Program: Where's my village? Esther Perel on how to build community

Yumi
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Esther
So I think I understood the concept of village and family of choice before any of these words were invented in the modern meaning we give to them today.

Yumi
Esther Perel knows the value of gathering a community of chosen people around you better than most. The world-renowned psychotherapist is the daughter of Polish refugees who survived the Holocaust and as a child, she saw her parents rebuild what had been destroyed.

Esther
They were no other survivors of their entire family than my two parents. Parents were surrounded by other people who had gone through the same experiences, but they were not family, but they were family. And we always used to say because we don't have family, we create family. We have friends who are like family. I mean, it was the way we talked about it.

Yumi
Esther's parents created a village, a group of chosen people who could lean on each other. They were there for the small things and the big. They were the safety net that underpinned everyday life. But are you noticing that the village is getting harder for people to build and maintain? I'm hearing this complaint so often, this craving for connection from people who are at a loss as to how to create it. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, around one in six of us are lonely. But what if we actively, intentionally built community to share the load? What are some real active steps that you can take to build your village?

Emma
It really has been the most delightful experience to be explicitly invited into a village.

Lauren
You know that quote from Sex and the City, it says, maybe our soulmates are our friends. I honestly, genuinely believe that. That's how it feels for me.

Emily
It just reminded me that the absence of love from one person doesn't mean that you can't build a community around yourself with people that can actually show you the love that you deserve and what you need.

Yumi
When I got divorced, I suddenly wasn't the tough guy anymore. That was shocking to me. I was used to being needed, but I wasn't used to being needy. But during this deeply traumatizing time in my life, I had needs. I needed my closest friends, the ones who'd read my emails when I was overwhelmed, or come on hikes, or watch my kids in an emergency. But a village is more than just those friends. It's people like my GP who knows my business. It's the friendly faces at the gym who say hi and check in. It's my workmates who bring cake and do some breathing by my side when I need a fat cry. It's my mum and my adult daughters, my weekly running buddies and the parents at soccer. All these people remind me every single day that I'm not alone, that I'm connected, and that I matter. I'm Yumi Stynes, ladies, we need to talk about bringing back the village with Esther Perel.

Esther
It's not out of nowhere that we suddenly all over the West are talking about the loneliness epidemic. People are disconnected. People are gradually more and more socially atrophied. And I think that in every sphere where people are studying this, the numbers and the data is corroborating.

Yumi
Esther Perel's work as a psychotherapist, author and host of the huge podcast, Where Should We Begin?, has given her a deep understanding of how relationship dynamics have changed.

Esther
People don't meet in person, people don't party, people don't host, people don't just work remote, they live remote. We are deeply aware of the de-socialization that is taking place. And I think it is in part due to individualism. We left villages, we left communities, we moved to the cities, we became a lot more free and a lot more alone. We began to bring one romantic relationship to the heart of our life. That romantic relationship became one person who was supposed to give us what once an entire village used to provide. This one person was going to give us the feeling of belonging, of community, of continuity, of identity. He was going to be my best friend, my trusted confidant, my passionate lover, my intellectual equal, my co-parent. And that person is then called my soulmate, my one and only. And then from there, we began to realize, wow, this party of two that is supposed to become like a welfare state of its own, that is crumbling under the amount of expectations. Where is the village?

Yumi
As well as the pressure we put on romantic relationships, there's also the pressure to parent like it's a competition.

Esther
And that has everything to do with the changing culture of child-rearing. Parent was a noun. You were a parent. Today you are parenting. It is a verb and it's a high intensity activity in which there is often a sense that you have to take care of everybody, kids, adults, your parents, your partners, your man keeping, whatever you think you're doing, and then builds the resentment, then builds the disconnect and then builds, you know, all the emotional and sexual and intimate consequences.

Yumi
This inward focus is not just making our worlds smaller. It's actually bad for us.

Esther
The first implication is health. We all know that overall health is determined not just by our physical health or even our emotional health, but by our social health, that relationships are at the core of overall health, meaningful, fulfilling relationships.

Yumi
The good news is that even if you feel like you've left it too late or you're not from a big enough family or your family is dysfunctional or you're not cool enough, you can, with a little effort, choose the people that populate your village.

Esther
The village of today does something that is really revolutionary, which is this concept of chosen family. The modern village is often chosen. That is the fundamental difference. It can be chosen like people who choose to leave the city and go live in rural areas and in the countryside. That's a physical choice, but it is also chosen in sharing activities, sharing hobbies. It's the small book club and movie club, but it's also a parenting group. It's people who often meet together to go through certain phases of life, where there is a communality and a shared experience and a shared reality and they meet to exchange with each other.

Yumi
We asked you, our listeners, what your village means to you, and this is what you had to say.

Lauren
My village is honestly everything to me. They are the women who've grown with me through every season and every version of myself. They've shaped me, they've held me, they've challenged me, they've laughed with me more times than I can count, and they are honestly the real love story of my life. They're the people who've seen every version of me and they still show up.

Emily
I recently broke up with someone who I've been with for six years, and one of the most healing things after that breakup has been seeing and accepting love from my village of beautiful friends. Small things like making me breakfast in the morning and plaiting my hair before I went to sleep and going home with me after a night out to make sure I wasn't alone. And I guess it just reminded me that the absence of love from one person doesn't mean that you can't build a community around yourself of people that can actually show you the love that you deserve and what you need, and that love is in fact like a verb and not a noun.

Yumi
Esther learnt the importance of building a village from her parents and she's continued that lesson in her own life.

Esther
I have a group of friends from age six that I'm still connected with, so the value of continuity was also very significant in friendships. It's not just for the moment, but they are those that you would not have met today. If you saw them today, you wouldn't become friends with them. So the real ones are the ones who have evolved with you.

Yumi
After Esther moved from Europe to New York, she worked really hard to build her community.

Esther
The first thing you do is you meet other foreigners, because everybody's looking for contact and connection. And then slowly you meet your first American who is curious about the foreigners, because many times when you come to a place, the people already have their groups, you know, and they're not always as open and as curious about who has just moved around us.

Yumi
Esther built close friendships in her chosen city, but after a while, the foreigners she knew all had to go back to their home countries. And she knew she had to be intentional to fortify and repopulate her village.

Esther
One day, a friend of mine offered me his place for a holiday. He was going away and I invited 10 people who did not know each other for five days to come together. I know some of these people, they're peripheral people. I like them, but they've never really become close friends yet. Let me just organize this. Nobody else among these foreigners has where to go. None of us have family here, so we knew nobody has anywhere to show up for Thanksgiving. And 34 years later, we are still the Thanksgiving group. We meet every year for Thanksgiving. Our children are like cousins for each other. We had no kids when we met. Many of us were not yet partnered. People have divorced since. I mean, the family has gone through the cycles of life.

Yumi
That is so great, Esther and Pharrell. I love that so much. I've actually got tears in my eyes. We did an episode about loneliness and it was really heartbreaking because what we saw was women who were longing to connect with people but didn't have, I guess what you describe, sounds like courage to me. The courage to say, hey, strangers, should we all get together? Having the attunement and the understanding of these people to guess, forecast that they would get along and it would be okay. And then I guess being enough of a social lubricant or a person to bring it all together that it did actually work. So does it take courage and bravery? What if you're not as sophisticated socially to make stuff like that happen?

Esther
I think it's a beautiful question. I mean, you like biking, you like hiking, you like rock climbing, you like pottery, you like vinyl records, just go find a group near you and join on the basis of something that you share. There is an interaction. There's an activity that mandates interaction and trust and connection and all of that on the basis of the activity, not on the basis of what you talk and share.

Yumi
What's happening these days is everybody's waiting to be invited and not enough people are inviting. So please remember that maybe you can be the one creating the fun event or the invitation to connect. During the pandemic, Esther did some inviting of her own and organized a group of friends to practice yoga together.

Esther
The yoga is incidental. I mean, it still is there. We do it four times a week for five years without interruption. But that is not what's really happening. What's happening is a group of friends from the age of 30 to 70 come together and discuss every aspect of life and become a cohesive force and help each other with death, with birth, with screenings, with book publishings, with all kinds of issues.

Yumi
That's a village. Sometimes being in a village means rallying around someone when they're in need.

Emma
I'm part of a village who helps a friend who is a single mum and doesn't have family around to support her. When she realized the situation that she was in, she explicitly invited us to be part of her village and be aunties and uncles to her children. And I think people should not be afraid about having these conversations because there's probably a fear that it sounds transactional, but it really has been the most delightful experience to be explicitly invited into a village.

Peta
I fell out of my wheelchair and literally fell on my face. It was a good time. I was bleeding everywhere and I yelled that horrible yell that none of us want to use, but I yelled so loud that my whole street came and sat with me for over an hour in the Melbourne rain, waiting for an ambulance. It was just a level of community that I'm like, oh, I live in the right place. This is amazing.

Yumi
Maintaining a village is all about putting yourself out there, even when it's not easy, even when it's, oh my God, even when it's inconvenient.

Esther
What is currently overly emphasised in relationships is, does it suit me? How do I feel about it? It's very much determined by me and my individuality. What is missing is accountability. Accountability is the things that I do for you. It doesn't matter if I feel like it, if I like it, if it suits me, if it does me any good. I'm just talking about duty and obligation to the wellbeing of others and that I am part of a larger network of connections. And as part of that network and as part of receiving that sense of belonging, I do things for you.

Yumi
It's such an important ingredient. To have a thriving village, you don't operate from selfishness. Your starting position needs to be one of generosity. And it's not sexy, but also you need good old-fashioned reliability.

Esther
What makes it the village? That you can rely on people. You know that if you go there, you're going to see somebody. You can trust that they will show up, whatever the version of the showing up is. I think that is essential for a village.

Yumi
And because we can choose our village these days, this sense of obligation is actually vital. It used to be that your close family was the village from which you couldn't extricate yourself. Esther describes this as a tight knot, which could be suffocating, but also gave a sense of security. Relationships

Esther
have become much more loose threads that you can go in and out of. And people who are in the loose threads don't want to give up on the loose threads, but they also don't want to feel the isolation that comes with the loose threads. We talk about belonging as being seen and being accepted and feeling a part of. And all of this is absolutely true, but belonging has never existed without responsibility to others. I mean, so in that sense, I'm saying that sentence is incomplete. It involves acceptance and being seen and being a part of, but it involves also that being a part of means that I owe things to other people and not just what do they do for me.

Yumi
Most of us have the experience of someone flaking on us at the last minute. They said they were going to come, and then with nothing more than a text message, poof, they flaked. Or maybe we have been the flakers ourselves. But it's really important if you want to build a village to show up when you say you will, to choose to show up even if it's hard and yes, inconvenient.

Esther
If I say I come, I come.

Yumi
Yep.

Esther
What we have now is I can cancel half an hour before. You have gone shopping, you have set the table, you have prepared, and I am calling you an hour or half an hour before that I say I really need to take care of myself. Self-care is so important. I'm not going to come. One more, one less. What's the difference? Other people will show up instead of me. I shouldn't force myself if I don't feel like it. What is happening? I don't know a person who hasn't had that experience. And that's not just etiquette. That is part of the thread of the knot. If I feel a knot, I don't just flake on you because I don't think that it really matters. Who doesn't matter? Me to you or you to me? What are we saying to the social messaging here when we do that? And we're doing it a ton, a ton.

Yumi
Of course, the village isn't all about obligation. It's also about celebration and going through the seasons of life together.

Alicia
At the centre of my village are two incredible women who are my high school mates, Deanne and Christie. We have seen every version of each other from the permed hair days of the 80s in our teens to the raging menopausal moments of today in our 50s. They have steadfastly backed me through two marriages, cried with me over a now adult child living with addiction, cheered on and validated a later in life career change among many, many other shenanigans, and have done it all with grace, humour, patience and unending love and care.

Lauren
We always have each other. We always circle back to each other like it's second nature. And I think, you know, the way we know each other is wild. One look across the room and I know exactly what my friend is thinking and one tiny eyebrow raise and I know we're having a one hour debrief in the car on the way home. We have inside jokes that we've been laughing about for 20 years, but they're still just as funny. And I think they are my soul. You know that quote from Sex and the City, it says, maybe our soulmates are our friends. I honestly, genuinely believe that. That's how it feels for me.

Yumi
Esther has spent a lot of her life cultivating her village and being a natural facilitator. But a couple of years ago, in the midst of a family medical crisis, Esther realised she needed the village to rally around her. And so she orchestrated it.

Esther
And I basically created the WhatsApp group. That group became an entire sustainability system. It existed on four continents. It checked in every day. There were the people who cooked, the people who did transportation, the people who took care of all kinds of things that we didn't have a time to take care of. I had written, and particularly my husband, he has written a ton about collective resilience, but we had actually never fully, fully lived it. And here it was. It's like he who also doesn't want to impose, doesn't want to ask, found himself the recipient of a tremendous amount of giving. And what we all understood is that giving is receiving. When you do for others, you actually also feel important. You feel that it matters. You feel relevant. You feel that you're part of something that isn't just you. And at this moment, this has become very, very important.

Yumi
The example of the WhatsApp group that rallied to help, it sounds like that enlightened you in some ways, like you saw things and understood things in a way that you hadn't before.

Esther
Yeah, I became shameless in asking for help. Yeah. But it wasn't like I even thought about it. It was like I need help. And people who helped, asked other people to help. I thought, wow, are we lucky? And this is real. This thing is, when we put it in action, this is how it works.

Amanda
One of my friends was hit by a car when he was cycling his bike through the city and he had to be at home in bed for seven or eight weeks. So I organised my big friendship group of which are sort of 30 or 40 people into rosters each week to take him dinner and sit with him for a couple of hours in the evening. You know, you don't have to support other people by yourself. You can give other people a way to help each other.

Yumi
Esther says there's no shame in openly seeking a village.

Esther
There's nothing to be embarrassed about in saying I want a more robust group of people.

Yumi
I mean, I love Esther and I don't want to question what she says, but it can be totally awkward to put yourself out there, right?

Esther
If I say to people I want to create a more robust community, I'm basically admitting that I'm lonely. Possibly. Yeah, it's very interesting. If I say to people I want to go eat and I admit I'm hungry, we don't think that that's vulnerable. You know, to say I think that I've spent too much time focused on my work or I've been moving a lot from one city to another and there's too much disruption in my social fabric or I've been taking care of my ailing mother for the last two years and I really have lost connection and I want to bolster my circle is a wonderful thing to do. It is health incarnate. The quality of your relationships will determine the quality of your life.

Yumi
And on that note, Esther Perel, thank you so much for talking to us today. It's a pleasure. Entraînou, we're all over it. Are you coming back for a tour again?

Esther
No, not a tour yet, but I'm coming back February 25 and 27.

Yumi
If you want to do any bushwalking while you're here, then that's my thing that I do with my friends. Nice. Yeah. I love it. It's very fulfilling and you feel incredible afterwards. If you're interested, I can take you out for a good, decent hike.

Esther
I would love that. I would love that.

Yumi
This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gundungurra, Gadigal and Muwinina peoples. Ladies, We Need To Talk is mixed by Anne-Marie de Bettencourt, produced by Elsa Silberstein and Sarah Mashman. Supervising producer is Tamar Cranswick and our executive producer is Alex Lollback. This series was created by Claudine Ryan.