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IN Journal and Courier (May 24, 2005) - 5/25/05 Unplanning a wedding starts with the difficult decision of calling it off
By Kevin Cullen, Journal and Courier Author Rachel Safier has been there and done that. But better a broken engagement, she says, than a divorce. "There is no common thread. People call off weddings for many reasons; there are millions of soap-opera subplots, from the benign to the dangerous," she says. Georgia's Jennifer Wilbanks, 32, recently made headlines when she faked her own kidnapping to get out of marrying John Mason in front of 600 invited guests, 14 bridesmaids and 14 groomsmen. In 2001, Safier's wedding was canceled two weeks before the big day. She talked to scores of others who had gone through the same ordeal to write There Goes the Bride: Making Up Your Mind, Calling It Off & Moving On. Safier's phone has been ringing non-stop since Wilbanks' meltdown. "I'm the go-to person when somebody does something terrifically crazy, like faking a kidnapping," she says in a phone interview from her home in Washington. D.C. Safier has appeared on all the morning shows, MSNBC, and in The New York Times, talking about what it's like to say "I don't." Based on pre-cana statistics kept by the Catholic Church, about one in five couples split up after announcing wedding plans. Safier estimates that three times as many prospective brides get cold feet than do prospective bridegrooms. All go through a period of grief. After all, a relationship has died, and many of those affected feel that the future has died, too. Safier, now 35 and happily single, says her fiancé was "much more gung-ho" about the wedding than she was. "He knew I was the one, but I never felt that feeling," she says. "I thought I had some block against living happily ever after." Her reservations were dismissed as pre-wedding jitters, but she developed migraine headaches. Finally, she and her boyfriend agreed to cancel the ceremony. "I had no 'smoking gun,'" she says. "There was no third party, no abuse, just this deep knowledge that I was doing the wrong thing. It's hard to listen to that when people want you to get married." Typically, the engaged person must reach the decision alone. She usually doesn't confide in anyone, because she hopes her doubts will pass. When they don't, she goes through terrible stress. "I wrote the book for catharsis for myself," Safier says. "I thought I could be helpful to people. I was never a little girl dreaming about bridesmaids and wedding gowns, but I was paralyzed. I couldn't say, 'This is not right.' We went to the wedding site three weeks before the wedding, and as I stood there, I felt I couldn't go down that aisle." Planning a lavish wedding is somewhat like being aboard a fast train with no brakes. It's hard to jump off, she says. She felt guilty for not recognizing a problem earlier, but great relief when the wedding was nixed. On her Web site, she lists 10 "non-negotiable" reasons for pulling the plug. They include abuse, cheating, and an uneasy, "not right" feeling. "If they see themselves there, there is something much more serious than 'cold feet,'" she says. Thousands of messages appear in Safier's on-line forum. "Runfast" writes that her fiancé tried to pull her engagement ring off her finger. "I wish I never met him," she says. "It has been six years of misery. I love him but he fights dirty and is mean." To which Moran04 replies, "Get out while you still can, and move on ... you need to get out." Safier hopes that Wilbanks' public humiliation gets others to think. She urges engaged people to take a day to be alone with their thoughts. "I didn't confide in anybody," she says. "Make your needs and fears known. Maybe you just need an afternoon for yourself, to take a walk or sit quietly in a room, blocked off from other voices, listening to yourself. You have to take some time and really decide, feel the feeling, then decide what you want to do with it." Bottom line: "Don't be afraid to open your mouth," she says. She was amazed at the support she received. "One friend said, 'You did the right thing,'" she says. "She said, 'I walked down the aisle, and I'm divorced.'" Interestingly, many would-be brides place way too much importance on the material end of the wedding. Safier says that all gifts should be returned, including the ring. "Whoever bought it has to get it back. You are not trying to hurt anybody, just get on with your life," she says. "With everything you do, be as kind as possible. There should be no venom in this. There is no winner in this." Typically, the wedding dress can't be returned, but it can be sold, given to a non-profit, or cut down into a cocktail dress. "Have some friends come over with sharp scissors. Make a quilt," Safier says. The former couple doesn't need to explain any more than they want to, she says. "(The guests) need to know not to come to the wedding, and that you are going to be OK," she says. "I did a mass e-mail to all of them, saying I would be at home with family for awhile, and that I would be in touch." Family and friends can help with the "un-planning," Safier says. "You have a group of people there to help you put on the wedding. They are there to help you dismantle it," she says. "Your Mom can make some phone calls." FYI Many caterers, florists, cake decorators and reception halls require deposits that can be forfeited if a wedding is canceled at the last minute. "We work with the bride. We understand these things happen, and we generally would forego (keeping) major deposits," says Dawn Smith, event manager at Midwest Party Rentals in Lafayette. "We understand that the bride will be getting married again, so we show some sympathy," she says. "It is hard enough to cancel such as big affair as a wedding ... the big message is that they can trust us and count on us." Kim Motuliak, controller at the Lafayette Country Club, didn't care to discuss specifics, but she said that wedding receptions are canceled occasionally and that a cancellation policy applies. "Most of our weddings and large parties are for our members only, and sponsored by members," she says. "People are so happy to be here, some book a year in advance. We don't have that many dropouts." Late cancellations can cost a cake maker major money, so deposits sometimes must be forfeited, says Mary Lee Bollock, co-owner of Dream Designs, which specializes in decorated cakes. "We ask for $100 to secure the wedding date, and would probably keep at least half the payment," she says. "If (the cancellation) is within one or two weeks, we likely would turn down other business. This doesn't happen much, maybe two times last year, and the one was not so close that we didn't lose money." "We look at each situation," Bollock says. Typically, the deposit isn't lost, she says, "if they let us know as soon as they can, and there is no loss. We know it is extremely difficult."
On her Web site, www.theregoesthebride.com, author Rachel Safier cites these 10 "non-negotiable" reasons for calling off a wedding:
Past press on 'There Goes the Bride' below.
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The Bride
by Rachel Safier
with Wendy
Roberts, LCSW
(Jossey-Bass,
2003).
In bookstores
this April.
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