Esther Perel Has an Awkward Conversation Game
Esther Perel — cheater apologist, blog nemesis, and shameless marketeer — has a game.
Blaming victims? Torturing sentence construction? Making STDs sound sophisticated?
No. Those were her old games. You forgot “trauma specialist.” (Esther is to trauma what ice cream trucks are to pedophiles.)
Her card game — on sale just in time for the holiday season! — is called “Where Should We Begin? Conversation Cards for Couples, Friends, & Co-Workers.“
Yes, my mind went there too. Who needs boundaries when you can have awkward, intimate conversation with your co-workers!
Apparently, the game came out during the pandemic, but the algorithms are just catching up with me. I fed the promotional material to the Universal Bullshit Translator.
Have Fun With Your Partner & Friends: Uncover new insights and strengthen bonds with this card game that encourages deeper understanding and storytelling among couples, friends, & co-workers. With 280 conversation starter cards, this game is perfect for any occasion.
Have fun with your partner and friends! Mate in captivity no longer.
Storytelling among couples? I was sleeping in my car/office/Bible study. Had no cell phone reception. Janice is just a friend. “Just a friend” is perfect for any occasion.
How to Play: This Esther Perel game is designed for 2-6 players with 2 levels of gameplay. The basic rules use only the 250 Story Cards. While the advanced rules include the 30 Prompt Cards that guide your conversations and the 12 tokens you can place on the card you want them to answer.
I would like to place my token on the card: “Why is Janice’s underwear in my glove compartment?”
Share, Listen, Discover: This game for couples and friends helps create a safe space for discussing thoughts and feelings about relationships, family dynamics, personal values, and beliefs. It encourages sharing, listening, risk-taking, laughter, and discovery.
Unwittingly share body fluid. Listen to lies. Discover abnormal pap smears! This game for couples and throuples helps create a safe space for discussing your thoughts and feelings about sexual ethics, and why rules of consent don’t apply to you.
So, Where Should We Begin? The Esther Perel card game “Where Should We Begin” promotes personal growth and understanding in relationships through intriguing questions & topics. Grab a seat, pull a card, and get ready to experience self-discovery & connection. This is where the adventure begins.
Be intriguing for $29.99! Experience self-discovery as Janice tells your wife and human resources she’s pregnant. This is where the adventure begins.
CN, your Friday Challenge is to come up with questions for Esther’s card game. Or any snark of your choosing. Happy Holidays!
Hmmm. Only two levels of game play and only 6 players max? I feel this could be critically limiting for some cheaters. How could they fully discover themselves in such restricted circumstances?
Don’t worry! There’s a secret third level of play – strip Where Should We Begin! You have to take off an article of clothing for each question answered.
Lol!
😂😂😂
“What is the capital of Vermont?”
“Who played ‘the basket case’ in ‘The Breakfast Club’?”
“What brand of dishwasher detergent do you use when you clean your dildos?”
These are the only types of questions to which I’d have a better than 50/50 chance of getting an honest response.
Is it wrong for a Head of House and a Head of Year at a Secondary School to have an affair if they work at different school sites? It is likely their staff and family social events will be held at different times and places. Also the Head Teacher is currently having an affair with the bursar.
Will the judge believe you if you pretend your co-worker girlfriend is your lodger?
Will the judge ask you to produce evidence of your “lodger”‘s rent?
Will you get VERY angry when you can’t?
Will the judge believe your sudden, interesting, last minute story about your deep compassion for your co-worker who apparently needed housing?
Ask Girlfriend to put down one rent token in order to proceed to the next level….
This “game” might have been interesting pre-DDay, but now I couldn’t give 2 flips about his answers to any of the questions. He’d probably just lie anyway.
Side question: when are you supposed to do this with co-workers? During work? I’m sure the boss would be tickled pink that you aren’t finishing your project because you’re too busy asking Bob from accounting about his unshared dreams…
At one of those messy/boring/awkward after work get-togethers, where alcohol and faux-intimacy leads to the kind of atmosphere conducive to a furtive “I’ve always had a crush on you, you know” Yuletide snog in the utilities cupboard. Why, just this past week a departing colleagues got inebriated and initiated a discussion centering around their sex-dreams involving members of staff.
I’m thinking about a question.
But, I just noticed that the game is discounted at Uncommon Goods. Must not be such a hot seller.
Firstly, is everyone expected to play this game by a set of universally applicable and mutually agreed rules …. or do some special subset of players get to redefine the rules, not tell the others that they are playing by a different set of rules and then get all pissy and lie about it when found out.
Secondly, do the special subset of players get to invite other players into the game, but not tell the people that they started the game with that they have done so?
Thirdly, for extra points, determine which common saltwater mollusc shares similar levels of self-awareness and empathy to those shown by La Perel.
I could go on, but the thought that people would part with their hard earned cash for this game is making my head hurt.
LFTT
Is the saltwater mollusc a limpet or a mussel? Or a cockle?? Did Molly Malone sell them at all?
It’s gotta be clams. You have to forcefully pry them open to get anything worthwhile out of them, but even then you won’t get a pearl.
This is the best answer. The only correct way to play this game is to cheat at it! lol
CdC
And – perhaps – frame the cheating as an act of “exuberant defiance” and therefore entirely permissible?
Esther’s head would explode.
LFTT
Well, if cheating at the game makes you “happy”!
Two levels of play?
Level 1 is All Cards on the Table
Level 2 is The Secret Sexual Basement.
O.M.G., V.H.! It is so good to hear from you. I have missed your entries. I do hope that you are enjoying a life full of good health, harmony and happiness. Best wishes for a Happy Holiday, and a rip snortin’ New Year.
I second that. I love me some VH.
Come on Tracy. Are you trying to trick us?
The only way to win at Ester Perel’s game is not to play.
That’s the correct answer. Or cheat.
But in all truth, cheaters never really win.
“If your partner has the gall to use bagged salad, what is the only logical and acceptable response in the entire known universe?”
The correct answer? Have an affair! This one is a nod nod wink wink to all the Chump Nation old timers here today. Newer members please consult the archives….
Yess. Although I would not to put money in the pocket of La Peril, if I did find it at Goodwill, I think I would turn it into a ludicrous drinking game where the only answer to every question, is “Have An Affair!”
“Have you no standards? Food should be prepared from scratch. End of “
Wannabe Game Designer here-I guarantee this was designed to cash-in on Cards Against Humanity. Pretty sure THAT market was already oversaturated pre-pandemic, but I digress.
I also simply adore that “safe space to share” horse hockey-“it’s just a game!”(“I get to say and do whatever I want. It’s in the rules!” Very similar logic brought us all here together today-from other people that claimed to have our best interests at heart, no less.) Apparently Ms. Perel has never seen a table flip and a fist fight during(well, ok, ending) a game of Uno?Lord knows I have.
All that being said, I like the idea, just not the person writing it. Anybody know of a version of this NOT made by a bog witch?
I love the term ‘horse hockey’. It gives me flashbacks to Colonel Potter from MASH.
And since I am really old, Col Potter takes me back to Dragnet.
That was the reference! On very special occasions, I’ll do “mule fritters!”
I’d make the claim that you’ll learn a lot more about a person playing CAH than Esther Perel’s game. I remember once playing it with a previous boyfriend and his family. Learned everyone’s sense of humor and who knew who best.
My ex-husband (not a cheater) used to call games or quizzes like this (about your marriage) “divorce prompts”.
This doesn’t sound like a game of discovery it sounds like a hostage situation.
Two players turns into chump and cheater doing a back and forth of cheater trying to corner the chump into agreeing to things that make them wildly uncomfortable and chump trying to get cheater to ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION CHARLES.
With multiple people it sounds like a circle jerk of narcissism and at least one person getting steamrolled.
My questions would be-
1.What do we tell the crying children? 2.Which shredding company gets all the family pictures?
3. Can you tell the whole truth this one time, unvarnished by even one lie ?
4. Define love and what that looks like to you
5. How many woman ,men have you been involved with since you promised me, in front of witnesses to be monogamous?
6. Who will take care of your sick aging mother now( insert any of his family you are tending. )
The questions are endless.
I’d like to invent game to sit beside Esther’s game called.
“All the lies you have told me.”
Pick a card from the stack with any marital topic and ask the questions. All answers must be the whole truth or a purple ink ball explodes and a lawyers number is automatically dialed to give advice.
Oh, please, Esther. We all know this is only one question phrased in a bunch of faux-sophisticated ways:
Q: Should we aardvark exuberantly right here and now, then watch as the embers of our lives settle into the dry grass?
A: Yesther, we should.
Oh Yesther, I can aardvark,
no-one can tell me that it’s wrong,
I can aardvark, in a carpark, all night loooong
😆
Aardvark is my new favorite euphemism!
I borrowed it from Joe Bob Briggs, the drive-in movie critic of Grapevine, TX. 🙂
“ Who needs boundaries when you can have awkward, intimate conversation with your co-workers!”
Exactly, one of our biggest problems is too many are having too many conversations with co workers about stuff that shouldn’t be discussed on the job. None of your business who I have sex with, and who I voted for, or how I worship, I have work to do. Well before I retired anyway.
Aside from work issues there should be no need for a guide to awkward conversations with co workers, because we shouldn’t be having them. Mgt needs to know how to tell a worker they aren’t doing their job, they smell or whatever; and yes they need to know how to do those things; but aside from that; if we are thinking this is going to be awkward; don’t do it.
“one of our biggest problems is too many are having too many conversations with co workers about stuff that shouldn’t be discussed on the job.”
Right you are. I don’t care for this trend of people getting their friends from work. It makes it too intimate. It also means they only get the perspective of people who do the same stuff everyday that they do. It narrows their lives to the point where work becomes everything.
My FW’s so-called friends were all from work. So he never got to hear what people in other professions had to say. His particular workplace had two types of people; nerds and turds. He had the distinction
of being both. I have nothing against nerds, but it might have done him some good to talk to people who cared about things other than gaming and tech stuff.
Yes, and also it put folks who don’t want to get to close in unfair situations. I mean in general terms.
Obviously fws and whores will find each other regardless.
Prompt: “Push your partner down a flight of stairs, then explain to them how this whole experience will bring you closer together as a couple. Extra credit – give your partner three reasons why it was their fault.”
You’re the one wanted a two-story house!
It sounds like Perel designed the card game partly to soften prohibitions against corporate workplace cheating which is where, statistically speaking, most of it takes place. So we might as well get down to brass tacks and clear up some specific areas of confusion, like:
Well, this is timely as I just discovered a month or so ago that my director is having an affair. It’s making me look for another job, for real, because I have absolutely zero trust in this person now. Zero. Zero respect. It has already directly affected our work, and others on my team don’t know the whole story of why an important project got torched.
But director’s channel is firmly set to self-pity, and all I can do is go puke in the corner until I get out.
Cheating isn’t an idiosyncrasy, it a global character trait. These people are horrible to work for, especially old white married dudes who keep rent boys in Japan and Thailand and amuse themselves playing “office FW chess” by assigning married associates to oversee gaggles of grinning interns especially hand-picked for unremarkable educational records, crushing student loan debt, binge-drinking and hair twirling proficiency and tendency to go giggly and boneless whenever anyone with status walks through the peon pen.
Holy Moly, is this part of the induction questionnaire? You’ve seen some stuff, Hellova.
Oh what mine eyes have seen. :/ I worked in the media industry before #MeToo so the samples of corporate creepery and gross hypocrisy I listed that I witnessed in the course of being chumped are kind of mild and almost funny compared to what I experienced in my own profession.
Soon to be followed by the Bernie Madoff Monopoly edition.
1- What do you do if your safe space has a fuckwit in it?
2- What is one thousand three hundred and sixty five dates with Schmoopie divided by three thousands nine hundred and eighty nine lies about where your partner was?
3- If you have HPV, HIV and crabs, what are the odds your partner is right in saying you got them from a toilet seat at Grand Central Station?
4- What are the odds that while you were at Grand Central Station being assaulted by a toilet seat, the woman/man you saw your partner holding hands with while boarding a train was just a friend?
5- Does this saran wrap I’m pick-me dancing to a Barry White tune in make me look fat?
6- Are there any differences between fuckwit word salad and AP gobbledegook?
7- At kid drop-off time, when an ex FW hoovers and makes a half-assed apology, should you say “meh” “lalala I can’t hear you!” or “ish kabbible?”
8- Can fuckwit ego power be a used as a source of renewable energy?
9- Are friends electric? (Thanks to Gary Numan for that one.)
8- Can fuckwit ego power be a used as a source of renewable energy?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA and HA
*Is booking a flight with cash difficult? Explain the process.
*What’s the recipe for shit stew?
*How would you decorate a secret sexual basement? How would you describe that aesthetic? Ex: Betrayal bourgeois? Cheater chic?
*What inexcusable action or inaction by your partner would justify having an affair? Examples might include such things as: forgetting to put away the vacuum or buying more caffeinated coffee than decaffeinated coffee.
Or, asking him to fold the towels a certain way! He never folded laundry. And yes, if he possibly did, please fold them in a way that they would fit in the linen closet!
Or running out of salt. Evidently running out of salt for the first time in 20 years is a heinous action on the part of the betrayed spouse. Must go f— strange.
My new game is called Deposition! It’s the same probing questions, except my lawyer is asking them and there’s a court reporter present.
What’s his favorite position during the deposition?
😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣 ✊🏽
Oh my gosh that made me laugh so loud! The X’s deposition was a joke and my lawyer was able to serve up the lies hard core at our two day trial. It was hilarious!
I just laughed so hard I got a stitch in my side.
Your entries are great!
“How do you know when I am really seeing you?”
Is one of the sample questions I saw on Amazon about the game.
Be more helpful to ask:
How do you know I am really at a business dinner instead of schtuping some rando in the backseat of my car?
Here’s one of the reviews on Amazon about the game:
“1.0 out of 5 stars
Do not buy
Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2022
This game asks you to tell your partner things couples shouldn’t talk about. In the end it might make your relationship stronger but you will hurt each other along the way. My girlfriend and I communicate very well but the subjects this game brings up puts you in situations that you don’t want to be in. You either need to be dishonest (don’t do that BTW) or don’t play this game. Every question has a negative connotation to it. Seriously. When is the last time you thought about breaking up with me? What kind of porn do you watch? If you were to cheat on me, why? ALL NEGATIVE! This game is toxic for your relationship. Do not buy.”
Sadly, over 80% of reviews were positive.
I wonder how we chumps would have viewed the game before our eyes were forced opened to the world of deceit and cheater olympics that was the backdrop to our lives.
It’s like knowing Santa doesn’t exist long before you were ready to hear it and long before any of your friends know.
We were forced to see and everyone else gets to make believe all partners have good intentions toward one another.
Be awfully wonderfully if that weren’t a scam.
I hope Krampus visits Esther on Christmas Eve and carries her off to visit the deep dark sexual basement belonging to her husband.
I think her flaming exuberance for infidelity would become a bit soggy and limp.
Then her little reindeer game would suck to her too.
Those examples of questions are creepy. Perel is one fucked up individual.
Should the workplace be required to provide knee pads or other suitable protective cushioning to protect married coworkers future health and mobility while they perform oral sex for other random married coworkers on the concrete floors of the closets in our hallways? Should said coworkers be required to clock out for these meetings of a non work related activity?
Chumplady, thank you for the laugh out loud today! Why IS Janice’s underwear in my glove compartment? Perfect.
Have a great holiday with your loved ones!
Instead of a lightning round, there’s a trickle truth round.
Now I can’t stop thinking of classic card and board game remakes: go fish, old maid, bingo, candy land, chutes and ladders, monopoly. Or gameshows: SNL-style Jeopardy for chumps (What is, “See, this is why I couldn’t tell you the truth”?), Wheel of Fortune (replace RSTLNE with ILYBINILWY), Pick-Me Dancing With the Stars…
*P.S. had to change my chump moniker to log in to new site (f/k/a bread&roses)
“Or gameshows: SNL-style Jeopardy for chumps (What
is “See, this is why I couldn’t tell you the truth”?), Wheel of Fortune (replace RSTLNE with ILYBINILWY), Pick-Me Dancing With the Stars…”
😆
It’s nice to see you here again, B&R.
I would rather have my molars extracted through my nether regions than play this game with anyone. Ew. The only question I can imagine is thus:
“When are you moving out of my house you morally inept mollusk?”
I have had enough games with my ex. I hope this card game either flops, or becomes a firing offense at every company HR dept. Or both.
I don’t understand how this game is supposed to work. Two sets of cards and a set of tokens? Not that I have the least bit of interest but it just seems like a way to bully the chump/person you don’t like out of the game as soon as they give an answer you disagree with.
The rules are also made to be broken, and we know that however you choose to use the story cards and pro
mpt cards, meaningful and fun conversations are in your future.
Her demo of how to play the game is hysterical. Tokens are used to pressure others.