When I got engaged back in July, I was determined to understand, as much as you can ever really hope to understand, what I was getting myself into.  I don’t mean what I was getting myself into as far as my fiance goes and who he is.  No, I’m referring to my own emotional state, what getting married truly entails and means.  I wanted to be prepared and realistic for what was coming, and how I could expect it all to feel.  So I did what I always do.  I bought books on the topic and read them.  There were 2 that were particularly good: What No One Tells the Bride: Surviving the Wedding, Sex After the Honeymoon, Second Thoughts, Wedding Cake Freezer Burn, Becoming Your Mother, Screaming about Money, Screaming about In-Laws, etc. and Emotionally Engaged: A Bride’s Guide to Surviving the “Happiest” Time of Her Life . They were both helpful in different ways, and I truly believe all brides-to-be should read at least one!

One of the pieces of advice that resonated with me the most was a mention of the kooky paranoia that can often plague engaged/newlywed women.  WHAT?!? I thought when I read that part.  You mean the psychotic bouts of momentarily paralyzing paranoia I’ve been experiencing are NORMAL??!! Then I thought, why has not one of my married friends warned me about this?  After some consideration, I realized it’s probably because it’s not something anyone wants to admit, because when it happens it does not FEEL normal.  So no one talks about it.

I decided I was going to talk about the paranoia I was feeling.  I spoke with Tiffany, and discovered she has been experiencing the same thing ever since she got married.  She bought a house and got pregnant and now she is uber-paranoid for no good reason, too!  We decided a good way to get this out of our systems would be to blog about it: hence this post.  Tiffany has written a post about her problems with being paranoid lately as well, which you can check out by clicking here. {EDIT: Tiffany’s blog has suffered a tragic blow, from which we are not sure it will recover.}

So, what do I mean when I say I am crazy-paranoid these last few months?  I mean that sometimes, out of nowhere, I find myself gripped with an all-consuming fear that an awful, terrible, no-good, very-bad SOMETHING is going to happen, and then the fear passes as quickly as it came.  The result is me sitting around, scratching my head, wondering what the heck is wrong with me lately.

A few examples of this would be:

• I am utterly terrified that something bad is going to happen to Alex.  It’s a pretty non-descript fear, it can manifest itself many ways.  One time it reared its ugly head when I was waiting for him to get home from work, and resulted in me calling him every 5 minutes for about 45 minutes until he finally got near his phone and picked up, to find me nearly in tears because I truly thought he must be in a gutter somewhere.  Each time I get paranoid like that, the irrational fear involves something tragic and dramatic occurring that prevents our wedding from happening.
• I am worried much more often than I ever have been in my life that something is going to happen to one or both of my parents.  This particular irrational thought always involves something that makes one of them miss my wedding, and it is always for a tragic and dramatic reason.  For example, my dad recently had to go on a business trip to Texas.  I was SO SCARED something was going to happen to that plane.  And I’m never worried about things happening to planes, I’m one of those people who insists loudly that the chances of something going horrifically wrong in the air are much lower than something going horrifically wrong with a car on the ground.
• I’m also pretty paranoid something is going to happen to the WORLD, and that it will prevent me from being able to marry Alex.  I mean big things, like gravity will cease to exist and we will all go flying off into space, or a black hole will lumber into the solar system and disrupt planetary orbits, sending Earth hurling into the vacuum of interstellar space.

Obviously these are all doom-and-gloom, ridiculously improbable scenarios.  I’ve had this newfound paranoia manifest itself on smaller scales, though.  The biggest place I’ve noticed it is when it comes to driving.  It used to be that driving didn’t phase me at all.  I did it all the time, over long distances.  Now I dread being behind the wheel, because I have gotten cautious to the point of OVER cautious when it comes to driving.  I have gotten overwhelmingly nervous more times than I can count that someone was about to hit me.

Now, this may all sound like I need professional help.  But I think what’s important to realize is that NONE of these little instances of paranoia lasted for more than fifteen or twenty seconds – well, none except that time I got really freaked out and couldn’t stop calling Alex.  I always get a grip on myself and realize everything is fine, and that there is no point getting worked up over things that MIGHT happen, and that would happen regardless of anything I could do to stop them.  If a black hole is heading our way, I don’t think me sweating bullets over it is going to make a difference!

According to my books, this paranoia thing is actually normal.  I think the psychology behind it says something like this: newly engaged/wed women are so happy and everything feels like such a fairy tale to them, that sometimes it can get scary when you realize how perfect everything feels.  The result?  Being terrified that something bad will happen to take your happiness away, because after all, you’ve never gotten to experience a happy ending before now, have you?

It really made me feel better to realize that a) my mini-episodes of paranoia don’t necessarily mean something is wrong with me, and b) other people have experienced this issue.  So I’m curious, if Tiffany and I have both noticed this, has anyone else?  If you’re willing to share, please do!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I are calling ‘collective blogging.’ To refresh everyone’s memory, we will both be writing blog entries on the same topic as an exercise to see how different our thought processes and memories are. Hopefully it will be good practice for an idea we have for NaNoWriMo 2009 – to write the same novel, but separately.

Today’s Topic: Thoughts and Memories on the First Week of Being Engaged

A major milestone was reached for me since I last posted on my blog.  I am now engaged!  Since Whitney and I can now say we both have experienced the first week of betrothal, we decided to make that the topic of this collective blog post.

You know how in school, when you’re writing those God-awful essays for college entrance or scholarship contests, they like to ask you to pick one word to describe yourself or an experience and then explain why you chose that word?  Well, the only word I can think of to sum up the experience of the first week of being an engaged person is this: surreal.   I definitely never thought I would get married (you can ask any of my friends, they will back me up on that), and I definitely never thought I would be getting married to Alex.  He is definitely everything I never knew I always wanted.  And I hate to say this, because I think it probably sounds awful, but I can only remember the proposal in bits and pieces.  I know what we did and what he said before it, and after it, but the actual proposal is a bit hazy.  Alex feels the same way; people ask him what he said and he can’t remember!  It’s like someone else’s life to both of us right now.

On top of the feeling that I’ve been removed from my body, there is the realization that one of my closest friends was dead-on balls accurate about one thing: people who are normally rational human beings can become totally crazy when you announce a wedding.  Demands get made that you didn’t see coming.  Things get blown out of proportion that you never would have thought were a big deal to someone.  And then there are the politics of weddings – the guest list, the budget, the wedding party.  And it’s only the first week!  Then there are the questions that have been asked, more than once, by many people, that I didn’t realize you have to be prepared to answer right away.  For example, many people have asked us if I cried when he proposed, or if he cried when he proposed.  To me this is weird, because I’m not really a crier and neither is Alex.  Were we supposed to cry?  Is there something wrong with us because we didn’t?  Obviously this is not as strange a question as I think it is because many people have asked it, but it sure threw me off!  I’ve also been asked many times, in some cases the day after the proposal, if we’d set a date yet.  This one I understand, and it’s a logical question to ask a newly engaged couple, but still!  The other one that threw me off the first time I got it was whether or not I have decided on colors for the wedding.  Again, now that I’ve gotten the question a bunch of times and thought about the reasons, I understand this question.  But it’s pretty overwhelming at first!  (Actually, everything is overwhelming at first…)

And then we come to the ring.  I love my ring.  It’s beautiful and I am so proud of the way Alex put it together.  I expected people to want to see it.  I expected myself to look at it a lot.  I did NOT expect that I would be as paranoid as I am about having something happen to it.  Some things are obvious, like don’t wear it if you’re cleaning or doing loads of dishes.  Other things I struggled with at first, and am still struggling with, like hand washing, and showering, and sleeping with it on.  I work in a lab, and it never once occurred to me before I was engaged that you have to decide whether or not you want to wear your ring at work, because lab gloves don’t exactly fit over the ring.  I wear mine, and got bigger gloves, for the record.

So my general impression of being engaged, a little over one week in, is that it’s a lot to take in, and I still haven’t fully absorbed it all!

If you want to read Whitney’s take on her first week of being engaged, you can read it here.

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.