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FL Herald Tribune (May 9, 2005) - 5/21/05

I Don't
by Nina Diamond
It's all just so tawdry and sad.
Jennifer Wilbanks, 32, ignited a national search when she vanished from her suburban Atlanta home April 26, days before her wedding to John Mason.
She took a bus to Las Vegas. She then traveled to Albuquerque, N.M., where she called police and her fiancé, giving them a story about being kidnapped by a Hispanic man and a white woman.
First, she was lost; now, she has been found out.
And law enforcement and Georgia district attorneys offices are angry, as is a Hispanic advocacy group.
How did all the pomp and circumstance surrounding her wedding come to this? The circumstances read like a plot from a bad novel (not to mention the 1999 Julia Roberts-Richard Gere movie "Runaway Bride").
With all the books that tell you how to plan a wedding, it was only a matter of time before someone wrote a book about how to cancel one.
Magazine writer Rachel Safier wrote "There Goes the Bride: Making Up Your Mind, Calling it Off & Moving On" (Jossey-Bass, $14.95) in the wake of her own canceled wedding.
"I started writing the book two days after we called it off," she said from her Washington, D.C., home. "I found writing it the most cathartic thing. Now I really feel fine."
In "There Goes the Bride," Safier writes, "I looked for a book like this to help me heal, but it didn't exist. So I decided to write it."
She tackles not just the emotions, but also the logistics of undoing a wedding, and includes her experience as well as those of 62 other "almost brides," as she calls them, including the Tampa area's Teri Boyd, who, at age 23, broke an engagement two weeks before her wedding in 1999.
When Boyd's boyfriend proposed, "I knew right away I should have said no," she said. "I burst out crying, and not the good kind. I said 'yes' because I really wanted a wedding. I was really immature."
During her eight-month engagement, Boyd said, she learned just how incompatible she and her fiancé really were.
Safier said she has found that Boyd's experience is quite common.
Some women are raised to think that "marriage is the finish line," Safier said. But, she said, women should "live your life and don't worry about when you're going to grab the diamond ring."
Safier said that pressure from well-meaning friends, family and colleagues also often leads women into engagements.
"People say, 'You're pretty and smart and accomplished; why aren't aren't you married?'" Safier said.
She said that many women who have gone through with marriages they had doubts about have written and e-mailed her after hearing about her book, saying, "I wish your book had been around when I got married because I didn't know you could call it off."
According to Safier, about 20 percent of all engagements and weddings in the United States are called off each year, which amounts to about 500,000. So canceling a wedding is more common than people may think, but maybe not as common as it could be. That's because the stigma attached to canceling a wedding is far greater in today's society than getting a divorce, said Safier. "People understand marriages not working out."
Two years after Teri Boyd canceled her first wedding, she happily went through with her second engagement to a lifelong friend whom she began dating well after she broke off her first engagement.
"On the morning of the wedding, I got so many calls from people asking, 'Are you going to be there?'" she said.
But they had nothing to worry about.
"I knew it was right this time," she said. "This time I wasn't getting married just for the wedding."
She and her husband now have two children.
Safier's advice to women who wonder if they should get engaged or go through with the wedding they're planning is simple.
"The truth always rises to the top," she said. "Shut out the voices of your parents, friends and fiancé. Sit by yourself and think if this is what you want. The answer comes to you. We all have the answer to this inside of us."

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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