Here's the very successful story of Erin, a 27-year-old bride-to-be, who I helped get married this summer.
​
Do you see yourself in her story?

Last November,Ashley found me by Googling "cold feet about getting married."  

She often tells me that she sobbed when she read my website -- that finally, someone understood what she was going through. 

We met on Skype the next day, and she sobbed basically through the entire free 15-minute consultation.

"Eight months before my wedding, I completely freaked out," wrote Ashley, a bride-to-be I'm working with right now. Her experience in bridal counseling has been so powerful that she wanted to share her story with brides everywhere.  She writes:

"Whenever anyone mentioned the wedding or my fiancé, my throat tightened. I'd get short of breath. My heart raced. I was scared.

Four months earlier, I happily said "yes!" to a wonderful man who understood me inside and out and was perfect on paper.  Before becoming engaged, I loved my relationship with my fiancé.  I loved him, felt lucky to be with him, and that we had such a special and magical relationship.

Now, I was questioning my decision to get married because I was no longer attracted to my fiance.  I felt we had lost our spark, and I was trying to talk myself into marrying him.   

I was so confused.  

I never imagined I'd have cold feet.  I thought cold feet only happened right before your wedding. 

It's normal for brides-to-be to experience times of uncertainty during their engagements.  Uncertainty about the relationship, the wedding, the guy.

It's normal, yes, but it's really upsetting and difficult, especially when everyone's expecting you to be only confident, sure, and 100% certain.

What can you do with your feelings of uncertainty?

This is what we'll discuss at this Wednesday's Google Hangout for Brides:  what uncertainty might mean, what it's purpose is and how to work through it.

9-10pm EST: I will moderate the conversation, keeping it focused on managing uncertainty.  I'll also lead you all in an exercise to help you deepen your understanding of what's going on.

These brides contacted me because they felt anxious and alone in their struggles.

Anxious and alone because the world expected them to be only "brides" -- only excited, only happy, only thinking about dresses and shoes and aisle runners.  

These pressures and expectations didn't match their own inner emotional experiences, which were rich, deep, and lifechanging.  In our work together, each of these brides could be their complex, "unbridely" selves, as they made sense of the very real changes their impending marriages caused them to face.

I'm happy to say that, across the board, without exception, all 7 brides successfully worked through their issues. Each and every bride has reported back to me about the happiness and joy they felt on their wedding days.  Most couldn't believe they had traveled such a distance, emotionally, from where we first started.  At the beginning of our work, they couldn't envision a happy wedding day, they were so wrapped up in their angst and pain.  

And yet, as one bride just told me during her FREE post-wedding download session:  

"Our wedding was phenomenal. The whole thing. Emotionally, I was calmer than I expected to be -- nothing was going to get me down --  and I was surprised at how choked up I got saying my vows.  It was amazing and so satisfying to see all the million tiny details that I worked so hard on, sweated over, and fought for, come to life.  It was perfect."

If you see yourself in any of these 7 brides, or if you are feeling anxious and alone, pressured to be a "perfect bride" and not your complete, complex self, contact me for a free 15-minute Skype consultation.  For these 7 brides, working with me -- having a place in their lives to be "unbridely" -- allowed them to be real, delve deep, grow, learn and come out the other side happy and ready to be married.  

If you'd like that too, please, be in touch.

Early spring is always busy at Emotionally Engaged.

Big deposits are due for spring weddings, and that causes brides to fully face what they are doing with their lives.

So I'm busy. Wonderfully busy.

I have a great new group of brides from all over the globe working with me.  This week, I've been finding myself asking many of them one very simple question:

"Do you want this marriage?"

The answers are all over the map.

"No, not this relationship as it stands right now," said one bride.

"Um, I really don't know," said another. "That's why I contacted you."

"Yes, absolutely, yes," say most brides I work with.  And they quickly follow up by saying, "So why am I feeling so anxious and chaotic inside right now?  I know I want to marry him, so why do I feel like this?"

There are many reasons why some brides feel overwhelmed and anxious.  Here are some of the emotional challenges I worked with brides on this week:

• Getting "financially naked" with your fiance -- how important it is, how vulnerable you might feel, but ultimately how much comfort it will bring knowing the facts
• Letting go of your own apartment or home -- how sad, difficult and confusing that is, because you know you want to live with him
• Understanding the psychology of your & his families and how it plays out in your relationship -- the marriages you both grew up in, the patterns you both learned

See?  These anxiety-causing issues aren't so much about the relationship or marriage, but about mourning the end of your single life, adjusting to the intimacy of creating a life together as a married couple, and getting to know each other on a whole new level.