Giving Perel this platform and seeing how many people showed up hungry to engage were encouraging signs that maybe the existential dread of feeling isolated that Perel discussed is at its tipping point. The festival has long been home to tech innovators and innovations, a hotbed for creating social tools but not necessarily a place dominated by actual person-to-person communications, social warmth or vulnerability. Scheduling Perel, part of the health track at SXSW, was an inspired move. Bernie Sanders, Jake Tapper at SXSW 2018 ? The wry and perspicacious Perel requested the lights remain up after stating with some questions about who in the audience was in relationships and following up with asking how many of those who raised their hands were in relationships that they wished they could get out of (at least sometimes). (I thankfully took the volunteer’s advice and had a front row seat at the large monitor.) The crowd was so massive that those standing at the end of the line were encouraged to head to overflow conference rooms to hear the engaging Belgian therapist discuss the state of human relationships. The psychotherapist who specializes in couples therapy and who rose to prominence more than a decade ago with her first book, “Mating in Captivity,” had hundreds of people lined down the halls and up and down stairwells waiting to get into her South by Southwest keynote speech Friday afternoon.

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