No matter how much you love a man, after 15 years of marriage—and 20 years together—the things that once seemed like endearing little habits tend to make you want to grind your teeth.
That’s how it is with my husband, Cornel. We have a good relationship, but we don’t fall in love as much anymore. He used to be spontaneous and strutted through life like a brave young man. Now he’s more of a slow, old deer, while I, like many middle-aged women, have become increasingly stressed and distracted, and now I go through the days at a mile a minute.
We don’t need a drastic intervention, but we could do with a little cleaning.
So when I was offered the opportunity for exactly that in the form of a “couples energy reading” by a famous and renowned psychic, I wasn’t going to say no.
Julie Cook and her husband Cornel tried the 80-minute “energy reading” session
But Cornel was doubtful about its benefits while Julie was more open-minded.
For £160 a session, US expert Kathy Fitz offers the equivalent of a marriage check-up (over the phone, no less) to assess whether you and your partner are still “connecting with your energy”. After just 80 expensive minutes, she promises that couples will notice “an improvement in communication, a way of accessing the emotions or energies that are holding you back”.
Such readings are big business – the psychic services industry is said to generate $2.3bn (£1.8bn) a year in the US alone. Fitz’s celebrity fans also include wellness queen Gwyneth Paltrow, who raves about his work on her lifestyle website, Goop.
So, one grey and rainy afternoon, I book a “personalised only” session.
After two children, aged 15 and 10, and two decades of more or less domestic harmony, we know each other like the back of our hands. But will Fitz consider our energies to be aligned?
Cornel chuckles.
“Isn’t that nonsense?” he says. “How can someone do that over the phone?”
The psychic is already bringing up our differences, because Cornel is a hardened cynic, as “mystical” as a Scotch egg.
American expert Kathy Fitz offers the equivalent of a marriage inspection through an “energy reading”
Fitz’s famous fans include wellness queen Gwyneth Paltrow.
I, on the other hand, am decidedly a fan of the mystical. I have had two psychic readings, one of which was so eerily accurate that I never forgot it.
It happened when I was just 13 and I 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 soon after I met Cornel and had to choose between the two men.
The prediction was absolutely true.
Then when I was 27, I visited a blind psychic who told me I would have two children, a boy and then a girl. That also happened.
Still, I’ve never implicated Cornel in my less conventional beliefs.
“Everything is energy, ask an astrophysicist,” I tell him.
He shrugs, which I know after 20 years together means, “Oh, go ahead then.”
Julie says she has had two psychic readings, “one of which was so terrifyingly accurate that I have never forgotten it.”
The night of our reading, Cornel sits at the next table and I call Kathy at her Florida office via the not-so-esoteric medium of WhatsApp. Her voice, when she answers, has a languid, warm American accent.
According to Kathy, all human beings have a unique energy field. She will “cleanse” the “old energy” that holds us back. The result? Positive vibrations that will strengthen our relationship.
“Who wants to go first?” he asks. I look at Cornel, but he’s already playing a game of pool on his phone. “You,” I whisper, trying to grab the phone from him.
—Uh, yeah, okay, I’ll do it —he says.
Kathy asks Cornel to say her full name several times, which he does, while still trying to get the ball into his game.
Then the line goes silent. Suddenly, Kathy starts breathing heavily and asks Cornel to do the same. Cornel rolls his eyes. Then Kathy pauses. “Some of this could be old energy or an old family dynamic, but what it’s showing me is a responsibility you had to carry,” Kathy says. “Sometimes it can slow you down, like carrying a heavy backpack.”
Cornel and I exchanged glances.
He grew up in communist Romania with his mother, who was a single mother at the time. She had been hit by a car when he was a baby and his life was hard and impoverished. He had started playing the piano at the age of seven in an attempt to make a better life for himself.
Kathy explains that this sense of responsibility used to be a positive force, but now that Cornel is older it is no longer as useful. Cornel stops rolling his eyes for a moment and becomes thoughtful.
Julie enjoyed the session and felt that Kathy expressed some things about her marriage “exactly right.”
Kathy says she is going to “get rid” of this old, negative energy by inhaling and exhaling forcefully several times. How does that work 4,000 miles away? There is no explanation, but Kathy continues…
‘There’s a part of you that wants to get things done and doesn’t mess around, and that’s served you well.
“Your life is different now. It’s like you’re in a restaurant and you can choose what you want from the menu.”
I’m baffled, but Kathy explains that Cornel can now leave old pressures behind and seek luxury. “I see a velvet robe and slippers,” she says, without a trace of irony.
I almost laugh when I see that Cornel loves the dark red robe and stylish Barbour slippers he received for Christmas.
“I see you resting in a luxurious way,” he adds.
She then exhales forcefully again and asks if he has a creative outlet. Cornel replies that he works as a musician and Kathy tells him that he should take up painting, or even doodling, to ward off negative energy.
Then we go back to heavy breathing. We wait in silence. Once she announces that she has cleared Cornel’s energy (he obediently replies that he feels better and then goes back to the pool table), she heads over to me.
Like Cornel, she asks me to repeat my full name several times. She exhales sharply before saying, “You are in front of a sewing machine and you are sewing very fast…”
Cornel is drinking tea and spits it out.
I know why. I don’t know how to sew at all and once I sewed two trouser legs together.
—He doesn’t mean it literally! —I say silently.
Kathy goes on to say, ‘And you’re pushing the pedal but it’s not going any faster and you’re really frustrated.’
I nod. I am the least patient person I know.
“No matter how fast you go, you always want to go faster. Let’s see what motivates you…”
She exhales again and says to me, ‘The image that’s being shown is that you’re running and you’re looking back and as long as everyone is behind you, you’re fine. There’s a distance that allows you to be yourself, but once someone gets a little bit closer, you want to keep going.’
I am certainly like that. I have few close friends and I don’t like getting close to people. I offer a non-binding “that’s true.”
She suggests this has to do with “old family energy” that makes me feel like I need to “get ahead of the game.”
She “cleanses” this old energy – and I strangely feel lighter, almost happy while she does it – and then turns her attention to our energy as a couple.
‘A lot of times in couples, energies are so intertwined and tangled that it can be problematic. But you two are kind of the opposite. You have a relationship space and he does too… but those spaces aren’t necessarily together.’
This, Kathy says, is a good thing, but it can be frustrating when we want to share a deep bond as a couple.
I look at Cornel, now engrossed in his emails, and nod sagely.
‘Sometimes you want to connect but, Cornel, you’re too practical and, Julie, you’re too fast.’
Now this sounds familiar.
Cornel is definitely the more pragmatic one and I’m the impatient one, the one who rushes and doesn’t think things through. He’s a saver, I’m a spender. He looks for vacations for hours, I book them in seconds.
“With this shift that you’re moving toward, there’s going to be a lightness that comes into play,” Kathy intones between breaths.
‘There is a slowdown, and this will make it much easier to move into a deeper space in your relationship.’
Huff, snort, more deep breathing. Cornel glances at his watch.
‘The idea of this reading is to release energy so that you don’t get stuck in a rut. I imagine them 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 vehemently.
She tells us to take a deep breath and exhale when we are comfortable.
We make.
She ends the session by saying that she sees us – our energy – intertwined with “curiosity”, as if it were a braid.
“You’ve known him for a long time, but there’s still a lot you don’t know about him, and vice versa.”
When the reading is finished, Cornel staggers dramatically and moans “I’m starving!” before heading to the snack cabinet.
I feel lighter, more alert.
“Do you feel like your energy is different?” I ask.
“Well, my blood sugar is low,” he says as he takes a bite of a Double Decker bar. He’s practically the same man he was 80 minutes ago.
So was our reading a real step towards bringing us closer? Cornel doesn’t think so, as he thinks the phone call was a costly mistake.
But for my part I answered with a resounding yes: I feel that Kathy understood perfectly some things about us.
And the beauty of this method is that, in theory, it can work for both of them, even if Cornel remains unconvinced. His energy has been purified, whether he realizes it or not.
Over the next few weeks, Cornel and I decided to take some time just for ourselves, to laugh and be a little lighter together.
As for long-term harmony in our marriage, only time will tell.
Will I ever slow down? Probably not. Will Cornel enter his fated robe-and-slipper phase?
He is already there.
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