I’ve worked intimately with brides since 2002, and I’ve identified 5 typical sources.

If you and your fiancé were planning your wedding in a vacuum, just the 2 of you, it would be a piece of cake:  You know what you like, you work together, you can deal with your budget.  But that’s not what's going on here.  Most brides have not one but 2 Moms inserting their strong opinions.  So decisions become a delicate diplomatic dance.   It’s tedious and exhausting, belaboring every detail.  

Solution:  You and your fiancé define for yourselves 3 non-negotiables each for your wedding – 3 things each you are unwilling to compromise on.  Make sure you get those things, done perfectly, and then be willing to be influenced on the rest.  Especially if parents are paying.

You go home with a husband with the power to make life-and-death decisions for you, a new branch on your family tree, and (possibly) a new last name.  Your wedding is NOT just a party.  

Solution:  Everything about your wedding feels overwrought and bigger than it should be because, well, it is.  For example, the stress you feel when you can’t find the right bridesmaids dress isn’t totally about the design and color of the dress.  Psychologically, you’re also working through how you’re going to “fit” all these important women into your new, unknown, married life with you.  Be aware of the deeper levels always going on. (Read also: Why it may be healthy to obsess about your wedding.)

You're coming face-to-face with the end of your single life and identity as a single woman; the end of your primary family identity being “daughter”; and the end of the simpler dating days of boyfriend and girlfriend.  Each of these endings can cause emotional turmoil as brides process their feelings about these major identity changes.  

Solution:  Give yourself time and space to just feel.  Reflect.  Journal.  Acknowledge the passing of time, the change in identity, the growing up that is going on.  Mourning is background music playing in your mind right now.  Let it become foreground music occasionally to work through it.

Bride S.C. from Australia, who worked through her engagement anxiety and engagement depression with me, here on her very happy wedding day.

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.

But the bride herself was drawn to another style of dress altogether: 

Yet during the many subsequent fittings, the lovely, elegant and expensive dress just didn't feel right:

Between the initial purchase of the dress, when she was financially dependent on her parents as an actress and writer, and the final fitting 2 weeks before the wedding, her she sold her novel, for a lot of money.  That changed things, among them her feelings about herself AND her wedding dress:

She tried on another dress -- "a 1930s fantasy -- silky, backless":

Even her Mom knew the second dress was the right dress and didn't put up a fuss with the switch.  Because the second dress more accurately reflected and represented who her daughter was and was becoming.

Have you had an experience like this during your engagement, when something you ordered or committed to at the beginning of your engagement didn't feel right as your wedding date approached?  

Did it feel off because something about you has changed in the intervening months? What was changed in you? What changed in your relationship to yourself or others?

I'd love to hear your experiences -- please share below.

I discuss this transition from the Ending stage of being engaged to the Bridging stage at length in my book, but in a nutshell, here's what happens:

Many brides-to-be describe their transitions out of the Ending stage and into the Bridging stage like a fog finally lifting.  

For the early months of their engagement, they walked around consumed by feelings of loss and disorientation as they let go of old ways of being.  They felt that the confusion would never end.

They've been afraid that they'd be in a down, depressed funk on their wedding day, and that they'd never feel happy or excited about getting married, even though, deep down, they trusted that that was what they wanted to do.  

As the wedding approaches for these brides-to-be, however, joyful anticipation beings to creep back in.

Once you enter the Bridging stage, you will have made the internal psychological adjustments necessary to begin your new life as a married woman.  

During this stage, women who've struggled with the loss of identity as a single woman or their single-minded focus on their careers, find themselves embracing how their fiances enrich their lives.

Brides-to-be who've had difficulty letting go of their dependence on their parents discover that they can be close with their families even as they put their fiances first.

Women who mourn the end of the days as boyfriend and girlfriend begin to see the richness and depth that come with making a lifelong commitment.

In short, the confusion that accompanied all the many endings brides-to-be have faced is replaced with greater clarity, curiosity, and hope.  Your focus turns to the future.

Entering the Bridging stage doesn't, however, mean that all the gray clouds will have permanently lifted. But you'll likely find that when difficult emotions do arise, you'll no longer stay stuck in a downward spiral. Instead, you'll embrace the emotions and feel them fully, and then they will quickly move on. On the whole, your positive feelings about your future with your fiance will consistently outweigh your grief about the ending of your single life.

Bridging, then, is a time when the balance shifts, when your new life as a married woman begins to take shape in your mind, in your heart, in your life.  After all the hard work you will have done to end earlier chapters of your life, you'll begin to realize that it all had a purpose.

How far away is your wedding?  

Is it in less than 6 weeks?  If so, have you entered the Bridging stage?

Or is your wedding more than 6 weeks away?  If so, then you're probably still more connecting to the Endings.

I'd love to hear more about where you are in your engagement, and you can learn more about the 3 stages of being engaged in my book, Emotionally Engaged: A Bride's Guide to Surviving the "Happiest" Time of Her Life.

You have got to read this piece by Anna Latimer!  She really tells it like it is:

Direct, right?

But she's struck a chord on the xojane.com website: a phenomenal 179 comments posted in less than 24 hours....and counting.

And that's because she writes -- straightforwardly and hilariously -- about the emotional work of being engaged:

I'm delighted that my book offered Anna some comfort and context during her engagement.  But even happier to have her in blowing the lid off the myth and stereotype that engagements are only easy, happy, wedding-planning times.

She gets the message through -- loud and clear -- that there is much important emotional work to do during your engagement, too.

The title of the piece?  "I Love My Marriage, But Hated My Engagement."