time to withdraw, time to cut off, time to shut down sexually.

Speaker D
Disappointments. Okay, that's what it is. One disappointment after another, disappointment after another. I always gave chances, hopes, and especially in the last one, I learned to speak out and talk about things which I find difficult, or I don't like, or I would like to have it different. But I believe I always had hopes, which maybe not always have been realistic.

Speaker B
Tell me more. Because the person who doesn't know what love is learns. Love from where? From books, movies, and all that is artificial. Somebody made it up.

Speaker D
And then when you meet real people, you maybe want them to be that character. You see some features in them, but then real life happens and you start getting disappointed because the person is not as you imagined it from the very beginning. So that's the rescue? Yeah. The rescue is you will pick me up and drop me into perfect Loveland without any boo boos, no frictions, no fractures, never disappointment.

Speaker B
I'll give you everything I have and you'll transport me to this haven where I am cherished and adored and desired and made to feel valued. And when it starts to become clear that that's not going to happen, I basically raise my sails and off I go. Yeah.

We are in the midst of our session, and there is still so much to talk about. We need to take a brief break, so stay with us.

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Speaker G
And there's even a way to put money aside to donate to charity. So it's a great way to have conversations around money. Millions of parents and kids are learning about money on Greenlight. Sign up for Greenlight today and get your first month free when you go to greenlight.com estair. That's greenlight.com estair to try Greenlight for free.

Speaker B
Greenlight.com Esther.

Speaker H
Support for this show comes from Atlassian. Atlassian software like jira, confluence and loom help power global collaboration for all teams so they can accomplish everything. That's impossible alone, because individually we're great, but together we're so much better. That's why millions of teams around the world, including 75% of the Fortune 500, trust Atlassian software for everything from space exploration and green energy to delivering pizzas and podcasts. Whether you're a team of 2200 or 2 million, or whether your team is around the corner or on another continent altogether, Atlassian software is built to help keep you all on the same page from start to finish.

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Speaker B
I withhold sex because I see it as a currency for love. It's not just I deprive myself of my own pleasure on anything. It's simply, you don't deserve this. And I'm not giving you squat. Fuck you.

You're not there for me, and I don't give you. Because even though I like it and I enjoy it, in the context of marriage, it's part of marital duty. It's the thing I do when I'm nice. That sounds very sad, that sex is a duty. Well, not always, but it means that I do the things I do to be nice.

You tell me I'm thinking out loud, and I may be off, but I'm watching your eyes while I talk.

Speaker D
I don't think I ever punished any of them with saying no. If I'd really wanted. Oh, but I didn't want anymore. But I should want. Yes.

Speaker B
Yes, yes. No, no. I'm very clear that the wanting goes the moment you start to withdraw. It is like the. It's the alarm system.

Speaker D
Yeah. It's the place where I know that I'm open, that I give myself to you, that I invite you in. And when I experience my disappointments, it's the first thing that closes up. Does it mean that I actually punished them with that? And that it was in my power that I can give myself to somebody else?

Speaker B
You tell me you don't experience it as punishing. You're experiencing it. You experience it more as lack of connection and self protection. They may experience it as punishing, but for you, that's not the verb that resonates. No, that's true.

I know that. I think it's more the feeling of you hurt me. I protect myself. I protect myself by not wanting to be touched by you. Stay away.

Don't come close. Is that resonate? Yes. That was surely an escape. This is how I named it for myself as well.

Speaker D
With. I never had affairs as well for a very long time. So usually it would take a month, and then I'm off out of the marriage. But when this last affair started, so that was. I called it an escape.

Speaker B
Do your husbands know them? I mean, do they know of the affairs? No, they don't know. So one day you come and you just say, I want out. Basically, yes.

Speaker D
Yes. After I did that, then I had, like, enough energy or power inside me to say that yes. Now it's over. And then what would happen? They would say ye nay.

Speaker B
They would fight. They would hope to convince you to stay. They would say, go ahead. Most of them were trying to convince me to try more and stay and work on the marriage and such. But usually it would be already like a couple of years after I started to express my disappointments or needs in something, what they were not giving me.

Speaker D
And I was trying, actually, I was asking, let's work on it. And none of them would do that. And then we come to the point, like in two years time, that I'm saying, okay, it's over. And then they are willing actually to start doing something. But for me, when it's done, it's done already.

So this is kind of no return point. And especially if basically cheated already. I went for an affair. So for me it's a no go for coming back. Because.

Mostly because that I'm going for an affair already when it's totally empty, right? I mean, I'm on my way out and I need something to strengthen me so I'm not completely alone. So I have someone else who really is with me, even if it's just for the transition. And those are exit strategies. To call them affairs is just a means to an end.

Speaker B
And they may last for a couple of months afterwards. And then that's it. They did their job. I feel empowered. I feel like they have a man by my side.

I am not alone. And I basically accomplish my mission. And mission is an escape. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To get out of there as fast as I can.

To go where? Because if you go. Yes. With the same magical thinking, with the same fantasy of what romantic love should basically protect me from. Ever feeling alone, ever feeling disappointed, ever feeling needy or unmet.

Ever feeling those longings that I had my whole life. You get to forget something once, maybe twice. By the third time, some very old feelings begin to come back up and it starts to feel so familiar. And it's a kind of an emotional desert in which we are tied by what? By dependency, by need, by caretaking, by duty, by responsibility.

Speaker D
Yeah, that was a lot of. Okay. All words you used for mom and you. And it's quite fantastic how scotch free your father is. He's basically just seen as the man who worked.

Speaker B
He's untouched. I think he was the one who actually knew what he wants, how he wants it, and how to live a good life. Yes, but he left her with the two children and is not held accountable. He was providing the family. That was kind of normal.

Speaker D
You know, that time in that country, it was a usual thing that men worked. They were giving money to the wife and going back to work and women would be taking care of everything, like children and household. And my mother, she had her own traumas, her own childhood, her own issues, her troubles with her mother. I really don't know why she was coping with staying alone for long periods of time and being sick and taking care of us. And me and my sister, I never saw them close.

I never saw them loving. I never saw them like, I don't remember us sitting around the table and talking with each other. Even so, it was a fun time. Did you see it at your friend's home? Oh, yes, my neighbor and we were often visiting each other, and I was always so I don't know if the word jealous is right to use in this particular circumstance, but I really like.

I was admiring how her parents were looking at each other. And you know what's interesting? Her father, he was a pilot. My current boyfriend, he is a pilot too. And he even reminds me a little bit how my friend's father looked like.

Speaker B
And what does that mean for you? I'm always happy when I think about it, because that home, maybe that was the only real life. Not books and not movies, but actually real relationship, which I saw where the love was so obvious, love for children, how they loved their daughters and how they expressed their love, how they loved, how they celebrated all the holidays. And that was something that I definitely desired for myself. How are you with your daughters?

Speaker D
Oh, I love them very much. I love them very much, but I do not control them well. The youngest one, she is a handicap, so she is in like 50% home and 50% in the special institution. And she doesn't talk, and it's not much of such communication with her. But my oldest one, she's 19 and she's moving out this summer.

I love her very much, of course, and I've been very different with her, comparing to how my mother was with me. And how has it been for her to travel these multiple marital units? She is a daughter of my second husband. She has got her trauma, I guess, because of that, especially because of my third husband, the father of my second daughter, because that relationship was extremely difficult. But my fourth marriage, she was already a teenager when it happened.

And it was easier, I guess, for me, I was always open with her, I don't know, but I've never been afraid of showing my feelings to her, explaining things. And it can be that she will have to work with a therapist later on as well. But you're saying. I have been trying with the therapist to address how my relationship with my mother and the emotional desert that I felt I was living in has accompanied me in the course of my life, how it completely created idealistic expectations for me in what love is, you know, in a very childlike way, that love should be a permanent state of enthusiasm, that it should have no ripples and no cracks. And that it, in a way, didn't prepare me except for knowing how to leave.

Speaker B
I don't know much what to do when I have disappointment, when I am sad, when I am hurt. And it's not that I don't tell the partners, but I don't know how you told, and I don't know who you chose to tell it to. So then I realized at one point, I'm going to go. And then I basically start preparing myself for a year or two on how to extricate myself from here, financially, emotionally, logistically. And then I basically.

The affair is just a fatal blow. I just bring the big gun to make sure that I succeed and that there is no return possible. I am completely shut down to any of these men. They can talk to me, anything they want. Nothing enters anymore.

I've opened another little window to another guy on the side, but to the husbands, I'm completely done. And now I am with someone, and it's been a bit of a different pattern. And so here's the question for me. How do I learn? Because once we are just us and we've cleared all the.

The families, because it's families that are involved, what will happen to us as long as there is other people? When he disappoints me, I can also think of it structurally. It's because he's not available, it's because he's flying, it's because we have still divorces to go through, etcetera. But once it's just him and I does this put me back in exactly the same situation where I put myself completely at the mercy of everything he says and does to prove our love. And then basically put myself in this most vulnerable place where I am just the recipient of what he will or will not bestow upon me.

And that's the structure that needs to shift. As long as there are obstacles, I can kind of rationalize the shortcomings, the disappointments, the letdowns, etcetera. But once we're just us, I don't want to put him in the same examination because I know he will fail, because everybody does, because nobody is perfect. No man will undo the legacy of your mother. You will.

Speaker D
How?

Speaker B
I'm not capable of answering that. After 1 hour like this, honestly, what I did think is when they hurt you, the sadness and the anger that come up like a volcano, much of it doesn't belong to them. It belongs to you and her. And if that rage, which is a combination of sadness and helplessness and anger erupts inside of you, then in some interesting way, she remains in control of your life. You may have left, you may have run five times, four times in marriages and many others, but in effect, she continues to have the control that you so ardently have hoped to escape.

Still, even now, in those moments, I. Hope so much that I actually already kind of worked through this mother thing, connection and managed to cut it, at least with forgiveness and to her right. But it's the moments when the man that has been identified as the source of love, redemption and repair, when he misses, and even when he misses again, that's the moment.

Speaker D
But does it mean that it's all my fault? That all my marriage is collapsed? Not at all, no. But you came to ask me about your part. And when you are in them and you're about to leave them, you tell yourself the story.

Speaker B
As they let you down, they became abusive, they became infantilized. They didn't do their part. They made it impossible for you to tolerate this. When you're with them, you don't think, what am I doing? You think, what are they doing to me?

And how am I reacting to that? When you're with me, you say, this is true, but it sits on a set of expectations. So I'm basically escaping not them, but I'm escaping my feelings. What's hurting me. Unexpressed expectations are predetermined resentments.

When you meet them, you idealize them and you put on them a host of things which they don't even know. And then they fall from grace. How shall I know that now it's different.

I don't know. I wish I could tell you everything like that after an hour, but I can't. I would be saying just generalities, and that wouldn't be fair to you. So here's a perfect example of a conversation that will end with a frustration.

So you want to know, is it different? This is the moment. You can make it different. You know, it's interesting because I kind of. I felt.

Speaker D
It was a moment. I felt like, so much lighter. And now I feel again like, ah, welcome to life.

Yes, exactly. You think that the heaviness is a disappointment and it doesn't feel good, but it's not, by definition, a tear.

Speaker G
This was an Esther calling, a one time intervention phone call recorded remotely from two points somewhere in the world. If you have a question you'd like to explore with Astaire that could be answered in a 40 or 50 minutes phone call, send her a voice message and Esther might just call you. Send your question to producer estheraparell.com dot where should we begin? With Esther Perel is produced by magnificent noise. We're part of the Vox Media podcast network in partnership with New York magazine and the Cut.

Our production staff includes Eric Newsom, Destry Sibley, Sabrina Farhi, Kristin Muller, and Julian at original music and additional production by Paul Schneider and the executive producers of where should we begin? Are Esther Perel and Jesse Baker. We'd also like to thank Courtney Hamilton, Mary Alice Miller and Jack Saul.

Esther Calling - Four Affairs, Four Divorces. Why Do I Keep Doing This?

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1. Introduction to the guest’s relational history

2. Exploring childhood influences

3. Affair dynamics and current fears

4. Confronting self-sabotage

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

Content Warnings:

Transcript