Got a ring on your finger and freaking out?

Understanding My Craziness
The rare times I admitted to my conflicting emotions, I generally heard one pat response: “It’s a rite of passage,” family and friends would say. “Of course you’re having a hard time.” Rite of passage, rite of passage — I kept hearing the phrase over and over again.

“What the hell is a rite of passage?” I thought. “And why is it so damn hard for me?”

I’d just completed my master’s degree in counseling psychology, so I knew the value of self-analysis — of closely observing and examining one’s inner dialogue, thoughts, and behaviors. My hope was that by asking and answering the tough question — Why, during the happiest time of my life, do I feel so bad? — I would make sense of this strange experience. In other words, if I studied my emotions during my engagement, I’d know that all the angst I was going through wasn’t for naught.

So I took myself on as a client and a research subject, so to speak. With my therapist hat on, I worked to understand my inner experience. Instead of fighting my feelings or trying to distract myself with the wedding to-do list, I became curious about my emotions. My inner dialogue — aka the whining in my head — changed from, “Why do I feel so bad all the time?” to “What can these ‘bad’ feelings tell me about myself?” I wrote pages and pages in my journal, and I continued to work hard in my weekly sessions with Ceil, my therapist, to be as self-aware as possible.

It took me a while to overcome the shame of not being a 100 percent happy bride. (Flipping through Martha Stewart Weddings, all the brides beamed big toothy grins at me. They seemed happy. And from what I knew, my married friends hadn’t melted down the way I was; they seemed happy, too.) When I gave up that self-imposed struggle, however, I was able to look at how I was really feeling: happy, but also sad, scared, afraid, disappointed, ashamed, guilty, delighted, overwhelmed, confused — what a complex cocktail of emotions was roiling within me! No wonder I tried to keep the feelings at bay. Now, however, I was going to unleash them.

What happened? The anxiety, fear, and overwhelm quickly dissipated, and I was left adrift in a deep sea of sadness. Grief, even. It really felt like a death, a funeral of sorts, and though it didn’t make sense at the time, I trusted it. I knew from my experiences both as a client in therapy and as a trained therapist that the only way out was through: I needed to feel my sadness before I could understand it. Then and only then would the grief truly pass, and I would feel fully happy again.

In an effort to make sense of my sadness, I went to the library and devoured whatever texts I thought might be helpful. My first order of business was to get to the bottom of this rite-of-passage business. What was a rite of passage, exactly, and how could I learn to go through mine more gracefully?

A rite of passage, I learned, is a ritual that helps a person pass from one life stage to another. Throughout our lives, we go through many rites of passage — birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, motherhood, the empty nest, old age, and death. Each passage is, essentially, a change of identity. We mark and celebrate these changes in identity with rituals: first communions, bat mitzvahs, sweet sixteens, baby showers, even funerals. The purpose of these events is to help us pass from one defined position to another, to facilitate the separation from an old identity and the transition into a new one.

A wedding is the quintessential example of a rite of passage. (Turns out my family and friends were right!) To marry, the bride and groom leave their single lives and families of origin in order to begin their married life together as one new family. Traditional wedding rituals encourage this separation. The single girlfriends throw a last-hurrah bachelorette party before the bride goes off into marriage. The bride wears different clothing than her bridesmaids, signaling her separation from them. The father gives the daughter away to her husband-to-be at the altar. When viewed through this rite-of-passage lens, a wedding’s ingrained traditions, its universal structure, and even its insanely detailed planning process help women make this break with their former realities.

Learning this helped a bit, but I was still confused. Why was I so sad and scared when I was doing exactly what I wanted to do — get married to Jason? Because, I learned, I was going through a major life transition. Neither single nor married, during my engagement I was in the process of leaving my single life (without having fully left it) and, at the same time, entering married life (without being fully a part of it). No wonder I was such a wreck.

That I was grieving the end of my single life was a counterintuitive, unconventional, and revolutionary way to think about being engaged. It debunked the myth that this was the happiest time of my life. And that gave me freedom to do the psychological work I needed to do before I walked down that aisle.

Excerpted from “Emotionally Engaged: A Bride's Guide to Surviving the “Happiest” Time of Her Life” by Allison Moir-Smith. Copyright © 2006, Allison Moir-Smith. All rights reserved. Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

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