Engagement Anxiety

Then it hit me. I was evaluating whether or not Jordan was a potential life partner for marriage. Something I should have been doing during our courtship and entire relationship.

Love is action. Love is tolerance. Love is learning your partner's love language and then expressing love in a way that he can receive. Love is giving. Love is receiving.

There's really only one good reason to get married: because you've found your soul mate. But there are so many bad ones. Here are the seven worst.

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My biggest fear is that I will have doubts the day of the wedding and be scared to walk down the aisle. How can I learn to trust that this is the last phase of the process and not think that this is a sign that I shouldn't marry?

Projection is a defense or an addiction against feeling the natural fear and grief associate with a transition and the anxiety, self-doubt, and old traumas around love of your wounded self.

In three weeks, I will be a bride. This is the plan, assuming I have not melted down into a tiny, white, bridal nugget. Three weeks to go, and instead of savoring the moment, I find myself devolving into weepy, grouchy, clingy, sleepless, panicky, and all the other dwarves.

Romantic Love is, most simply put, infatuation. It's based on the model of longing for someone that you can never completely have, and it's this longing that then becomes mistaken for real love.

The beauty and challenge of motherhood is that as tightly as you would like to hold on to your precious one, you continually need to let go.

From the beginning, her heart and mind and body were still attached (addicted to) the jerk. Equating sex with love, she was completely convinced that she would never feel in love with her husband.

People find me because in the throes of anxiety. They're taken down by a series of questions that cause them to fear whether or not they're in the "right" relationship or if they're making a "mistake."

There's nothing like the hot-button days of Valentine's Day and proposals to simmer the myth of romantic love that permeates Western culture to the surface.

What's happening here? The mainstream model of relationships disseminates the message that "doubt means don't" and nowhere is this phrase more prominent than during an engagement.

We may have waged a war on drugs but we havent even begun to dismantle the rampant addiction to love that seeps into every crack of mainstream culture.

Take time to think about what works best for you as a couple and for your families and then jump into the pool with a clear direction and a joyful vision.

We're all aware of the sobering statistics that tell us that 50% of marriages end in divorce. We know that the modern marriage is vulnerable to a myriad of obstacles that couples must learn to navigate if their partnership is to succeed.

But there is one belief that is talked about even less than the others: that at the wedding day, the relationship itself is supposed to be at its height of ease, love, and workability.

The year after college, an inescapable shift occurred as I watched women with whom I'd just spent four years dressing up for parties, suddenly covering up their exposed mid-drifts to become brides.

Until I learned how to challenge fear's arguments, I was a helpless pawn under its rule, a victim in a dark forest. It was, in short, misery.

Fear's entire mission in life is to keep you safe from the risk of loving. It sees love as a dangerous cesspool where the invisible sea creatures lurk beneath the dark surface, waiting to snatch you into their murky waters.

My clients are always surprised, then relieved, to learn that thinking about an ex is a normal part of being engaged.

When engagement anxiety kicks in full force and causes people to nitpick their fiancé and put his or her every perceived flaw under a microscope, a downward spiral of focusing on what's missing usually begins.

We can discuss sex; we can talk about money; we can divulge the darkest secrets about our family history in blog posts and on forums. But when it comes to the fear, doubts, anxiety, and ambivalence that characterize thousands of women's engagement experience every year, we hush up.