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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Author and therapist Sheryl Paul explains why wedding planning turns some people into quivering messes.
Dec 4, 2003 | During her engagement in the fall of 1995, Sheryl Paul found countless wedding planners offering advice about dresses and flowers and food -- but she didn't find any books that helped her with the big problems she was facing: the fear of marriage and becoming a wife, and the anxiety about leaving behind her family and single life. After all, planning a wedding and getting married should be an experience nothing short of ecstatic, right?
Not always. The engagement, the wedding and the first few months of married life are periods of constant ups and downs, says Paul, a Los Angeles-based therapist and author. But none of the wedding books she read discussed this emotional roller coaster.
So Paul, who was earning an M.A. in counseling psychology at the time, wrote her own wedding book -- "The Conscious Bride: Women Unveil Their True Feelings About Getting Hitched." "As part of my research I conducted interviews with many women and I quickly learned that I was not the only one who felt afraid and anxious while planning my wedding," says Paul. "Some women burst into tears when they were proposed to, some wanted to flush their engagement ring down the toilet, some cried on their wedding night and had no idea what was going on. They didn't have the vocabulary to name and talk about their experience."
While working on "The Conscious Bride," Paul launched a bridal counseling business, Conscious Weddings. She now works one-on-one with brides around the world, helping them deal with their individual transitions into marriage. Her second book, "The Conscious Bride's Wedding Planner," recently hit bookstores.
Why is there so much pressure to create The Perfect Wedding?
There are very few times in a woman's life where she has a chance to create a fantasy as she does around her wedding. It's a day where there's a potential for an immense amount of beauty and tears. Couples feel inspired to create this day that expresses their love and expresses their deepest commitment to each other. Where people get out of whack is when they're acting on a very deep, usually unconscious motivation that starts from the time they're little girls -- they try to create a "fairy tale wedding." The reality is there's no such thing as a perfect wedding. Images that we see in magazines and movies are not real and they cost thousands of dollars to create.
So how do you hold an amazing wedding without getting all caught up in the fantasy? How do you check yourself?
You check yourself by first checking in with your intention -- why are we having a wedding? -- so that you're not trying to create an externally imposed vision of what you think the wedding is supposed to look like. Are you trying to please your parents? Are you trying to measure up to a celebrity wedding that you just saw on E!? Have you and your partner sat down and asked yourselves, What do we really want to achieve with this wedding? Why are we having this wedding as opposed to eloping or going down to the courthouse? When couples stay attuned to their intention they usually end up having a very beautiful day.
What are the most common traps engaged couples fall into while planning the wedding?
The most common trap is spending all of your time on planning -- and I mean literally all of your time, so that you don't have any time to sit down with your partner and connect.
Equally important as couples spending time together -- and this is where my work comes in -- is each person individually taking time to explore what this transition means to them. If both people are overly involved in the planning they're not going to slow down enough to look inside and say, I'm leaving an identity -- what does that mean? I'm entering into marriage -- what are my fears, what are my expectations? How can I prepare for this monumental transition? Women who don't prepare for the transition to marriage often experience post-bridal depression and are not present for their first year of marriage. And because of the depression, the first thing they think is, have I made a mistake?
What is "post-bridal depression"?
Post-bridal depression is what happens when women throw themselves into the planning and become consumed with their list of to-dos. Then, after the wedding is over, they crash. And every conversation they didn't have, and every fear they didn't explore before the wedding comes down on them. And the reality hits: I'm married to this person for the rest of my life.
Why do you think people avoid talking about these issues during the engagement period?
Because it's not socially acceptable to talk about your fears about marriage. But people don't realize that you're supposed to be terrified out of your mind. That's normal. Why wouldn't you be terrified? You're about to jump off a cliff with this person, and you don't know what it's going to look like on the other side. Much of my work with women is telling them that the more they talk about their fears, the less afraid they're going to be. The fear is exacerbated by trying to pretend that it doesn't exist.
So suffering from post-bridal depression doesn't necessarily mean you made the wrong decision.
No. That's one of the biggest misconceptions, not only after the wedding, but before as well: If I'm scared, if I'm doubting, if I'm confused, if I'm grieving, does it mean that I'm making a mistake? Sometimes it does, and that's a very difficult place to be.
