Deliciously Coupled

“Once you have mastered a technique, you hardly need look at a recipe, and you can take off on your own.”
– Julia Child
August is the time for ocean swims, bike rides, giggles, and hugs. This week,  as you come together to dine on freshly grilled vegetables from our local gardens, pause for just a moment between wave jumping, fishing, and crabbing, to acknowledge the power of human coupling to create bonds strong enough to weather threats to human well-being.
Barely graduated, after four years of making snow angels during college finals in rural Maine, I could not wait to expand my horizons.
I convinced my father to fund a summer in Paris studying French at the Sorbonne.  The tiny student cafes of the Left Bank enticed my senses and my imagination. 
I hunted down the markets at Les Halles, lugged home produce from street corner markets, and vowed to make Europe part of my life. This was easy since I was nearly engaged to Erich Henry Ernst Coche, a multi-lingual Dutch-German European scholar. We married and moved to Europe for completion of his Ph.D.  We missed no chance to camp in his old Boy Scout tent, eating our way through most of France, some of Italy and Switzerland.
Would I be away from the U.S. for a few years or a lifetime?  My future was up for grabs. I was happier than ever in my life, exploring the ancient alleyways of Northern Europe and learning all I could about its culinary secrets. I wanted to learn to cook this food, and the teacher I chose was none other than the then-young Julia Child. Although her recipes were too rich for my hips and too time consuming for my impatient nature, my culinary diligence occasionally produced a Coq au vin mildly reminiscent of the dish I could taste in my dreams. 
Erich and I were lured to the U.S. by the glimmering reality that the U.S.A. was at the forefront of advancement in Psychology.  In the fullness of time, I opened The Coche Center around Rittenhouse Square, and Erich and I teamed the satellite office on the bay in Stone Harbor. Word spread that I loved to work with couples, families, and groups. For the last 35 years, I have gotten plenty of practice helping clients turn fast-food marriages into sensual delights.
Still cooking with the now-legendary Julia at my side, I began to think about her thorough handling of raw materials, her clarity of recipe presentation, and her unbeatable eye for detail, as a template for the work I do in psychotherapy with unhappy individuals, couples, and families. 
The parallels are striking between her ability to break complex cuisine into teachable and learnable component parts, and my work to help clients break lifelong coupling into teachable and learnable segments.  The stuff of marriage stands up well to analysis using terms straight out of the kitchen.  The parallels become obvious:
•    The raw materials of marriage are need, passion, longing, joy, terror, compassion, sense of humor, protectiveness, the most powerful stuff of the human spirit.
•    The location: the bedroom is the kitchen of marriage.
•    The skills of marriages require constant practice. We need to learn to listen with the heart, speak carefully about how we feel, remain fair, and manage other tricky. Let’s examine seven of these in more detail:  
1.    Commit fully to the self-discipline needed to practice the skillful loving that keeps intimacy on a steady course. Abusive anger is damaging both physically and mentally.
2.    Learn skills to maintain financial security. Money has replaced sex as the most complex couples’ concern. Mutual budgeting creates secure financial management.
3.    Maintaining a sense of humor acts as steadying mechanism for a couple.
4.     Prioritize forgiveness of yourself and your partner. Forgiveness and humility help maintain balance.
5.    Create joy on all levels each week. Pleasuring can run the gamut from a back rub to intense passion.  To be involved in mutual loving is the greatest of coupled delight.
6.    Build a foundation for safe, sensual vulnerability through total honesty, especially when it hurts. Maintaining integrity is both challenging and necessary to keep trust high in a marriage.
7.    Celebrate your shared history at each holiday and family event. Family rituals become a time of family celebration, allowing members to remember why the family is of central importance in human life. And it is.
To Consider: What do you love most about summer?  Do you take time to devote your attention to leisure activities that create unforgettably pleasurable moments with those you love? If not, why not?
To Read: Your Best Life.  Coche. Optimal Life Press, 2013. 
Judith Coche maintains The Coche Center, LLC, a practice in Clinical Psychology at Rittenhouse Square and Stone Harbor. You can reach her at www.cochecenter.com.