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The Charlotte Observer (August 24, 2003) - 8/27/03

On their site at: http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/living/6605321.htm


Etiquette for the nearly wed


Whether you're jilted or the jilter, you have a lot of unplanning to do

ROXANNE ROBERTS


Originally: Washington Post

If everything had gone as planned, Rachel Safier would have celebrated her second anniversary this summer. Over a romantic dinner, she and her husband would have laughed about the pre-wedding jitters -- the day when she threw her engagement ring on the bed, tossed clothes into a bag, and barreled out the door.


Except for the wedding, that's pretty much how it happened. One minute she was engaged to be married in two weeks, the next she was an ex-fiancée. She looked for a book to help her through this heartbreaking time but couldn't find one. So she wrote it herself: "There Goes the Bride" -- a survival guide to the messy etiquette of broken engagements. What to do with the ring, the dress, the caterer, the presents, the parents, the pain, the ex.


"It's just this terrible irony: this traumatic and horrible time in your life, and there are all these things to do to unplan a wedding," says Safier. "It's pretty much the last thing on Earth you want to do."


There are no official statistics on engagements, but Safier (using premarital counseling data) estimates that up to 20 percent of engaged couples call it off before the wedding -- about 500,000 people a year. That's an awful lot of canceled receptions, unworn dresses, heartbroken jilters and jiltees.


And plenty of women asking, "Do I have to give back the ring?"

The book is ... well, it's a chick book. It's for Almost Brides (Safier's term), by Almost Brides. There's no male point of view because she started writing two days after the breakup. "At that time, I couldn't have cared less," she says. "It sort of started as a `You go, girl -- I got through it, you can, too.' "


Safier has become the engagement expert, the Queen of hits and not-quite-Mrs. There are lots of interviews, plus her Web site, theregoesthebride.com, and another book in the works: "How Not to Get Married Just Yet."


She would like to get hitched -- eventually. "I do want to get married," she says. Her parents were married for 38 happy years until her father died this spring. "I am pro the right marriage. So, yes, I want to get married -- but only if I find that connection."


She's already got the dress: a $1,200 wedding gown that was waiting to be picked up just before her wedding day. Would she wear it for her next one?


"No one else I know has said yes to that question -- but yes." She ticks off the reasons: Her fiancé never saw it, it's beautiful -- and besides, she couldn't return it because it was taken in for her increasingly nerve-racked body. She could have resold or consigned it, but decided to keep it instead.


Past press on 'There Goes the Bride' below.

Find it on Amazon.com



There Goes
The Bride

by Rachel Safier
with Wendy
Roberts, LCSW
(Jossey-Bass,
2003).
In bookstores
this April.

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