Wedding blues. They’re real.
The wedding is over, the bliss is fading away.
The constant support, cards, and gifts have fluttered out and the honeymoon is over. Have you heard of the post wedding blues? Many of us have, and I think for the majority of people it is a real thing. When I first encountered this concept I didn’t really give it a second thought. I knew for me at least, that when the planning was over I would feel relief. Which I did, but a different kind of blues set in for me for the past few weeks. A stressful, unsure, sad blues that I couldn’t pin point at first. After we got back from the honeymoon, we worked on donating/selling all of our wedding decor. Once all of that was over, we tackled all the thank you notes in 2 weeks time. When we finished that, everything was really over; it felt good, but it felt strange. Our schedule opened up again before of course filling back up with more weddings. Haha. Living in your twenties! I think we were struck with a…. what do we do now?
What do we do now?
As Matt and I went back to work and started up our normal routine again it felt weird. This past year we really had two jobs, one for money and one for wedding planning. The absence of the latter had us feeling kind of weird.
I also realized that I was starting to panic under the pressure of having so many new family members. Birthdays to remember, holiday cards to send. I had always been on top of taking care of my side of the family but now I felt responsible for all of his…now my family too. His family is great, but even he felt the same way about mine. It is a lot more people and for whatever reason that seemed to add to the discomfort. I realized that every little fight or argument we have seems like a much bigger deal because now we can’t just walk away if it gets hard. You can’t just turn around and change your mind. That alone in our fast paced, social media scrolling society is hard to imagine. When you picked your college, you could always transfer. When you pick a job you can always leave. With a husband or wife, you can’t do that. You make a decisions and through life’s up’s, down’s , changes, and evolution you are forever bound to your spouse; it is a beautiful thing, but also scary (depending on who you are of course).
Marriage doesn’t mean giving up who you are.
I have always been an independent person and I struggled a little with that concept over the course of the 4 years we dated, and our engagement. By independent I mean I just like to do things on my own. In my college years I loved the fact that I had a free schedule, no boyfriend and I could make all the decisions for the day in my own head and never have to consult someone else. It was almost a high and getting married turned that off. It’s taken a while to realize that it didn’t have to. This slow kind of anxiety started to bubble up and I looked at single people as free and me? Well… not. But a good dose of your partners reality check can do wonders for the spiraling mind.
Back to Reality
One of the reasons you married your partner probably like I married mine is because they understand you or “get you” on some level. So they will probably understand completely and help draw you out of your rabbit hole. It can hard to start talking about it, but I promise it will help in the end. It’s okay to not know or understand why you are feeling this way. I remember saying, “I don’t know why” a lot while I whittled away at the problem until I figured it out. Like most things when you are upset it normally is a lot of little things that make up one big discomfort or issue. My suggestion, is to start with your expectations. Talk about what you expected married life to be like and what it actually feels like now. Discuss your feelings and don’t hold back, once you give a name to all of your feelings it will help immensely and you’ll be able to figure out how to tackle each one.
At any point after the wedding if you start to feel sad or depressed, negative or unhappy: First, know you are not alone. For a lot of couples the first year of marriage is the hardest and post wedding blues are a real thing. Even in today’s world, when most of us live with our significant other before we’re married, it can be difficult. Second, communicate. Talk it out with your partner. They may be suppressing some feelings that are much better communicated out in the open. I can still take time for me and make decisions on my own, I just need to communicate them to my spouse. Third, remember why you got married and focus more on the positive rather than the negative.
Don’t let fear control you
For me, even though I felt many fears before getting married, I knew that is exactly what they were, fears. I put a name to my feelings and tackled them each one by one. I didn’t want to let my fears hinder my decision because I knew the root of my unease was in fear.
Fear that we wouldn't work out like my parents or his parents.
Fear that I could potentially meet someone new one day that made me happier.
Fear that we'd grow tired of each other.
Those are all just unnecessary doubts when in reality we know why we married our partner and in that first year i think it is important to talk about it with each other. Remind yourself of the reasons why you made that decision. Remember too, not everyone experiences the wedding blues the same. You’re experience may be totally different than anyone else’s and that’s okay too.
We got married on May, 5th, so clearly it has only been a month and half. We are both still working through this. There are more aspects that we are happy about than not happy about, but we are still on this journey and trying to understand how to support each other through this concept. We never imagined we’d be here “struggling after the wedding”, dealing with post wedding blues. This is where we are. Know that you are not alone, if you too are going through this as well. More updates to come as we journey down this road together!
Please leave a comment if you have any suggestions or questions. If you’d like to share your story with us too, we’d love to hear from you.