No matter how much you love a man, after 15 years of marriage – and 20 years of being together – the things you once saw as cute little habits now make you want to grit your teeth.
That’s how it is for me and my husband Cornel. We have a good relationship, but there’s not much swooning these days. He used to be the spontaneous one, strutting through life like a brave young buck. Now he’s more of a slow old doe, while I, like many middle-aged women, have become increasingly stressed and distracted, and now race through the days at a thousand miles an hour.
We don’t need drastic interventions, but a little bit of renovation would be useful.
So when I was offered the opportunity to do just that in the form of an ‘energy reading for couples’ by a well-known psychic, I could hardly say no.
Julie Cook and her husband Cornel tried out the 80-minute ‘energy reading’ session
But Cornel had doubts about its usefulness, while Julie was more open-minded
For £160 a session, US expert Kathy Fitz delivers the equivalent of a marriage MOT – over the phone, no less – assessing whether you and your partner are still ‘tapping into your energy’. After just 80 precious minutes, she promises that couples will notice ‘an improvement in communication, a way to access emotions or energies that are holding them back’.
Readings like these are big business – the psychic services industry is said to be worth $2.3 billion (£1.8 billion) a year in the US alone. Fitz’s celebrity fans include the queen of wellness, Gwyneth Paltrow, who raves about her work on her lifestyle site Goop.
So on a grey, rainy evening I book an appointment for a ‘uniquely personalized’ session.
After two children, ages 15 and 10, and two decades of more or less domestic harmony, we know each other inside and out. But will Fitz see our energies as aligned?
Cornel chuckles.
“Isn’t that a load of nonsense?” he says. “How can someone do that over the phone?”
The psychic already brings up our differences. Because Cornel is a hardened cynic, about as ‘woo-woo’ as a Scotch egg.
American expert Kathy Fitz gives the equivalent of a marriage MOT via an ‘energy reading’
Fitz’s celebrity fans include the queen of wellness, Gwyneth Paltrow
I, on the other hand, am definitely woo-woo. I’ve had two psychic readings, one of which was so eerily accurate that I’ve never forgotten it.
It happened when I was just 13 and saw a gypsy fortune teller at a fair. I gave her 50p and she sat me down and told me I would reach the top of my profession before I had to choose between two men.
In 2005 I was promoted to editor of a magazine. I was married at the time, but met Cornel shortly after and had to choose between the two men.
The prediction came true exactly.
Then there was the time I went to a blind psychic when I was 27, who told me I would have two children, a boy and then a girl. And that happened.
Yet I never involved Cornel in my less common views.
“Everything is energy, just ask an astrophysicist,” I tell him.
He shrugs, which, after 20 years together, means, “Well, come on then.”
Julie says she’s had two psychic readings, ‘one of which was so eerily accurate I’ve never forgotten it’
On the evening of our talk, Cornel sits down at the table next to me and I call Kathy at her office in Florida via the non-esoteric medium of WhatsApp. Her voice, when she answers, is a languid, warm American accent.
According to Kathy, all people have a unique energy field. She will ‘clear’ the ‘old energy’ that holds us back. The result? Positive vibes that make our relationship stronger.
“Who wants to go first?” she asks. I look at Cornel, but he’s already playing a game of snooker on his phone. “You,” I hiss, trying to grab his phone from him.
“Uh, yeah, okay, I’ll do that,” he says.
Kathy asks Cornel to say his full name several times, which he does, while still trying to pocket balls in his game.
Then the line goes silent. Suddenly, Kathy starts breathing heavily, and tells Cornel to do the same. Cornel rolls his eyes. Then she pauses. “Some of this may be old energy, or old family dynamics, but what it shows me is a responsibility that you had to carry,” Kathy says. “Sometimes it can slow you down, like carrying a heavy backpack.”
Cornel and I exchange a glance.
He grew up in communist Romania with his mother, who was a single parent at the time. She had been hit by a car when he was a baby and their life was hard and poor. He had started playing the piano at the age of seven in an attempt to have a better life.
Kathy explains that this sense of responsibility used to be a positive force, but now that Cornel is older, it no longer serves such a useful purpose. Cornel’s eye-rolling pauses and he looks thoughtful.
Julie enjoyed the session and felt that Kathy had gotten a number of things in her marriage ‘just right’
Kathy says she is going to “clear” this old, negative energy by taking several sharp breaths in and out. How does that work 4,000 miles away? There is no explanation, but Kathy continues…
‘There’s a down-to-earth side to you that wants to get things done, and that’s served you well.
“It’s just that your life is different now. It’s like being in a restaurant and being able to choose what you want from the menu.”
I am taken aback, but Kathy explains that Cornel can now let go of old pressures and seek luxury. “I see a velvet robe and slippers,” she says, without a trace of irony.
I almost have to laugh, because Cornel loves the dark red dressing gown and the chic Barbour slippers he received for Christmas.
“I see you leaning back so deliciously,” she adds.
She then exhales hard again and asks if he has a creative outlet. Cornel replies that he works as a musician and Kathy says that he should take up painting, or even just doodling, to ward off negative energy.
Then it’s back to the loud breathing. We wait in silence. As soon as she announces that she’s cleared Cornel’s energy – he dutifully says he’s feeling better, then goes back to the snooker – she goes to me.
Like Cornel, she asks me to repeat my full name a few times. She exhales hard before saying, “You’re sitting at a sewing machine and you’re sewing really fast…”
Cornel drinks tea and spits it out.
I know why. I can’t sew for toffee and once sewed two legs of a pair of trousers together.
“She doesn’t mean that literally!” I say with my lips.
Kathy continues, “You step on the pedal, but it doesn’t go any faster and you get very frustrated.”
I nod my head at this. I am the least patient person I know.
‘No matter how fast you go, you want to go faster. Let’s see what drives that…’
She exhales again and tells me: ‘The picture that appears, you run and you look back and as long as everyone is behind you, you are worth gold. There is a distance that allows you to be yourself, but as soon as someone comes a little closer, you want to move on again.’
This is me, without a doubt. I have few close friends and don’t like to get close to people. I say without any commitment, ‘That’s right.’
She thinks this has to do with the ‘old family energy’ that makes me feel like I have to ‘get ahead of the competition’.
She ‘clears’ this old energy – and strangely enough I feel lighter, almost happy when she does this – and then turns her attention to our energy as a couple.
“A lot of times, couples’ energies are so mixed and entangled that it can be problematic. But you two are kind of opposites. You have a relational space and he has a relational space… but those spaces aren’t necessarily together.”
Kathy says that this is good in itself, but that it can also be frustrating if we want to experience a deep connection as a couple.
I look at Cornel, who is now engrossed in his emails, and nod wisely.
‘Sometimes you want to make contact, but Cornel, you’re too practical and Julie, you’re too fast.’
This sounds familiar to me.
Cornel is definitely the most pragmatic and I am the impatient one, who is in a hurry and does not think well. He is a saver, I am a spender. He searches for hours for a holiday, I book within seconds.
“With the change you’re moving toward, there’s a lightness that will come in,” Kathy sings between breaths.
“There is a delay, and this will make it much easier to find deeper space in your relationship.”
Huff, puff, deeper breaths. Cornel looks at his watch.
“The idea of this talk is to free up energy so you don’t get stuck in a rut. I see you young and getting to know each other and that combination can be very exciting.”
Exciting? That doesn’t sound so bad.
“You both have a stubborn energy,” she says. We both nod vigorously.
She tells us to inhale deeply and exhale when we feel comfortable.
We do.
She closes the session by saying that she sees us – our energy – entwined with ‘curiosity’, as if it were a braid.
‘You’ve known him for so long, but there’s still so much you don’t know about him – and vice versa.’
When the reading is over, Cornel staggers dramatically out of his chair and groans, “I’m starving!” before walking to the snack cupboard.
I feel lighter and more alert.
“Does your energy feel different?” I ask.
“Well, my blood sugar is low,” he says, taking a bite of a Double Decker bar. He’s the same man he was 80 minutes ago.
So was our reading a real stepping stone to rapprochement? Cornel thinks it’s a no, because he thinks the phone call is a bit of expensive nonsense.
But I said yes wholeheartedly: I think Kathy got a number of things about us exactly right.
And the nice thing about this method is that it can theoretically work for both of us, even if Cornel remains cynically unconvinced. His energy has been purified, whether he realizes it or not.
In the weeks that follow, Cornel and I decide to make time for ourselves, to laugh together and lighten things up a bit.
Only time will tell how the harmony in our marriage will develop in the long run.
Will I ever slow down? Probably not. Will Cornel enter his predestined luxury robe and slippers phase?
He’s already here.
