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PHILADELPHIA — On a rainy Thursday evening earlier this month, a horde of 30- and 40-somethings stream into the 3,500-seat Met Philadelphia concert venue, looking as if they’ve come from a smorgasbord of office jobs. The auditorium stage is tastefully stark, decorated only with a single table and a bouquet of pink wildflowers in a vase atop it. The room fizzes with anticipation.

Soon, she takes the stage, to ravenous applause: Esther Perel, the couples therapist, podcaster and author known for fostering frank, funny and revealing conversations about sex and desire (among other things). She’s wearing a sharp red suit with white Veja sneakers and sporting a new funky, asymmetrical haircut.

“Oh my Go-o-od,” a guy behind me breathes, reverent at the sight of her.

The Belgian-born daughter of two Polish Holocaust survivors, Perel, 65, has captivated millions in recent years with her disarming sense of humor, her polyglot’s worldly vocabulary and her daring but generously humane philosophies on love. (Perel speaks eight languages in addition to English — French, German, Flemish, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese — and her family spoke Polish in her early years.) Her work as a therapist and lecturer has been popular ever since the 2006 publication of “Mating in Captivity,” her guide to ensuring domesticity and sexual desire can coexist in long-term relationships.

But her podcast “Where Should We Begin?” — which launched in 2017 and features her onetime therapy sessions with anonymous real-life couples — established her as the 21st century’s most revered relationship oracle. Its spinoffs and subseries, such as “Esther Calling,” “How’s Work?” and “Say More,” apply the same deliciously eyes-emoji formula to other scenarios. She has been interviewed on programs hosted by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Chelsea Handler and Jada Pinkett Smith. For a brief time, Amy Poehler hosted a parody couples-therapy podcast also titled “Say More.” (Perel herself made a good-natured cameo and recorded an ad.)

Perel’s 2017 book “The State of Affairs” examined infidelity, somewhat controversially suggesting that in some cases, partners might be better served by staying together and learning from the experience. She gained a new legion of disciples during the relationship-testing early months of the covid-19 pandemic.

Now, Perel has a new offering: a touring live stage show, complete with audience participation and breakout sessions, that opened last week in Philadelphia — and its reception here only underlines what it is that America loves and admires about her.

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When we meet for lunch in a downtown Manhattan diner a few weeks before the show, Perel is dressed stylishly in a black spaghetti-strap top, a multi-strand mother-of-pearl beaded necklace and black beaded bracelet that winds its way around to the back of her hand. And she’s either oblivious to or politely ignoring what’s starting to happen around us: Other patrons, overhearing our conversation, surreptitiously glance over. Could hers really be the distinctive voice that pipes through their AirPods on their way to work? Whose thoughtful, probing questions have inspired countless daydreams of unpacking their own troubles and traumas in her office?

Perel knows that much of her work “is more listened to than read,” she explains with a wry smile.

To behold the owner of a famous disembodied voice is always, to speak plainly, a trip. Yes, her percussive, ASMR-adjacent accent really sounds like that in person. Yes, she is just as bewitchingly poised and unrufflable in conversation as she sounds on her podcasts. It’s like having lunch with one of Frank Herbert’s spooky, supernaturally wise Bene Gesserits in “Dune”: She is elegant and regal in demeanor, and her command to “Finish that thought” compels immediate compliance.

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And yes, it is immeasurably difficult not to spill your own guts — your relationship’s troubles, the original sins of your upbringing, the unresolved bits and bobs of your self-identity — under her attentive, always-compassionate gaze.

Because as any habitual listener knows, if anyone can ask the right question to get to the bottom of What’s Really Going On Here, it’s Perel. “Are you asking him, or are you supposing?” she once asked a wife who posited that her husband’s affair resulted from genuine feelings for another woman. “Do you know what you’re trying to change?” she asks a husband who keeps re-creating a dynamic from his childhood through infidelity.

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Last year, Perel made a brief cameo as herself on Apple TV’s “The Morning Show,” asking Jennifer Aniston’s news anchor Alex Levy what makes her feel alive other than work and the last time she felt alive with another person. The latter question promptly renders Alex speechless on live TV. On a show that strives for topicality and verisimilitude, Perel is perfectly cast as the one person who can peer through Alex’s smokescreen of work devotion right to her secretly yearning heart.

When I ask whether this is something she strives for, Perel quotes Rainer Maria Rilke. “‘Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue,’” she reads from her iPhone. “‘Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.’

“It is really about asking a different set of questions, or asking, maybe, better questions, or deeper questions,” Perel adds, setting her phone down. “I try to be authoritative and not authoritarian.” Her eye contact is so still and unwavering that I have to choose between breaking it and eating the Caesar salad in front of me. The Caesar salad loses.

Of course, you don’t even have to know Perel’s work to have come across some of her doctrines: that sex isn’t a thing you do but a place you go; that “fire needs air,” meaning that desire for one’s partner requires some disentanglement, distance and mystery; that “erotic” should refer to not just the sexual but to a wider range of passions and excitements; that nowadays long-term couples expect from each other both security and adventure, not to mention the support that a whole village or network used to provide. Often they’re refracted through the greater personal-growth and relationship-wellness content ecosystem that spreads across podcast platforms, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

An anecdote about Holocaust survivors began reverberating around the internet after <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/esther_perel_the_secret_to_desire_in_a_long_term_relationship" target="_blank">a TED Talk Perel gave in 2013</a> — some merely didn’t die while others “came back to life,” and her parents were in the latter group, devoting themselves to pursuing passions and the feeling of being alive. Today, it can sometimes still be spotted out in the wild, dropped into conversation at wine bars and <a href="https://www.insidehook.com/film/jason-isaacs-stop-calling-mass-powerful-film" target="_blank">cited by actors in promotional interviews</a>.

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Alexandra Solomon — who teaches the class <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/the-first-lesson-of-marriage-101-there-are-no-soul-mates/283712/" target=_blank>known as Marriage 101</a> at Northwestern University, hosts <a href="https://dralexandrasolomon.com/podcast/" target=_blank>the “Reimagining Love” podcast</a> and works as a clinical psychologist — is a longtime friend of Perel’s. The two women stay at each other’s homes and often call each other to talk about what they’ve been seeing in their therapy practices, such as burnout from dating apps and the lasting effects of the pandemic on relationships.

To Solomon, it’s a relief that Perel’s work has so much potential for virality.

“There’s just so many content creators and relationship experts and coaches who are creating this, like, fire hose of information — where everyone’s exes have narcissism, everyone has avoidant personality disorder, everyone’s love-bombing,” Solomon says with a laugh. “I feel like one of my goals [nowadays] is to help people really understand how to consume content, and everything Esther creates is infused with clinical wisdom and understanding of the science. She’s an example of the kind of high-quality content that I want people to be consuming.”

Perel indeed rarely engages with therapy-speak buzzwords such as “red flag.” “Because I still practice,” she says. Perel devotes two days of her week to her regular rotation of individual, couple and family clients, hearing how complex love really is.

Solomon and Perel have both witnessed the rapid normalization, perhaps even glorification, of going to therapy in recent years. “For all of my career, people have hidden the fact that they were in therapy,” Perel muses, “and now it’s become an asset on Hinge.”

Some would say this is Perel’s doing, or that there’s at least a symbiotic relationship. Her podcast episodes, after all, often contain a moment of weight falling from shoulders and scales falling from eyes — in which a person feels suddenly understood in such a way that they too can now understand themselves.

“She is, I think, the leading edge of that movement. But also I think the cultural moment has made it that much easier for Esther to have the kind of impact she has,” Solomon says.

A key ingredient in Perel’s appeal, Solomon theorizes, is that she shows up as herself, without pretense, in every context. It’s why she never seems caught off guard.

Once, Solomon says, during a midnight bike ride together in Manhattan (Perel admits herself that she’s “nocturnal”), the pair came across a biker and an inline skater who’d just had a collision. One started to loudly blame the other for his injuries, but as Solomon tells it, Perel interrupted him with a thundering lesson from couples therapy: “This is not about fault! This is about making sure that we are okay!”

Lately, Perel has been thinking a lot about loneliness, and how it looms ever larger over a society that believes it’s hyperconnected. In tiny villages elsewhere in the world, where homes are separated by just a shallow wall or a narrow alleyway, you know when your neighbors fight and when they make up. “But today, your best friends can break up and divorce and you never saw it coming,” Perel says. “You really think you’re the only one going through things.

“You have a problem with your kids? The school doesn’t say, ‘There are five other families struggling with something similar. You should come together as parents,’” she adds. “You have a miscarriage, and nobody says, ‘You know, on this floor today, there are five other women. You could help each other.’”

So with help from Wouter van Ransbeek (the former director of the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam), Mary Alice Miller (a former Vanity Fair editor who helps Perel craft her speeches), Jesse Baker (the producer of Perel’s podcasts), and Daniel Hartman and Courtney Hamilton (her technical director and producer, respectively), she created “An Evening With Esther Perel.” Part lecture, part Q&amp;A, part breakout session for audience members to connect with one another, it first toured in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom in 2022 and 2023.

When her tour kicks off in Philadelphia on April 4, the show runs a little over an hour and a half. Perel gives a short lecture — loosely built around how the quality of our relationships determines our quality of life, and how social and cultural forces have stunted those relationships in recent years — then runs a few group exercises that illustrate the ways we could all bond if we dared try. How many of us, she asks, have ever had a consensual sexual encounter that was unsatisfying but we stuck around anyway and said nothing? As nearly everyone in the auditorium rises to their feet, the room explodes in laughter.

Later, she invites everyone to pick one of four introspective questions displayed onto a projector screen and answer it to their neighbors. A woman I’ve never seen before tells me the biggest risk she’s ever taken in life. I share what I find annoying about myself as a partner. It feels, admittedly, exhilarating.

If listening to “Where Should We Begin?” is solitary and quasi-voyeuristic, this latest addition to the Perel multiverse inverts the dynamic, bringing her office to the people. Arguably, her prepared remarks fall short of re-creating the magic of her podcast therapy. Hearing Perel untangle the aching knot at the center of one couple’s specific but common home-life tension holds more intrigue than watching her acknowledge an infinite number of personal hang-ups and take abstract swipes at how they might be resolved. Perel even laments onstage how often she’s asked for all-purpose tips on maintaining stable-but-sexy relationships, arguing that “relationship issues don’t have discrete binary answers.”

In a Q&amp;A segment, however, dozens of audience members line up at microphones to ask Perel their questions — and a few moments crackle with genuine connection and vulnerability. One woman, for instance, wonders how she can go about telling the difference between a stable relationship and a boring one after years of tumultuous love.

“It’s a little like asking someone who always has sex when they’re inebriated what it’s like to have sex not drunk. It’s a different experience,” Perel acknowledges. “But there is a calmness that comes from not having to continuously deal in high drama that’s very welcome.”

Perel dazzles with her famous ability to quickly and brusquely identify the “question underneath the question,” prompting murmurs of “How does she do that” from around the theater. When one woman asks how Perel goes about helping couples in which one party was exposed to infidelity as a child, Perel distills it to: “How do I get to be in a relationship without having the fear of infidelity staring at me the moment I enter it?” But some prompts — how to live with fear, what does she think about secrets — feel too obtuse to set up a useful question or answer. When Perel gets the signal to wrap up, all those still waiting look painfully disappointed to leave without being seen or heard by her.

In the end, I too will give in and shoot my shot with Esther Perel.

Over breakfast the next morning, Perel will describe having been in what feels like three different marriages with the same husband — the American psychologist and trauma specialist Jack Saul, to whom she has been married for nearly four decades, in before-kids, raising-kids and empty-nesting iterations. I will admit that I too hope for another marriage with the same husband. That my husband of two years and I have spent most of that time taking care of our parents’ illnesses and grieving our parents’ deaths; that even now we’re live-in caregivers away from our home; that I hope to one day enjoy a partnership where our shared sense of duty and our shared sense of adventure can coexist in a radically different ratio.

Perel will listen quietly and then assure me that marriage is a living, breathing organism, adapting to new circumstances all the time. And while my husband and I will always have to look further than many of our peers to find our “village,” she will tell me, we’ve already learned to give each other something that many married couples never do. It will feel exactly as tender and as devastating and as amazing as you think.

I will abruptly run away to catch a train home, before our roles of observer and observed can fully reverse themselves. But not before I realize all over again why so many were ready to reveal their deepest private heartaches to Perel in front of a throng of strangers. It’s the power of her trifecta of certainties: that each and every one of their quandaries is real; is either a solvable problem or a manageable paradox; and is shared by countless others.

This story initially stated that Perel speaks Polish. Her family spoke it when she was a child, but she does not speak it today. The story has been corrected.

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Ashley Fetters Maloy is a feature reporter at The Washington Post, where she covers fashion and New York City.

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Esther Perel will see you now

The relationship guru is expanding her empire through a live stage show where fans get to interact with her — and each other