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 The Dating Doctor
The Dating Doctor, Serena Mackesy, brings her hard-won dating wisdom to bear on your problems. You can drop Serena a line about your own dating conundrums and catch up with her words of wisdom here every week. Read her latest advice here.
What Is It About Weddings?
November 6, 2006
Tony writes:
I never used to believe in things like demonic possession, but ever since we got engaged it's like an evil spirit has come in and taken over my fiancée's body. Where there was once a sweet-tempered, calm woman who dealt with the stresses of a demanding job - as, ironically enough, a party organizer - without turning a hair, I now find myself engaged to a howling banshee. Pretty much every day is punctuated by screams of "What do you MEAN you don't mind what sort of centerpieces we have? What kind of a bastard ARE you?" and "Well, I might as well not bother! It's not like you care!" She's called the whole thing off twice, though only for 24 hours at a time. I know this isn't an uncommon thing - consulting friends, male and female, they all seem to have come across it before - but what the hell is going on? What is it about weddings that seems to turn women into raving lunatics?
This does seem to be a genuine, and widespread, phenomenon. Every now and then womankind does have a remarkable capacity to play right up to the gender stereotypes we all complain about. And it's not, I think, particularly related to the fact that women take on the majority of the burden of organizing weddings - one of the most fraught, tear-smeared, regular-breakup wedding organizing I have experienced was a same-sex one with two sets of bridal hysteria to contend with. What it does have to do with, though, is possibly the nature of how men and women make decisions. Men are, basically, better at having faith in their choices once they're made; they adjust, close off the alternatives in their minds and just get one with the circumstances at hand.
Women, on the other hand, are far more prone to questioning their decisions. They fret after the event and tend to try to leave possible escape routes, or at the very least keep the potential for later adaptation in mind. As a consequence, despite the fact that women are legendarily keener on marriage and commitment than men, the impact of their spousal choice is considerably greater once it's done. Possibly this is a side-effect of the female urge to find the best possible chances for genetic survival, possibly it's cultural, possibly it's a bit of both, but certainly, weddings, like funerals, provide excellent displacement activities for brains that need time to adjust to huge chances in circumstance.
Look, the main thing to remember is that every minute she spends panicking about seating or the silver service is one less minute she has to spend panicking about marrying you. It will die down. The woman you committed to will come back. In the meantime, do your best to be helpful (really, it'll help - and score you points even if she does think you've done it wrong and does it all over again) and keep your ears pricked. A woman in a state of active frenzy about a wedding is still keen to go through with it. If she goes quiet about it, though, and stops sounding off about petty detail, that's when you need to start worrying...
Read Serena's latest advice here.
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