You’ve heard of the pre-wedding fears, but what about the post-wedding nightmares?
What was meant to be a blissful honeymoon was plagued by anxiety and newlywed Sierra Livermore’s dreams of rekindling the stress of planning her wedding.
“Everyone was fighting with each other and everything that could go wrong was going wrong,” the 24-year-old recalled of her night terrors. Parents.
She was confused: a wedding is supposed to be the happiest day of one’s life, so why was she still filled with anxiety?
Looking back, she now realizes her feelings were a “self-inflicted anxiety” about what her marriage should be like.
“If there’s something that’s still bothering you, you feel like you can’t talk about it because people might assume you’re ungrateful or that there’s something wrong with the relationship,” says Livermore, who is now working as an intern in marriage and family therapy.
But New York-based psychotherapist Landis Bejart reassures brides that fears like Livermore’s are actually “very common.”
Béjart, the founder of therapeutic practice Aile Talk As a consultant with Aisle Talk, a company that helps people deal with wedding stress, she says she often sees clients with post-wedding anxiety — in fact, she and her team at Aisle Talk even hold multiple sessions with some clients after the ceremony.
Patients may wonder, “Why am I feeling anxious if everything is going so well?” Béjart added.
Post-wedding anxiety can be caused by two things, she says: A bride may still feel anxious after her happy day, or she may be unable to stop thinking about what went wrong.
The latter was the case for 37-year-old Kelsey Wall.
“It went really well,” Wall, who works in marketing, told the Guardian, “but I found myself obsessing obsessively about what didn’t work, or what I forgot to do.”
Meanwhile, Janelle Doll, 33, who works as a consultant, said what mattered most to her was whether her guests enjoyed their big day.
“I asked myself: ‘If I had done it differently, would we have had more fun?'” she told the outlet.
Bejart said these fears often stem from underlying issues: One patient, he recalled, said the issue was actually her “ability to advocate for herself,” or lack thereof, which caused problems when she couldn’t express her wishes to the wedding planner.
“You have to accept that weddings aren’t going to be perfect,” Bejart says. “You don’t have to be perfect to have a great wedding.”
But in our society, weddings are widely promoted as the happiest days of one’s life, and cultural expectations of what a wedding should be can sometimes create stress, said Eric Nook, a licensed clinical psychologist and assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University.
Major life milestones, even positive ones, can be stress-inducing because they “tax your physiological systems and your mental capacities, and people often deny that they’re feeling stressed,” which in turn “can lead to a lot of self-criticism, which can increase stress,” he explained.
Nook advises anxious brides to ruminate on photos that evoke good memories and feelings from the day, read the notes in the guest book or wedding cards, and focus their thoughts on what went right rather than what went wrong.
“I dare you to believe,” he said, “that when people say it was a great day, they really mean it, and they don’t have some kind of criticism in their hearts.”
Emily Niksefat, 34, is one bride who tried to dispel any doubts after her wedding. In addition to talking to guests about her own wedding experience, she found it helped to recall how it felt to be a guest at someone else’s wedding.
“I realised I would never think such nasty thoughts about another bride, so why am I doing this to myself?” the copywriter told The Guardian.
