It’s peak “engagement season” — the span of time between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day when, according to the website WeddingWire, more than a third of couples pledge to marry.
As couples move from whispering sweet nothings to mounting strategic wedding-planning campaigns, their minds and inboxes will be deluged with checklists and countdowns, vendors and venues. But for the most part, their attention will be riveted by the Big Day, not by what comes after.
And why not? Couples understandably want to savor their giddy joy. The sociologist Andrew Cherlin has observed that marriage has become a capstone, rather than a cornerstone, of adult life. Accordingly, weddings have become less of a symbolic expression of a couple’s commitment to a shared future and more of a curated Instagram spectacle of “having arrived.”
The capstone wedding promotes the notion that its flurry of decisions represents a high point of stress and intensity, to be followed by the predictable routines of married life. Not so. I have been treating couples as a therapist for 20 years. I see couples whose unproductive fights over the dishes or in-laws are virtually unchanged, 17 years in. I also see couples whose frozen 17-year marriage begins to thaw once they start saying difficult things that need to be said.
Newly engaged couples do need to plan a wedding, if they want one. Chicken or fish for 150 doesn’t materialize out of thin air. But while they’re thinking about the Big Day, they should also think about how they will cope with disagreement. We’ve made love and marriage into such an ideal that people are afraid to consider, at the outset, just how stressful it can get. To read more from DAPHNE de MARNEFFE, click here.
Kin Leung, Marriage & Family Therapist, MFT, Counseling Burlingame. I specialize in helping couples overcome struggles related to: infidelity, intimacy, miscommunication, mistrust, parenting and life transitions. I’m happy to say that it’s POSSIBLE to regenerate the spark that brought you together in the first place. Although I have a special interest in working with Asians, many non-Asian clients benefit from my service due to my bicultural background and I believe I can offer you a unique perspective to reach your goals.