How Weddings and Marriage Affect Your Mental Health
What’s one word you don’t want to describe your marriage and wedding with? There are many answers to this question, but our response is “draining.”
Planning a wedding, taking care of finances, growing relationships with your in-laws, and other factors can make weddings and marriage draining — and constantly being drained can affect your mental health and prevent you from having a healthy, happy marriage.
Wedding planning, the wedding itself, and the marriage can impact a couple’s mental health. Each of these things is its own stressor, and trying to cope with that stress can lead to a failed relationship.
With that being said, if you can approach wedding planning practically, not put so much pressure on the wedding, and focus on the commitment it takes to lead a strong marriage, your mental health will benefit.
Before we provide you tips on minimizing the stress and maximizing the joy of weddings and marriage, let’s talk about how weddings and marriage can affect your mental health.
How Weddings and Marriage Can Affect Your Mental Health
First, weddings are stressful. Marriage is stressful. Simply trying to cope with the amount of stress that arises in the planning stage, the actual wedding, and the union after that can affect your mental health.
For example, people emotionally abandon their marriages, intentionally and unintentionally, when dealing with stress, sadness, pain, and other challenges in life.
Also, weddings can be hard on your mental health because not only are they expensive, but they can also make people compare their weddings and relationships to others. This can lead to overspending and over-extending yourself just to keep up with everyone else.
Here are two other ways weddings and marriage can affect your mental health:
Challenges navigating hormonal and emotional triggers
Marriages and weddings can do a number on your emotions. Emotional pressure can be hard to manage, from dealing with wedding planning stressors to all of the compromise and commitment it takes to be married.
Also, it isn’t talked about enough, but marriage can affect your hormones. For example, this study explores the link between falling testosterone levels and married men. Low testosterone can result in:
- Low energy
- Decreased sex drive
- Depression
- Low endurance
- Fatigue
- Irritability
- Reduced motivation
These effects can be long-term and inhibit one’s ability to have a healthy relationship and marriage. So, it’s essential to plan for the hormonal and emotional challenges you’ll face when it’s time for your wedding and marriage.
The financial obligation
The financial pressure can be an incredible burden for any couple, causing many not to walk down the aisle. Also, finances are the leading cause of many divorces.
So, you must stay within a comfortable budget when wedding planning and take that budgeting experience into your marriage so that you can remain focused on growing a healthy relationship instead of staying afloat financially.
Now, let’s minimize the stress and maximize the joy of your wedding and marriage.
How to Minimize the Stress and Maximize the Joy of Weddings and Marriage
Don’t let stress suck the joy out of your wedding and marriage. Minimize it and maximize the pleasure of your wedding and marriage by:
Create a wedding budget
You must develop healthy financial habits as a couple so that financial strain doesn’t tear you apart, starting with a wedding budget.
Do the following to create a wedding budget:
- Conduct a financial audit and determine what you can afford for your wedding
- Determine your wedding vision with your new budget in mind
- Track your spending
- Find ways to save on your wedding
- Put some money aside for unexpected expenses
Another tip is to change the way you think about weddings and marriage.
Grow your mindset
Having a healthy perspective on weddings and marriage is a must for minimal stress and maximum joy in both. For starters, a wedding is one event in your life. A marriage is, or at least we hope, for a lifetime. So, nurturing your relationship is far more critical than neglecting it to plan a wedding.
Grow your mindset about the importance of weddings and the meaning of marriage by:
- Learning about what a wedding symbolizes
- Learning the ins and outs of a successful marriage
- Reading stories about disastrous weddings that still led to long-term healthy marriages and vice versa
- Exploring courthouse weddings and couples that went this route
Also, be sure you’re marrying the right person for the right reasons.
Marry for the right reasons
When you marry for the right reasons, you’re more likely to stay committed to the marriage when times get tough. Marrying the right person is also important because when wedding planning gets crazy, or the wedding doesn’t go as planned, or when marriage just gets overwhelming, they’ll be there to get you through it.
Everyone has a different perspective on the right reasons for getting married and how to determine if the person you want to marry is the one. But we can say that the following reasons shouldn’t be the primary reasons you’re getting married:
- Financial security
- Sexual attraction
- Because you’ve been with someone for a long time
- Because you want a wedding
- To appease family or friends
- For the children
Some of the above reasons, like financial security and the children, are reasonable grounds for getting married in some respect. However, they should be coupled with the unconditional, unwavering love you have for your partner, how safe they make you feel, the loyalty between you both, and other meaningful reasons for marriage.
Conclusion
Weddings and marriage can affect your mental health. Whether that effect is negative or positive is up to you and your spouse. Do everything you can to minimize the stress of your wedding and maximize the joy of marriage, including creating a wedding budget, adjusting your mindset, and marrying for the right reasons.
Guest post by Luke Smith.
