I had a wedding. It was great! Also, I think I have post-nuptial depression.
Weddings are hard. It’s like your whole life for months and months is all about getting ready for this one big thing and then it’s here and you’re so wrapped up in it that you almost don’t even realize it’s happening. Kind of a great metaphor for life, right? We spend so much of our time getting ready for the next thing that we don’t get to experience what’s happening right now.
Like basically everyone else out there, I struggle with depression and anxiety. It’s something most people don’t see in me and I cover it up pretty well with what, I think, tends to come off as confidence. I’m a huge proponent of the “fake it till you make it” school of thought, and most of the time that works for me (apparently I am, actually, making it).
Going into the wedding, everyone kept telling me to make sure to “step outside the chaos to enjoy the moments and take everything in.” Great advice – except, because I am a person with generalized anxiety and a significant amount of control issues, the thought of being too anxious to enjoy my wedding and/or causing me to turn into a maniacal bridezilla was, ultimately, giving me tons of anxiety.
I know that I am not alone here. I put myself under a certain amount of pressure to have a Pinterest-perfect wedding. During the planning process, I had daydreams about being featured on wedding blogs and having our pictures go viral. In my mind’s eye, the flower crown was not shedding dead baby’s breath all over me, every corner of our wedding barn was a one-of-a-kind photo opportunity, the cake decorator hit just the right balance of rustic and elegant, and my left eye did not look smaller than the right one when I smiled in pictures. Basically, the wedding planning process was like living in a fairy tale, feeling like you have to create everything to make it come true, knowing that that’s an impossible task, and being completely consumed by it anyway.
The hard part about this is that I don’t see myself as someone who buys into the hype around the bridal industry and the wedding industrial complex. I am independent, strong willed, stubborn, and I usually [always] know what I want. I was inundated with marketing ploys that influenced my vision for the wedding, making it increasingly detailed and increasingly expensive. And I couldn’t stop.
When we label ourselves “brides,” we are immediately bombarded with advertisements and increasingly manipulative marketing strategies that convince us to buy into a certain element of competition around weddings. It has to be more unique, more personalized, more hand-made, more picture-perfect. As we strive to achieve wedding perfection, we lose sight of ourselves, and also of the reason we’re doing this at all.
Every time a coworker asked about the planning process, especially as the big day got closer, my response grew more detached and, strangely, more cliché: “I’m so exhausted, and I’m so excited.” In retrospect – planning my wedding took over my identity. My fiancee and I fought more than we ever had before. I didn’t even know either of us cared about centerpieces. Apparently we both have very strong opinions. So does my mom.
I won’t lie about struggling to control my anxiety or being able to fully enjoy our day. I don’t truly remember every detail. I yelled at my fiancee and her best man the day before the wedding. The ceremony is a little blurry, but I know that lots of people cried. I didn’t get to spend enough time with anyone in particular, but I had special moments with the most important ones. My new wife and I made sure to take a few private moments, but it generally felt like a whirlwind.
Of course, some elements of our wedding didn’t look exactly how I’d envisioned.
I imagine that there is a huge amount of freedom in recognizing what’s really important, and what you can just let go of. I don’t know how well I achieved that. What I know is that our wedding turned out beautiful, and that even though I saw a way more perfect wedding on Facebook THE NEXT DAY, it was exactly, perfectly us. And that I kind of don’t know what to do with myself now that it’s over.
I had a serious depressive meltdown a few days after the wedding, and I’m still struggling to swim back up to the surface. During our honeymoon, I had to pull over in middle-of-nowhere South Dakota because I couldn’t keep driving through the tears and I had no idea why they were even happening. The stress and pressure of wedding planning washed away, but left me feeling empty and goalless. Of course, I felt joy at knowing I’d just married the love of my life. But I also felt a gnawing sense of absence, even loss.
Our Pinterest obsession isn’t just making it harder to enjoy our weddings. It’s actually harmful to our mental health. Weddings are a big deal to most of us – to many of us, the biggest deal. But every time we click over to Pinterest, open a shiny magazine, or read the latest lifestyle blog, we’re setting a subconscious standard of living for ourselves which, ultimately, we know we’ll never achieve. I’m never going to have long, luxuriously smooth locks of perfect curls. My skin will probably always be a little ruddy, and for the life of me, I can’t keep the damn front table clear of clutter for more than half a day. The more time I spend admiring the perfection of other women’s lives, the more hopeless I feel about my own ability to create the life that I aspire to.
I don’t think this is healthy, and I kind of hate myself for being so wrapped up in all of it. But I also love to pin and read Country Living and totally admit to obsessively keeping track of my follower count on Instagram. Finding a balance between inspiration and individuality is a struggle that goes far beyond just my wedding. But recognizing the impact of the wedding industry on my mental health, our economy, and the loss of identity during the process, is a major first step toward recovering from it.
I don’t even know where this is going. I’m still trying to climb out of my post-wedding hole. I’m struggling to feel inspired, and feeling kind of lost about what to do next. What I know is that I spent so much time and energy trying to make sure our wedding was perfect that I lost track of the really important stuff, and now I need to figure out a way to get it all back.
bitchycrocker 