In the TED talk shared below, psychotherapist/sex therapist Esther Perel presents with her usual brilliantly nuanced approach to love, sex and desire. She notes that our era is the first time in human history that couples are looking to sustain love and desire across decades; in that quest, they often “ask of one person what was once asked of an entire village.”
Do Love and Sex Belong Together?
According to Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, authors of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (2010), and a psychologist and practicing psychiatrist, respectively, men and women aren’t meant to be in lifelong monogamous unions. In their attempt to explain the high divorce rates in the western world, they argue that monogamy is in direct confrontation with the evolved reality of our species.