Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.

Welcome to this week’s coaching hotline episode where I answer real questions from real listeners and coach you from afar. If you want to submit your question for consideration, go to unfuckyourbrain.com/coachinghotline, all one word, or text your email to +1 (347) 997-1784 and when you get prompted for the code word, it’s coaching hotline, all one word. Let’s get into this week’s questions.

“Why does wedding planning bring up so many negative feelings about our bodies, age, money, and sense of worth, and how can thought work help?”

So, I think that wedding planning brings it up because of socialization, right? There’s nothing inherently triggering about a wedding. In fact, it’s supposed to be a celebration of love and family and commitment and community and all these wonderful things. But it’s been completely commercialized, and really woven into all of that commercialization is so much patriarchy.

So, women are taught that their wedding day is the best day, the biggest day, the most important day of their lives. And we still get that message, even though many women have big jobs, important careers, creative work they’re doing in the world, whatever else. You’re still told that the wedding is your special day, which is not a thing that people say to grooms really, right? I don’t think that men are taught that their wedding day is the most important or best day of their life necessarily.

So, I think that it brings up these negative feelings because we’re sold this idealized version of it, and we are programmed to think that this is supposed to be kind of our experience of being a princess. And why do we want to be a princess? Again, because of socialization, right? So if you are raised with this idea that every girl’s dream is to be a princess and your wedding day is the one day that you get to be a princess essentially, then you are comparing yourself to this idealized version of what a princess basically is supposed to look like.

And so, because we’re comparing ourselves to these fantasies basically that are amplified and encouraged by the wedding industrial complex, which is just a billions upon billions upon billions of dollars of industry a year, we are being systematically encouraged to feel bad about ourselves so that we will spend a lot of money on this day on this experience.

And so, anything that’s kind of at that nexus of patriarchy and capitalism and women’s bodies gets implicated by wedding planning. So your body, your age, right, your sense of worth, how much money you want to spend. And then that’s on top of all the stuff that weddings can bring up around the non-commercialized aspects: your family relationships, your family’s expectations, your own feelings about commitment or intimacy or marriage or your partner or being the center of attention or whatever else might be going on. So it’s honestly amazing that anybody enjoys their wedding.

The way the thought work helps is really helping you break up that big knot, right, and start to really map out, okay, why am I feeling bad? What am I thinking? Where am I holding myself to an unrealistic standard, right? And I really recommend that you decide what the point of your wedding day is for you. Because society tells you that the point of your wedding day is to look a certain way, essentially, to spend a certain amount of money to have everything go a certain way, for you to physically look a certain way, for you to look a certain way in pictures even, right? We’re not even so worried about how we look in person. It’s all about how are you going to look in the pictures? How are you going to look in the video? As though it’s a movie starring you.

So, I think the most important thing is for you to decide for yourself, what is the point of my wedding? Why am I doing this? And when you can identify those values for yourself, it’s going to help you decide what you want to spend money on, what’s important to you. And it’s going to help you reorient when your brain is kind of using the opportunity of your wedding to run its favorite hits about what’s wrong with you. You are going to be able to reorient and ground yourself in the values that are guiding your wedding rather than using your wedding as an opportunity to measure yourself and find yourself wanting.