Tossing invites in the trash isn’t your ONLY option.
The trees are growing leaves. The flowers are blooming. You can’t escape it no matter how much you want to right now… It’s wedding season and the invitations have started arriving.
Your friends deserve happiness and you wish them well, but why the crap do they need to send you an invitation to their flipping wedding?
Don’t they know that just seeing their invitation sends you into a tail spin? It’s like they’re purposely rubbing salt into your divorce wound. Don’t they realize their invitation is just another reminder of your failure?
Honestly, no, they don’t understand your pain. Unless you’ve been through a divorce, you don’t get it. So the invitations are still going to come. And you need a way to deal with them a little better than just throwing them away and grabbing a pint of Häagen-Dazs, a bottle of wine and/or Tinder.
Here are 4 ways you can cope with the stress of weddings during your divorce:
1. You can choose to decline the invitation.
If going to a wedding is too painful for you, that’s OK. Divorce grief is a big deal. There’s no reason to put yourself into a situation that will undermine your healing. You have to take care of you first. Your friends will understand.
2. Take another friend along as your +1.
If your only reservation about attending the wedding is showing up alone, then, by all means, bring someone with you. Ask your best friend, your cousin or sibling to go with you. (Despite Debra Messing’s experience in The Wedding Date, please don’t hire someone to go with you as your date!)
3. Just go to the wedding solo and enjoy yourself!
If you want to attend, but feel uncertain of what it will be like, then go. Healing from divorce requires courage. You’re going to try lots of things that might be a little uncomfortable. And who knows, you might be surprised at how much fun you can have hanging out with your friends without your divorce being the focus of attention.
4. Keep sending those invites straight to the garbage.
It’s pretty normal to isolate yourself early in the divorce process. And ignoring what’s going on in the rest of the world can work when your divorce is new because you’ve already got more than enough on your plate while trying to make sense of what’s going on.
However, if you’re beyond the initial stages of accepting your divorce, then you need to ask yourself if you’re wallowing in self-pity before tossing another invitation without opening it.
