Why Relationships Feel Harder Now: Presence Over Phones

The interview opens with a rapid-fire round, the kind of warm-up that usually gets a laugh and a platitude. Rangan Chatterjee asks for one habit that improves relationships most, and Esther Perel answers without hesitation: ongoing appreciation. Then the room tilts. Her next answers turn on the checklist, the phone on the nightstand and the sentence she wrote twenty years ago that still hits harder than it did the first time. What follows, across a 43-minute conversation, is a sharp and unsentimental account of why connection has become so hard to sustain even as the ways to reach one another multiply. Perel argues that we have become expert at scanning our partners for flaws, that we treat finding the right person as a product decision, that marriage gets mistaken for the end of romance rather than the beginning of a story, and that our devices have introduced a new kind of absence: bodies in the room, attention somewhere else. Her remedies are not exotic. They are appreciation spoken out loud, curiosity kept alive, risk and ritual, and the willingness to be fully present, which she treats as the real currency of a life.

Why are we so good at criticising the people we love?

Perel's first answer is a diagnosis. "We become so good at being critical of the person we live with," she told Chatterjee at the top of the conversation (0:00), and the irony is that the same attention could be pointed the other way. Her prescription is almost embarrassingly simple: say the appreciative thing. "Thank you. Nice. I appreciate. It moves me." Each of those small acknowledgments, she argued, builds what she called a bucket, a reserve of goodwill that a couple can draw on when the hard conversations arrive.

The logic is less sentimental than it sounds. Couples who have spent years cataloguing each other's habits tend to speak in a shorthand of irritation. Appreciation interrupts that loop. It forces a partner to notice what is working rather than what is annoying, and it gives the relationship something to lean on when stress arrives. In Perel's framing, appreciation is not a reward for good behaviour. It is maintenance.

Why is the checklist a curse when choosing a partner?

Chatterjee asked what people misunderstand about finding the right partner, and Perel went straight to the premise. "The focus on finding the right partner is in itself a problem," she said (0:44). "Why don't we ever ask, am I the right partner? Who am I in this relationship, rather than what do I find?" The shift in question is the point. Modern dating culture, with its profiles, filters and attribute lists, trains people to evaluate a partner as they would evaluate a purchase. Perel's answer is blunt: "Ditch the checklist. I mean that in itself is a curse."

The checklist fails for a reason that goes beyond romance. A list describes a person at a single moment, and it turns the relationship into a verdict on whether someone meets the criteria. It leaves out the most important variable, which is what two people are able to build together, and the role each one plays in that building. Asking "who am I here?" moves the work back to the self, where it actually lives.

What does marriage become when romance is supposed to end?

Chatterjee had been rereading the twentieth-anniversary edition of Perel's book Mating in Captivity, and he pointed to a passage about couples who keep a sense of playfulness in and out of the bedroom, for whom marriage is not the end of romance but the beginning. He noted that this runs against the cultural script, and asked what people are getting wrong.

Perel's answer begins with the expectation that one phase replaces another. The typical arc, as she described it, is to find the person, marry them, and then switch from passion to reality. But she is skeptical of that trade. "Passion is a temporary state of insanity," she said (5:04). Yet "when you trade passion for reality, you trade one fiction for another." The fantasy of the chase gives way to the fantasy of the stable home, and neither accounts for an actual person who keeps changing.

The alternative she offers is to treat marriage, or any committed relationship, as the start of a new story that the partners have not finished writing. "Relationships are stories," Perel said, and as a couples therapist she sees how often two people arrive at a point where those stories have become incompatible. Staying curious about the other person is what keeps the narrative open. Without curiosity, the partner stops being a mystery and becomes furniture.

Is playfulness really just taking risks?

Perel defines playfulness with unusual precision. It is "basically taking risks," she said (5:46). "It's about engaging with the unknown, being spontaneous, not settling on the familiar or on routine." She also notes that playfulness involves ritual, a paradox worth sitting with. The rituals that sustain couples are repeated on purpose, but what keeps them alive is the sense that anything could happen inside them. The energy she described is the feeling of being on the edge of your seat rather than settling into the sofa.

She illustrated the drift with a line that got a laugh from the audience and a recognition from anyone who has ever come home from work. Many people, she said, take off everything they wore during the day, the clothes and the effort, because they no longer feel they have to be attractive. Her question was pointed: on what basis would anyone expect a partner to feel desire under those conditions? Her suggestion was not a costume change for its own sake. It was a reminder that the attentiveness people bring to a prospective client, the charm and the listening, is a form of care that can be extended to home.

What is digital lag, and why does it matter at the bedside?

This is where the conversation turns most sharply. Perel asked the room how many people's last touch before sleep is a phone, and how many people's first touch in the morning is a phone. Then she drew the line: "And how many of you have someone lying next to you in bed?" Chatterjee admitted he touches his phone too, and the two of them agreed that people touch and caress their devices more than their partners, then wonder why they are struggling (7:49).

Perel's term for what happens in between is digital lag. It describes someone who is physically present but mentally elsewhere, a split she summed up as "I'm there. I'm here, but I'm not present." She argued that people drop their attentiveness the moment they are in relationship with the person in front of them, and then act surprised when the relationship feels flat, low in energy, or without aliveness. She was careful to clarify that this aliveness, which she called eroticism, has little to do with sex. It is the sense of intensity people want to feel with each other.

Chatterjee went further, calling physical co-presence with emotional absence one of the most toxic conditions in any relationship, whether with a partner, colleague or friend. He linked it to ambiguous loss, the grief of someone who is still there but no longer fully available. Perel's broader point is that the cost is not dramatic; it accumulates in small moments where a person is not listened to.

Can desire survive when everything is frictionless?

Perel frames the present moment as a test of desire. "In 2026 I am asking, can desire survive," she said (13:15), and she located the problem in a life where almost everything arrives without effort. Desire, in her account, depends partly on some uncertainty, on the gap between what we have and what we might still want. Her observation that it can be challenging to want what we already have points to the paradox at the heart of long relationships: the very security that makes a partnership stable can dull the appetite that made it exciting.

The answer is not to manufacture drama. It is to restore the conditions in which interest can grow, which means curiosity, risk and a willingness to let the other person surprise you. Those conditions are harder to find when every need can be met with a tap.

Why was one person never meant to be everything?

The idea of the soulmate came up as one of the expectations that undermine modern couples. Perel described how many people now say they are looking for a partner who will be their best friend, their trusted confidant and their lover all at once (29:55). The expectation is enormous, and it lands on a single person. She connected this to a larger shift: one partner was never meant to provide everything that an entire community once did. Friends, extended family, mentors and neighbours used to carry part of the load. The result is a relationship asked to hold more than it was built to carry.

This is where her own history gives the argument weight. Perel said her parents were both Holocaust survivors who survived the war completely alone, and that relationships with people and friends were all they had. "I understood that idea that relationships, friendships, mentors, teachers, people in your life are the gold that you will travel with," she said. "I saw it in front of me and it became the basis of my work." That lesson, that the people around us are the real resources of a life, is the thread that runs from her childhood to her clinical practice.

What is the AI companion conversation telling us?

Perel also shared what she learned from a recent therapy session between a human and an AI companion (34:28). The moment marks a shift in the conversation from the intimacy of couples to the question of how digital companions are reshaping what people expect from connection. Her concern, as the material frames it, is whether technology that is always available, never tired and always agreeable can make ordinary human relationships feel like too much effort. The question is one many clinicians are now asking, and Perel treats it as central to any discussion of loneliness and presence.

Where to go from here

The most useful thing about this conversation is that its advice is small enough to try this week. Start with the appreciation: say one specific thing you value about the person you live with, out loud, without a qualifier. Notice the checklist in your head and ask Perel's question instead: who am I being in this relationship? Put the phone out of reach at the moments that matter most, bedtime and the first minutes of the morning, and give your partner the attentiveness you give a client. Call a friend rather than sending a text, because, as Perel put it, the voice carries something the message does not. Introduce a little risk and ritual into routine. And treat the relationship as an unfinished story rather than a settled fact. Perel's most quotable line, from her book, is that a partner "never belongs to you. They are just on loan with an option to renew." That idea is the whole conversation in one sentence, and the reason it matters is that she believes, as she told Chatterjee, that the quality of your relationships ultimately determines the quality of your life.