Half (ass) Book Report 1: The Wife

The Meaning of Wife: A Provocative Look at Women and Marriage in the Twenty-first Century by Anne Kingston

By page 133 I am enlightened. When I started the wedding planning process over a year ago, the web introduced me to the A Practical Wedding book and blog and the courageous writers who reassured me that I wasn't crazy as I experienced first-hand wedding night freak-out, the reality of family relationships and their place in a real life wedding, the ugly truth about budgeting and the grown-up "gimmies" induced by a serious industry...and how sometimes life really gets in the way of expectations. 

What I didn't expect was regret. My lover and I had great discussions about what we wanted in the wedding, and what we didn't. But I found myself with a bad case of the what-ifs post-wedding. What if we had abstained from sex for a bit before the wedding...would we have had more explosive sexual chemistry during the honeymoon? What if I'd tried on my mother's wedding dress...just for that bride-in-white framed portrait for the wall? What if my husband and I had reserved a special slow song just for us...just to say we did?

Repost: Ask Team Practical: I Hated My Wedding

2013 was the YEAR OF THE WEDDING. And no, we didn't hate our weddings collectively. We did definitely hate 89% of the wedding planning process (sh*t is wack, yo) but the weddings themselves, no! Except...well, except. Execept that some weddings have both highs and lows. And some of us brides end up with icky, bruising stuff happening during the wedding. Stuff that slams us hard down to earth and takes away from the memory and feel of our glowing, joyful ceremonies. 

This article by Liz Moorhead at A Practical Wedding Blog is THE most insightful and healing reaction to a fairly taboo subject: experiencing a disappointing joy-suck of a wedding. 

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Repost: http://apracticalwedding.com/2012/06/how-to-get-over-wedding-disappointment/

ASK TEAM PRACTICAL: I HATED MY WEDDING

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by Liz Moorhead, Contributing Editor

My wedding was over a year ago and while I’m thrilled to be finally married to my husband, I can’t get over my disappointment in my actual wedding day. We put so much energy and time into planning everything, and it still hurts to think about the ways that it didn’t go according to plan and the ways people were hurtful. I know that I should just be happy that we got married, and I feel terrible that I can’t just do that. How do I come to grips with the wedding we had not being the wedding we wanted?

Depressed Over Wedding Nightmare

Dear DOWN,

Don’t beat yourself up for this! Of course you’re upset that things didn’t work out as planned. That’s natural. Wedding magic doesn’t always make that go away. Sometimes it just helps to know you’re not alone. Take, for example, this post on not loving your wedding, or this one, and this one over here. There’s a lot of pressure out there to have the correct feelings about your wedding (and other things, too), and sometimes that’s just one more unrealistic expectation. Not feeling a certain specific way about major life events is okay; many people feel all sorts of different emotions. How can we expect every person to feel the same way regarding the really big things, when we rarely can all agree on the little things? (I honestly just don’t get the mustache trend. There. I said it.) Feelings can be complicated, whether we’re talking about weddings or moving in or changing our names or pregnancy. This pressure to have certain reactions devalues and ignores an entire spectrum of very real and very complex human emotion.

First thing? You need to forgive yourself for being disappointed. Then, you need to allow yourself room to do that. Rather than bottling up that emotion or feeling as though you’re not allowed to express it, let it out. Cry about it. Scream about it. Find a good friend who won’t mind listening to you whine about it. You have to give a wound some air in order to let it heal.