Esther Perel could have rapport with a dead plant or be a cult leader. She possesses an Oprah–like quality that makes you want her to guide you, comfort you, and be your best friend, all at once. Perhaps that’s why she’s the most famous therapist in the world: erotic stalemates, loving a chronic philanderer, and simply being too much are her zones of interest. When we met at her podcast studio in Chelsea in April, she had recently talked to someone about accidentally dating an OnlyFans star. Perel, maybe more than anyone, is aware of the state of modern love.

Perel’s book Mating in Captivity, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, presented a radical idea that we needed to throw out the prevailing psychology around intimacy—that when couples argue over perennial topics, such as children, money, and in-laws, resolving those issues would also resolve any sexual problems. Instead, Perel advised couples to try more radical means to get themselves unstuck. The book has sold over a million copies and has been translated into 30 languages.

Her advice felt wholly new at the time. “I read Mating in Captivity maybe maybe 19 or 20 years ago,” says the actress and director Olivia Wilde, who is a former patient of Perel’s. The two became friends after ending their sessions. (As far as other famous patients go, Perel would never say, but Elizabeth Chambers, the ex-wife of Armie Hammer, said in a 2023 interview that Perel was the couple’s therapist for most of their marriage.) “I really find her endlessly inspiring in every way. Her approach is so full of curiosity,” Wilde tells me. She adds that Perel’s focus on “personal investigation” allowed her to “consistently challenge the assumptions I had come to when speaking of relationships.”

And so in 2025, Perel came on as a consultant for Wilde’s film The Invite, which is a remake of a Spanish film about two couples who are neighbors, that will be released in theaters tomorrow. This version is set in a San Francisco apartment building, where Wilde’s character and her husband, played by Seth Rogen, are chronic bickerers who invite a neighbor couple played by Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz over for dinner to get to know them beyond the wild sex noises they hear coming from their apartment every night. Hijinks, innuendo, and a lot of heated discussions about love and sex ensue. Cruz plays a therapist based on Perel, albeit one who comes off unhinged.

When friends and colleagues heard that I was profiling Perel, they asked if I would seek advice. It’s hard to resist asking her for advice, not just because she seems wise, but because of her hypnotic charisma and sly smile. But I told everyone of course not, that I was treating this as any other interview, not as a chance for some pro bono therapy. I still ended up getting some.

You might think that Perel’s origin story would be one about falling in love, or heartbreak, or sexual awakening. It was actually about ghosts. Not in a supernatural sense, but rather being haunted by a presence, or a lack thereof. “I was interested in the absence of families. I knew that everybody else has families with uncles and aunts and grandparents. We had nothing,” she says.

Perel’s Polish parents were the sole Holocaust survivors in their families. They met the day they were liberated. They came to Belgium with three-month permits and remained as undocumented refugees for five years before becoming Belgian. (Now Perel is a Knight of the Order of the Crown of Belgium.) She studied literature and linguistics—she is fluent in seven languages—and moved to New York in 1984 to train in family therapy (and also because she loved live theater; many avid theatergoers have stories of spotting her in the aisles). She stayed because she met her husband of 41 years, the psychologist and Columbia University professor Jack Saul, with whom she has two sons, and about whom she rarely speaks, along with anything else particularly personal.

She was a therapist with a bustling practice in downtown Manhattan with about two decades of experience by the early aughts. A colleague asked her, “What are you thinking about these days?” Perel recalls, “And I just kind of blurted out, ‘I’m thinking about Americans and sex,’ jokingly.” She had spent over a decade treating Americans and observing our culture’s sexual mores. “Desire was not a concept that people talked about a lot here at the time. We talked about sex and sex meant sexual function, sexual disorders, sexual performance, but not the concept of desire in the broader sense of aliveness and eroticism and all of that,” Perel says.

Mating has become this era’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus in that we are so steeped in Perel’s language, we don’t even realize it. Anytime someone mentions relationships thriving on mystery and absence over a wine-soaked dinner party, they’re borrowing from her. One example from the book that illustrates Perel’s tough-love approach was a couple who loved to cuddle, wearing comfortable clothes such as flannel nightgowns to unwind. She told them to get rid of the flannel and to stop cuddling until they started having sex again. “I remember them very well. That cuddliness was actually anti-erotic. It brought them into the realm of a familial relationship, and that familiarity was not allowing for the tension that desire needs.”

She wrote that “love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery.” But with culture moving at the hyper speed it does, one could argue that we are fully steeped in the tension and eroticism she once advocated for, and so the question becomes what's next?

Mating was lauded within the clinical community when it was released, but didn’t find mainstream success until Perel did her first TED Talk seven years later. Since then, she’s gone from niche to real fame: She has nearly 5 million followers across Instagram, YouTube, and Substack; her two TED talks have been viewed close to 20 million times; her books, Mating and The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, have sold over a million copies and been translated into over 30 languages; and she has a podcast Where Should We Begin?, which is usually in the top 100. She always seems to have a viral video making the rounds. In early May, a single clip of her on Jay Shetty’s podcast racked up hundreds of thousands of views in a few days. In it, she’s asked whether you can ever really get over someone after a breakup, and she says that their impact will eventually diminish. Except she says it Esther-style: “You won’t forget them, but they will take a different place on your shelves.”

When I ask what she looks for when deciding to take on a potential client, Perel says she wants to feel “chemistry,” aesthetically and intellectually, with her patients. She wants the people she treats to move her. “It’s the way of, how comfortable I feel sitting next to you and you sit next to me,” she says. Her English is fluent, but the Belgian-born Perel has a slight accent, so “sit” sounds a bit like “seat.” “It’s how I listen to you. Do I lose attention? Do I stay intensely focused? Do I have a reaction to you? Do you seem to have a reaction to me?”

Then she says, “The great thing about this profession is that you can do it until your head drops.” And that’s when our talk, maybe inevitably, turns to me. I mention that I’d once had a therapist who died. So yes, I sidestepped the obvious trap of talking to her about sex or romance or dating, only to end up discussing the unavoidable: death.

Her twinkly blue eyes zoned in on me, as I felt her focus switch from someone who was answering questions to someone who wanted to ask the questions. “And you were still seeing her when she passed away?” she asks. Yes, I reply, but she had been very old, in her 90s, so I knew that it was something that would happen, and then there were some cancelled appointments; I had a sense that things had worsened. “Do you wish she had said, ‘We should talk one day about the fact that I may not be here.’ That she had introduced the subject of mortality?”

I tell her I’d never thought about it—not then, and not now, over 10 years later. I liked that my hour of therapy was always about me. “But that also could have been about you,” Perel counters. “I may not be here for you at any moment.” And that hit so close to the core of my psyche that I was mystified by how quickly with an offhand comment, she got me. I’ve been in therapy for most of my life and interviewed people for decades. Neither therapist nor celebrity had done that before. It seemed like she saw something I didn’t.

“You already solved all my problems,” I tell her.

Perel is more interested in discussing the shifts in relationships, culture, and sex. She calls them “threshold moments” when every decade or so, some societal change makes its way to her office for the first time. She gives a quick history of what she has witnessed. There was no-fault divorce in the late ’70s. She came to New York in 1984 as the AIDS crisis raged. “AIDS on a family level was huge because so many of these men had never come out to their families,” she says. Also: assisted reproduction such as IVF and surrogacy, consensual non-monogamy, internet dating, and lately, menopause and neurodiversity. Not to mention the forced proximity brought on by the pandemic, the accessibility to porn, the ease of finding casual sex on an app, and the difficulty of forging real relationships in a world where chunks of our lives are playing out via screens.

But the issue that she’s gotten the most outside interest in has been human relationships with AI. In mid-March, she had her first podcast episode in which she treated an unnamed man who was in love with an AI bot he called Astrid. It’s a fascinating conversation, not least of all because Astrid has a high-pitched and quite young-sounding voice that Perel likens to a chipmunk. Perel never questions the feelings between the man and Astrid. Yet she points out the inherent flaws in the relationship, using words such as “sycophantic” and “undemanding” in the podcast session to emphasize that Astrid has no life, no history to bring to the relationship. “We have had imaginary friends since we are little, and we have spoken to our ancestors forever,” Perel says in our interview, a few weeks after the episode ran. “The danger of AI is that it becomes so soothing and so flattering and so frictionless that real relationships start to feel way too difficult by comparison.”

This new chapter in relationship development has brought her a whole new kind of press. She was in Los Angeles the last time we spoke, doing a Hinge event with Gen Z influencers and recording an episode of Call Her Daddy.

“What stood out for me is that it’s not like people go from thriving social relations to suddenly talking to an AI. They go from being isolated, spending most of their time at home, maybe going out every once in a while in the evening for dinner or to get to a gym, and they are already so centered on a very small universe that from there, they themselves have become so flattened by technology, they live in their phone,” she says.

It has made Perel zero in on the next great challenge. “This is a generation that actually doesn’t have a challenge of sustaining desire; they don’t even ignite it. You know, it’s not about keeping the flame going. It’s about getting the spark going. They don’t drink. They have not had much experience in their 20s, one or two relationships at most. They don’t have sex much. They don’t socialize much. They’re home a lot.” They are the children of people who first read Mating 20 years ago. Sounds like the topic for her next book.