From the New Yorker Festival, the couples therapist and podcast host discusses infidelity, apologies, and the problem with wedding vows these days.

The psychotherapist Esther Perel knows how to work a room. Since the publication of her first book, “Mating in Captivity,” in 2006, she has travelled the world, speaking to audiences about love, sex, intimacy, and infidelity: the nuts and bolts of romantic life. (Those who do not have an opportunity to see her live can watch her on the TED stage, where her videos, subtitled in more than thirty languages, have been viewed tens of millions of times.) Perel, who grew up in Antwerp as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, got her start as a family therapist, focussing on issues of trauma and cultural conflict. Couples have since become her clinical and theoretical specialty. In a style marked by humor, frankness, and empathy, Perel’s talks and books take a counterintuitive approach to answering provocative questions: How did the romantic couple become the primary unit of organization in society? Can romantic desire truly be sustained? Is infidelity ever a good thing?

Last year, Perel gave her fans access to a different side of her work. In her Audible podcast, “Where Should We Begin?”—which recently aired its third season—Perel conducts therapy sessions with real couples, one per episode, allowing listeners unprecedented access to her cloistered consultation room. The appeal of the show is partly voyeuristic; it is fascinating, not to mention unnerving, to hear other people expose their most intimate feelings and conflicts. It is also educational, poignant, and often profound, a public service in a culture that loves to talk about love, but rarely does so with honesty or humility. I first spoke with Perel last year, and caught up with her this fall onstage at the New Yorker Festival, where we discussed her own family background, her theories about romantic life, and her role as a mediator between a couple’s competing narratives. When we listened to clips from her show, Perel handed out pillowy eye masks so that audience members could focus more fully on her patients’ voices; as you listen to the audio clips amid the text below, you might want to do the same by closing your eyes.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

My first question has to do with your idea that the couple has never before been such a central unit in our social organization. Why is that the case?

Because never in the history of family life was the emotional well-being of the couple relevant to the survival of the family. The couple could be miserable for thirty years, you were stuck for life, you married once—and, if you didn’t like it, you could hope for an early death of your partner. Marriage was a pragmatic institution. You need to have it, but, once you’re in it, it’s not a great thing, and certainly not for the women.

And then we added romantic needs to the pairing, the need for belonging and for companionship. We have gone up the Maslow ladder of needs, and now we are bringing our need for self-actualization to the marriage. We keep wanting more. We are asking from one person what once an entire village used to provide.

Do you think people are aware of any of this when they go looking for a partner? We’re looking for “the one,” even if we’re a little bit cynical about that idea—

No, we’re not cynical at all.

O.K.

Marriage is an aggregate of multiple narratives. It belongs to the people who are in it, but it also belongs to the people who are supporting it and living around it: family, friends, community. As I once said, and it became a kind of a saying for me, when you pick a partner, you pick a story, and then you find yourself in a play you never auditioned for. And that is when the narratives clash.

The first thing you can ask yourself, from a cross-cultural point of view, is, Is marriage between two people, in your mind? Or do you come from, or still live in, a culture in which marriage is between two families? That will inform everything about the boundaries around a relationship.

You’ve practiced therapy for over thirty years. In that time—in the United States, certainly, and in large parts of the world—relationships have changed significantly. We have gay marriage. Women are having children later than ever before. Technology has become a huge factor in how we look for partners, and then in how we maintain contact with them. What are some themes around relationships that you see at the moment?

We come from a model where relationships, in our village lives, in our communal structures, were very clear. The community gave you your sense of identity. You knew who you were. You knew what was expected of you, and you knew how to behave. You had a lot of certainty, a lot of belonging, zero freedom.

And we have urbanized, and we have moved, and we have taken on radical individualism and aspirational materialism, and all of those things have created a playing field in which relationships are undergoing rapid changes. We have no idea how to handle them. Rules have been replaced by choices. But at the same time we have massive uncertainty and massive self-doubt. Every second book about relationships these days is about belonging and loneliness.

So I think that’s the big thing that is changing: what used to be defined by rules and duty and obligation now has to take place in conversation. And so everything is a freakin’ negotiation! You negotiate with your partner about what matters, where you want to live, if you want to have children, how many children do you want to have, if this is the right time to have children. It’s an absolute existential smorgasbord. But at the same time it’s very difficult to have to define everything ourselves. We are not just in pain for no reason, is what I’m trying to say.

So our expectations are really high. Our performance is somewhat lower.

Right. Good summary.

I want to ask you about apology, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially around #MeToo. How can we expect people who have done real wrong to others, in relationships, or in public, or at work, or wherever, to apologize? Something in our society seems to not allow it. The potential admission is too great.

Admission and apology are not the same. There are two justice systems, right? There’s the restitutive system and the retributive system. One is focussed on healing. One is focussed on punishment and vengeance.

The South Africans created a system for accountability: you don’t apologize; you stand accountable. You describe the facts and you leave the other person the freedom to decide what they want to do with it. If they want to forgive, because it’s in their interest to forgive—not to forgive as in saying it was O.K., but just not to live being eaten up with the hatred, with the hurt—that’s their freedom. You own your wrongdoing. That’s one piece of the apology.