Coffee can save your relationship (& your independence)

I wrote this a few years ago, and I’ve told some version of this story in every couple workshop I’ve ever done. Today I’m reposting it, because I woke up to this.

A part of the story I didn’t tell at the time, largely because I didn’t know it was part of the story until it came out of me unbidden during a workshop presentation:

My dad left the family in the middle of the night when I was seventeen. I woke up to my mom screaming. After I ran downstairs, all she could say was “Dad” and I thought he was dead. He wasn’t, but he had left her, and me.

For many years after that, I was afraid to go to sleep. Afraid safety would be gone in the morning. I always quote Gregory Bateson (or Bowlby? No one knows) in the workshops: “All behavior makes sense in context.” The context it turns out, is pretty crucial to understanding why coffee friend was so powerful for me.

---

From The Archives — 7 September 2023

---

Every Monday, my partner goes into the office and I work from home. It’s one of my favorite times of the week. I sleep a little later, spend the day puttering around the house at my own pace.

Solitude is crucial to my existence. When no one is watching me, I feel no pressure to complete any particular task at any particular time. That spaciousness is so important to my creativity, my energy, and my rest. Independence and autonomy are values that are often held up in opposition to strong relationships, like we have to choose between being independent and relying on someone else, but I believe strongly that they are in fact symbiotic. Healthy interdependence fuels functional autonomy.

Mondays are often one of my most productive days, even though to all appearances, I’m not doing much. I just kind of follow whatever I feel like doing, cleaning here and there, writing a bit here and there, watching TV in the background, playing with the cat. Somewhere in there I seem to get a lot done.

This is Marlowe. He does not help.

Before I get anything at all done, though, there’s coffee. I wake up, stumble through brushing my teeth, and then I go to the kitchen. My brain is not awake. My mind is hazy; I might not feel great physically. Some mornings I have a lot of pain. So the coffee can be a crucial ingredient to becoming a functional human. But there’s one other ingredient.

Not every time, but many times, I go to the coffeepot, find it brewed and ready, and on top I find something like this.

My mood may be all kinds of ways when I first wake up, depending on how much sleep I got, how my body feels, what I have to do that day, and how much Marlowe sang the song of his people during the night. But when I see that lounging little coffee man, there’s this delighted giggle, this moment of pure joy. And right after that, my whole heart feels warm, safe, and completely loved.

We talk a lot in couple therapy about the stories we tell ourselves, about what meaning we make of our partner’s behaviors. Here’s the story in that moment: While I was asleep, he was thinking of me. While I was doing absolutely nothing to earn it, he felt love for me, he wanted to make me happy. He felt a bit of joy, a bit of humor, in the drawing of this cartoon. And he gave it to me, for free. Because he loves me.

I asked him how long it took him to draw these, and he said about two minutes.

Two minutes.

For two minutes of his time, I spend the whole day with a knot of warmth inside me that can’t be shaken by anything else that happens. It may be a terrible day. I may be frustrated with the website code, forget to eat lunch until my blood sugar is shaky, have to make stressful phone calls, and underneath all that is this whisper: He loves me.

There is my secure attachment. My home base. The foundation of my independence. I can go anywhere and do anything and always, always come home to he loves me.

What a bargain. What a return on investment. And that’s just that day. But he’s done this for years. Years of repeated experience. Repetition of that simple message in my heart, day after day, week after week, year after year.

You tell someone anything enough times, they’ll eventually believe it to their core.

We know that to be true. For all of us, we have whispers of painful repetition, right? In a hard time, maybe your mind echoes, “You just don’t try hard enough.” “You’re not living up to your potential.” “You are so dramatic.” “You’re so needy.” “What is wrong with you.”

We know that what hear over and over throughout years is preserved in amber in our hearts and minds. Too often, that is bad news, because those messages weren’t nice. But sometimes, it’s good news. Because life is still happening. We are still learning. We are still taking in our experience, every moment of every day, and we still learn by repetition.

Making rituals in your lives is one of the lowest effort, highest reward ways to improve intimacy in your relationship. It takes seconds to connect with your partner. A 20-second hug yields a flood of oxytocin, the hormone that makes us feel loved, safe, and connected.

Gottman talks about the “magic ratio” of positive to negative interactions, saying that the best relationships have a ratio of 5 positive things to 1 negative thing. Holding hands at the movies. Handing your partner a tissue when they sneeze. A thank you for cooking dinner or picking up the kids. A brief moment of eye contact and a smile when you walk in the door may be enough on its own to avert a conflict over dinner. A few seconds of connection.

Those few seconds are a safety cue. Those few seconds say, “I’m with you. I’m on your side. We’re good.” For those of us who have been through a rough patch or two, we know how small a negative cue has to be to set off a conflict cycle. It can be something as brief as an overheard sigh that tells our bodies, “uh oh, they’re mad.” A ritual, a habit of connection, does just the opposite. It tells our bodies, “It’s okay. You’re safe here.”

One final brief note about choosing a ritual: the reason our little coffee cartoon ritual works is not because it’s funny or because my partner is a clever artist or because of which words he chooses to add. It’s because this is a genuine reflection of who he is - it’s condensing him and all his him-ness into a moment that brings him close to me. What will make your ritual work for you is how much you is in it. Your presence is the active ingredient in any ritual.

Maybe you like to make sure the car is full of gas so your partner doesn’t have to stop. Maybe you like to share with them some cool fact you learned that day or some joke you saw on Twitter. Maybe you like to take books to dinner and read quietly together while you eat. It can be anything. Something small. Something true.

The key is you. Make it yours.

(Or your cat’s.)