The more Amanda Cohen and her fiance planned their wedding, the more their relationship unraveled. And it wasn’t all that wonderful to begin with.
“Right after we got engaged, I had a nagging feeling it might not be right,” says Cohen, 26, a Chicago marketing and advertising specialist. “But, then I got wrapped up in the wedding planning.”
On Sept. 9, 2001, one year after becoming engaged, and eight months before the wedding date, Cohen knew the end was coming. She talked to her parents and friends that Sunday.
“I said to them, `What if I have to break off this engagement?’ They said, `Don’t worry, we’ll be there for you,'” she recalls. “My parents said, `If you need to call it off, it’s the right thing to do, we’re behind you and we’ll help you.'”
That night, Amanda Cohen’s fiance called off their wedding.
Every year in the U.S., about 500,000, or 20 percent, of all engagements and weddings are called off, according to Rachel Safier, author of “There Goes the Bride: Making Up Your Mind, Calling It Off & Moving On” (Jossey-Bass, $14.95).
The almost brides, as she terms them, often know they don’t belong with their fiances long before they or their betrothed call off the wedding, but initially resist canceling because “there’s more of a stigma attached to calling off a wedding than to getting a divorce,” Safier says.
Amanda Cohen’s family gave her their full support.
Because Cohen’s fiance asked her to move out of his apartment the evening of Sept. 9, 2001, she stayed with a friend that night. The next day, Cohen’s mother flew from Washington, D.C., to Chicago to help her daughter find an apartment she could move into the next day.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Amanda Cohen and her mother found themselves dealing not only with moving Cohen into her new apartment, and buying furnishings, but also with the devastation of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Meanwhile, her father handled the logistics of undoing the wedding planning.
Because of 9/11, “people were in a giving and understanding mood,” says Cohen, “so he got all his deposits back.” The only thing they lost money on was the wedding dress, which had already been ordered.
“I’m almost glad we broke our engagement at that time,” Cohen says. “Because 9/11 gave me a lot of perspective on what’s really important.”
While Cohen’s break-up happened immediately before an event of life-and-death proportions, Julie Swenson’s engagement took place immediately after one.
The 35-year-old Minneapolis publicist and her boyfriend had dated for almost five years, and broke up and got back together many times before their impulsive engagement in November 2000.
“We were caught on this little boat during a monsoon on vacation in Thailand,” Swenson recalls. “We made it back on shore and he proposed to me.”
Swenson says that, looking back, she had been blinded by the romance of a proposal on a storm-lashed beach, a fairy tale moment that could hardly remedy their incompatibilities.
She began to have doubts right away, and they grew worse as the couple planned their wedding.
Everything was planned, except finalizing the music and the menu, when her fiance broke off their engagement in April 2001, seven months before their wedding date, and just hours after she had finished addressing their engagement party invitations.
She had put a $500 deposit on her $2,000 wedding gown, but her fiance paid her back and paid the $1,500 due on the gown. She took it to a consignment shop.
Fortunately, Swenson’s fiance’s family was paying for the wedding, and a wedding coordinator handled canceling all of the wedding plans.
Rachel Safier suggests that almost brides not working with a wedding coordinator speak to caterers, florists, and others they’ve contracted with, rather than having a family member handle the cancellations for them.
“Make a personal pitch,” she says. “They’ll try to work with you when they know your story,” and you may not end up losing all of your deposits.
Keeping the ring, says Safier, is always a big no-no. In “There Goes the Bride,” she cites etiquette expert Miss Manners regarding the engagement ring, and also reminds almost brides that depending upon where they live, state law may prohibit them from keeping the ring.
Courtney Miller, 23, a Sacramento graduate student, kept her ring after she canceled her June 2002 wedding in December 2001, but that was “because I was paying for it,” she explains. She ended up selling it for “a fraction of the cost.”
The wedding would’ve been held at her fiance’s mother’s home, outside by a beautiful pond, but Miller hadn’t planned everything yet, a symptom, she believes, of her mixed emotions about marrying her fiance.
“I called off the wedding the day before I was supposed to put a deposit on the music. I’d looked at invitations, but hadn’t ordered yet. I’d registered [for gifts] and had to cancel that,” she says. “But the store’s bridal registry people didn’t understand at first. They thought there was something wrong with the service.”
Miller had bought her wedding gown, and ended up lending it to a friend, who subsequently returned it. Miller still has the gown and hasn’t decided what to do with it.
She wasn’t that bothered by the logistics of canceling the wedding, or the cost, because she says that when she broke the engagement, “I felt immediately that I made the right decision and haven’t changed my mind.”
Cohen feels the same way, and thinks about what would have happened if she had married her fiance.
“I joke that I need to send him a thank-you note now,” she says. “Because right now I wouldn’t be someone with a broken engagement, I’d be someone who’s divorced.”
