You’ve heard of pre-wedding jitters, but what about post-nuptial nightmares?
During what was supposed to be a blissful honeymoon, newlywed Sierra Livermore was still fraught with anxiety, experiencing dreams where she relived the stress of wedding planning.
“Everyone was fighting with each other, and everything that could go wrong was going wrong,” the 24-year-old recalled of her night terrors to The Guardian.
She was confused — weddings are billed as the happiest day of your life, so why was she still filled with dread?
Looking back, she now realizes her feelings were “insecurities that were catching up to me” about what marriage should be like.
“When there are things that you still struggle with, it feels like you can’t talk about them because people will assume you’re ungrateful, or they might jump to the assumption that there’s something wrong with the relationship,” said Livermore, who is now working as a marriage and family therapy intern.
But New York-based psychotherapist Landis Bejar assures brides-to-be that Livermore’s kind of anxiety is actually “really common.”
Bejar, the founder of the therapy practice AisleTalk that helps people deal with the stress of weddings, said she often sees clients who deal with post-wedding anxiety. In fact, she and the AisleTalk team meet with some people for multiple sessions after the ceremony.
Patients will are left wondering how they “feel anxious about something that went so well,” Bejar added.
The cause of post-wedding anxiety can be two fold, she said: maybe the bride had a blissful day but still feels anxious, or perhaps they can’t stop thinking about what went wrong.
The latter was the case for Kelsey Wahl, 37.
“It went great,” Wahl, who works in marketing, told The Guardian. “But I still found myself hyper-fixating on things that went wrong or I forgot to do.”
Meanwhile, 33-year-old Janelle Doll, who works as a consultant, said she was focused on whether her guests enjoyed her big day.
“I found myself asking: ‘If I had done things differently, would we have all enjoyed it more?’” she told the outlet
Bejar said these anxieties often stem from underlying problems. One of her patients, she recalled, discovered that the issue was really “her ability to advocate for herself,” or lack thereof, which presented problems when she failed to voice desires to her wedding planner.
“We need to normalize that weddings don’t go perfectly,” Bejar said. “It doesn’t have to be perfect to be great.”
But the stress can also come from the cultural expectation of what a wedding should be, which is largely advertised in our society as the happiest day of a person’s life, said licensed clinical psychologist Erik Nook, who also works as an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University.
Major life milestones, albeit positive, can still be stress-inducing because they “tax our physiological system and mental capabilities and because people often invalidate you for feeling stressed about them” and, in turn, “can trigger a lot of self-judgment and compound the stress,” he explained.
Nook recommends anxious brides to instead focus their thoughts on what went well instead of wrong by reminiscing on photos that bring positive memories and feelings of the day and re-reading guest book notes or wedding cards.
“Dare to trust,” he said. “When people tell you this was a wonderful day, trust that they really mean it and are not harboring some sort of inner critique.”
Emily Niksefat, 34, is one such bride who worked to dash her doubtful thoughts post-nuptials. In addition to talking with guests about their experiences at her own wedding, reminding herself of how she felt as a guest at someone else’s was a helpful thought.
“I realized I would never have these mean thoughts about another bride, so why am I doing this to myself?” the copywriter told The Guardian.
