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Kamy
Wicoff Susan
Shapiro Barash Susan
Maushart Rachel
Safier Marg
Stark Elizabeth Freeman An academic deconstructs the wedding Eva Unger Bowditch and Aviva Samet on how to survive your mother-in-lawStephanie Rosenbaum Lisa Miya-Jervis Nancy Cott Sheryl
Nissinen -----------
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SPRING 2003 | "Chin up," everyone says when you face disaster. But that advice is hard to hear when you're facing disappointed friends and family after canceling your wedding. Rachel Safier, devastated when her engagement was (mutually) broken off two weeks before her wedding, took a different route. Harnessing her experiences, and those of 62 other "Almost Brides," Safier wrote There Goes the Bride: Making Up Your Mind, Calling It Off & Moving On. In it she details the complicated, wrenching process of deciding to call off an engagement and tackles the practical questions -- everything from how to deal with vendors and what to do with the engagement ring. Speaking as the voice of experience and as a concerned advisor, Safier provides a solid handbook for anyone with cold feet, wedding worries, or more profound qualms about her (or his) future partner. Is there a stigma attached to breaking off an engagement? Yes, and it's so ironic and sad now that divorce has come to be much more accepted. I wish we could extend this acceptance to broken engagements. That was one of the main reasons I wrote the book. Our society has a very high divorce rate and one of the ways to lower it is to accept when something's not right so you can get out of it beforehand. I get letters saying: "We bought the dress, we have the hall, wouldn't it be easier to just go through with it?" It's not. It's not emotionally easier. It's not economically easier. But as hard as it is to break an engagement, it's less of a toll than going through a divorce. Why do you describe breaking off an engagement and recovering from it in terms of grieving? About a month before Mark [Safier's pseudonym for her ex-fiancé] and I broke up I met an acquaintance who had broken off an engagement three months before. I was very aware that she looked a lot happier than I felt. After Mark and I called it off, I asked her out to lunch. She advised me to look for books on grief, which I thought was ridiculous. Then I started to put it all together. It was the loss of a loved one; the loss of a vision of the future, and what I was traveling was a path of grief. Realizing that definitely made it easier for me and for the women I interviewed. Suddenly the question "Why do I feel so bad when I know it was the right thing?" seemed less confusing. When you realize that you really are following the pattern and timeline that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross [in On Death and Dying] succinctly set out, it's easier to accept. The roller coaster makes a bit more sense. You talk about how website The Knot helped you. What did the Internet community do for you that you didn't get elsewhere? There is something very healing about furiously typing your feelings and getting back this avalanche of support and love from people who don't love you unconditionally, who don't know you. I posted a lot on The Knot when I had cold feet and many of the women I interviewed said that they didn't discuss their cold feet with friends because they didn't want them to think poorly of their fiancés -- especially if they did stay in the relationships. Anonymity is helpful. When we called it off, all these women wrote to me saying that they had called off their weddings, and that they had gotten through it -- I had this wonderful community. It wasn't so much that I chose to speak to them instead of my friends. It was that my friends didn't have that experience. One power of the Internet is that you can find the community you need when you don't necessarily have it around you. How do you draw the distinction between cold feet and needing to call it off? I get lots of letters and postings on my website where people ask what the difference is between cold feet and something more. Most people suffer cold feet because getting married is awesome in the dictionary definition of the word. It's a huge undertaking where you're standing up before your family, your friends, your God (if you're so inclined), making a declaration for the rest of your life. Cold feet is the understanding that what you're doing is huge. It's great that you have this feeling because it means you're not jumping into something without thought. On the other hand, when you know deep down that this is the wrong thing for you -- the wrong person, the wrong time, when something about the situation just feels wrong, then it's more than cold feet. Women write: "He's great, he's wonderful, it's not like he hits me, it's not like he's disrespectful. Why do I feel this way when I love him?" I say: "It's not that you have to be able to write it out why this guy is wrong for you in three sentences or less. You can just know it's wrong. Beyond that there are the "Top Ten Nonnegotiables" I have in the book, and if you're feeling or experiencing these things you should absolutely lace up your sneakers and run. A lot of times our family and friends are blind to what we're going through because they think it's wedding stress. What made you include the list of relationship Nonnegotiables? When you're in it, you can't always see the forest for the trees. In my situation, there was no villain. But there are situations -- you see it on The Knot often -- where women will rationalize. Everybody's trying to understand why women feel compelled to stay in abusive relationships and think that marriage is going to solve their problems. There is a power that women feel once they have that ring on their finger that they have made that commitment and they're going to work through it all. It's very important to step back and realize you're not done yet and if there are big problems and you've ignored them, you still have time to rectify the situation. A lot of women feel that the engagement limits their choices. The most frightening thing to hear is: "I love him, but--" I've gotten letters saying: "He's emptied out my checking account, but I love him." or "He swears at my grandmother, but I love him." And the A-#1 thing I've learned from my experience is that love does not conquer all. I loved my fiancé, but we were not fit to go forever. How do you recommend handling vendors when you call it off? I interviewed wedding planners, and their first piece of advice is: the earlier you call it off it the better. People aren't trying to screw you, but they are running businesses, so if they can fill your slot, there's a better chance they can give you money back. Other women told me that they tried to get sympathy from vendors. It happened to me. We went for our final viewing of the place and the manager looked at me and said: "You don't look happy." I said: "I'm just stressed out blah, blah, blah." A week later we called it off, and she just sent back the whole check. There's no way they could have booked the place in time, but they were wonderful. Another possibility, if you can't get your money back, consider throwing another party. One woman did everything, she probably wore a different dress, but she even had the wedding cake and topped it with a single bride figure. You can also advertise online -- on The Knot they do this -- saying the hall is available if anyone wants to get married in a short amount of time. There should be a clearing-house for that. And what do you recommend doing with the engagement ring? Just give it back. The courts in most states currently say you should give it back, but advice columnists differ, people differ. The first question I get is: "Did you give it back?" Of course I did. It wasn't mine. I feel basically the way the courts do now: the ring shows your intent to get married. We weren't getting married so I gave it back, and he gave me back the engagement watch that I gave him. Why would you want it? I think people who keep it often have unresolved feelings of bitterness or spite. Would these relationships continue without the engagement and wedding planning? In many cases, yes. I think our relationship would have continued if we hadn't been engaged. People ask if I regretted getting engaged but it was exactly what I needed. This is one of the "Nonnegotiables." You have to figure out if the problems you're having during the engagement are a microcosm of your life together or if they're the stress of planning a big party. In our case we had different ideas of how we wanted to spend money, of parental involvement, of logistics, about when to stand firm and when to compromise and discuss it. We would have continued apace if we hadn't gotten engaged. Would you recommend people go through your survey even if they aren't questioning their engagements? I think there's a great deal of merit in not going into an engagement with stars in your eyes. I have a bit of an issue with the Susan Piver Book [The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say "I Do"] because many of the questions are so mundane. Essentially, my survey asks: "Are we both pointing the boat in the same direction. Do we want to get to the same place? Do we both want to get there the same way? How's our communication? How do we feel about money, sex, family and all of the other hot button issues?" The questions should be reassuring. I'm not trying to take down the institution of marriage. But the book is a worthwhile tool if you're trying to decide if it's something you're unsure about. After the split, who keeps the friends? I recommend a total breech. It sounds terrible, but when you think back to all of your hard breakups, the ones that took a long time to get over are the ones where you kept trying to be friends. Maybe with the passage of time you can be friends, but I don't particularly espouse it. I mention in the book, a conversation with my ex's sister-in-law who wanted to stay friends with me, and I knew I couldn't. I didn't think it was fair to my ex-fiancé. He got the ones he came in with, and I got the ones I brought. So I just walked away and was confident that he was setting off on his life and I was setting off on mine. Are people more invested in the notion of marriage right now than in recent years? We're in a very funny time in history. You don't have to get married. You don't need it economically, or for social status. But marriage is still a beautiful thing and it certainly makes a lot of sense especially given the complicated times we live in. There's obviously comfort in having somebody looking out for you and who loves you. And when marriage is good it's wonderful. So we're trying to balance it and figure out what exactly it's going to be now. An interesting thing is that the media coverage of this book falls into two camps. There is the morning show camp where they play the processional music and they want to hear the crazy stories like the woman who came home and found her fiancé in her undergarments, or the woman who heard the voice of God and got in the car and left. And then there's the more thoughtful reaction, which is more from [radio and print] reporters, which is: What does this mean for the future of marriage? What does this mean about women? How do your choices reflect what everyone else is going through? And that's much more exciting. The interesting part is not me and the 15 minutes of concentration on what happened to me. Within the body of literature about marriage I look at the book as an alternative to The Starter Marriage by Pamela Paul. If you didn't go through with it and then call it off right after, what did you do? You called it off before. And it's helping to bushwhack a path for the women who follow us. I think that Indiebride is really important because it explores a great and interesting truth: just because you're getting married doesn't mean you have to follow a prescribed path. And not having a certain kind of wedding opens you up to not having to have a certain kind of marriage. It's really a very exciting time and I hope the my book and this new wave of writing and thinking about marriage will help shape what women are going to make of their futures. ----------- Buy There Goes The Bride in the Indiebride book store |
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