Before you got engaged, I imagine you thought that, once engaged, your decision to marry your fiance is final.

The reality's different.

During your engagement, you evaluate your fiance and the relationship all over again. with even more intensity.

"I know in my bones that I want to marry Dan, and I said yes without hesitation," Erica told me.  

"But I'm finding myself being hypercritical of him -and sometimes even second-guessing my decision to marry him."

Why would a bride -- a happy bride, even -- do that?

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.

Don't miss this blog by Connie Ann (aka "The Most Relaxed Bride", see post below):  Three Blessings of a Long Engagement.

Connie Ann admits that she wasn't fully psyched about waiting 2 years to be married, after dating already for 3.  But the long wait did come with 3 unexpected benefits, including time "to focus on preparing for our marriage, not just the wedding."  To read the 2 other blessings, click here.  And congratulations again, Connie Ann!