Alexis had her wedding dress. She’d put down the deposits for the venue and caterer. She and her fiancé had posed for engagement photos, their bodies intertwined, her eyelashes fluttering against his nose. They had even asked a ring bearer and a flower girl to participate in their wedding. Three hundred save-the-dates sat sealed, stamped, and addressed, waiting to be mailed. And then, five months into their engagement, Alexis called off the wedding. Her fiancé, she felt, had crossed a “nonnegotiable” line.
“I thought about my future children and my self-respect,” she tells Glamour. “How much do I love myself? How much am I willing to take?” Months later, Alexis and her ex still owe more than $10,000 on a wedding that never happened. “But it’s cheaper than a divorce.”
This cool confidence and unwavering sense of self is lacking in the characters in The Drama, out this week. Just a few days before their wedding, Emma (Zendaya) tells her fiancé Charlie (Robert Pattinson) a secret about her past that is so brutal and repugnant, it changes the way he sees her. The great horror in The Drama is not only Emma’s history; it’s also Charlie’s realization that he is marrying someone he doesn’t really know.
The deciding factor in whether these two people will get married, the movie suggests, is not necessarily love or the ability to work through conflict. They seem to be powerless in the face of wedding planning. They have already invested in dance classes, posed at their pre-wedding photo shoot, and paid for three-foot floral arrangements, Champagne toast, and Chiavari chairs. Their wedding is a boulder rolling away from them, undermining the possibility of hard conversations about whether now is really the best time to become bound in the eyes of the state.
The new Netflix series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, produced by the creators of Stranger Things, also treats the engagement period as a horror show. (To market the show, Netflix is asking nearlyweds to enter a contest to win a “$10,000 fund to help you walk away.”) Both The Drama and Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen point to an uncomfortable problem—it’s hard calling off a wedding when it feels like getting married has become your identity.
Plenty of women do have these hard conversations with their partners. They wrench themselves away from the vision of a perfect day and start on a path toward a new life. Many women have winkingly rebranded divorce as a sexy lifestyle choice: Reformation recently dropped a Divorce Collection, divorce memoirs by women writers are everywhere, and online creators praise the body-and-spirit glow up of the “divorce effect.”
Calling off a wedding deserves the same treatment. This is the ultimate anti-people-pleaser move, the final boss in choosing yourself. It is an act of bravery to change your mind. Calling off an engagement or a wedding means prioritizing your long-term happiness and wellness over fears of other people’s judgment. It is painful, and heartbreaking, and powerful. It means realizing that it is okay to decide to not pledge your eternal love to another person, even though your parents’ friends already have room reservations at a Hilton. It means being okay with creating a lot of intrigue for your Instagram followers.
Four women who made this hard choice told Glamour why they did it—and how they’re doing now.
“I was constantly trying to convince myself, ‘Love is enough,’ but I knew it wasn’t.”
Jo, now 31, speaks about her ex-fiancé more kindly than some people speak about their current partners. He is an “amazing person,” she tells Glamour. They had chemistry and shared values. They were in love.
And still, months into their engagement, Jo was having nightmares—dreams about settling. Her family wasn’t excited about the relationship. She and her fiancé argued; they even got into a conflict on the day they went ring shopping. Jo found herself spiraling into anxious thoughts of the future, imagining having to disentangle 10 years down the line, with kids and a shared life.
“He loves me so well,” Jo says she thought at the time. “I don’t know if I’m ever going to experience this again.” Now, in retrospect, she realizes, “I was constantly trying to convince myself, ‘Love is enough, love is enough,’ but I knew it wasn’t.”
Jo journaled about her fears. She spoke to a mentor. Among other things, if she stayed in the relationship, she would probably have given up her dreams of going to graduate school in order to support his education. Jo and her fiancé finally had an honest, painful conversation, during which they agreed to call off their engagement.
“I feel so ashamed,” she told a friend at the time, crying. There were two sources of shame. First, the feeling of failure, given the belief that marriage was the pinnacle of success in a relationship. Second, the shame that she had stayed so long in a doomed relationship. Also, she missed her ex. “There’s that aspect of heartbreak whether you’re the one to call it off or not,” she says.
Jo’s breakup was more than three years ago. She’s now in graduate school and on the way to getting her degree as a therapist. She was able to date again. “I think, in my heart, I held on to the relationship because I didn’t want to be alone,” she says.
She’s single and still sometimes wonders, “Am I ever going to find someone again? Would it have been better to settle?” Breaking off her engagement was undeniably painful. But three years later, Jo’s life is filled with possibility before her. She doesn’t have regrets.
“It’s just embarrassing to call something off.”
When Omika, now 32, got engaged, she and her fiancé marked the occasion with a small ceremony for friends and family.
“I felt so celebrated and so loved,” she says. “I do think that the reason that so many people equate the engagement or the marriage with lasting happiness is because of how we celebrate those milestones.”
A year later Omika called off the engagement, moved to another state, and started a new job. Part of what made the decision so difficult, she says, was the fear of what other people would think and the worry that she was too old to start over.
“I have to continue with this no matter what,” she thought of her relationship at the time, “because that’s just what people do.” Omika’s Indian-American community tends to exalt marriage and stigmatize divorce, she tells Glamour. But when she announced the end of her engagement, nobody shamed her. “In fact, they wanted me to feel empowered and do what was right for my future.”
In the nine months since she ended her engagement, Omika has tried to reflect on why it was so hard to end a relationship that wasn’t working. “I felt like, I made this promise and told everyone about it, and it’s just embarrassing to call something off like this,” she says. “Even though there was nobody telling me that, I felt like I had absorbed that messaging my whole life.”
The wedding industry markets almost exclusively toward women, she notes. “I’m not around men who are dreaming of their big day or planning it for years in advance in the same way that women in my life are.”
“I think women—a lot more so than men—are tied to these timelines that we create that are kind of artificial,” she adds. “Sure, there are reasons behind these timelines, but you want to question your own sunk-cost fallacy.”
When she called off her wedding, she remembers thinking, My life is over.
“I feel completely fine now,” she says. “I’m 32 and living in a city that I love, living a life that I really enjoy. I can’t even believe that I was so conditioned to feel like my time was running out.”
“You really don’t know your own strength until you have to use it to get through something so excruciating.”
When Rebekah Lipsky was first engaged, the closest she had ever been to a person who called off a wedding was watching a Bachelorette contestant on screen. She remembers feeling “unbelievably isolated in my doubts,” wondering, “Is this even a decision I can make?” She had already signed vendor contracts, and her friends had purchased plane tickets for the bachelorette party.
Four years later Rebekah is happily engaged to a new person and getting married in a few months. She’s also a licensed therapist who specifically counsels women who have called off their engagements. “In vows you always hear, ‘For better or for worse, in sickness and in health,’” she says. She tells her clients, “We can still have conditions on what our ‘for worse’ is.”
Canceling a wedding, “there are so many layers of loss,” Rebekah says. In her case, she still loved her fiancé. “I truly felt like I was dying because my heart was in so much pain.” Then there is the loss of the months of celebration, the plans to gather with people you love, to feel beautiful and loved.
“It feels like you are taking this huge exciting goal away from yourself,” she says. It can also feel like you are taking those things away from others, particularly parents and grandparents. “I remember feeling a lot of guilt.” She had to send an email to her loved ones informing them that the wedding was off.
At the time Rebekah felt like a failure. Today she says she wants other women to understand that calling off a wedding is not a failure and can be empowering.
“I know this is cliché, but it is true—it’s just the idea of choosing yourself,” she says. She cautions, “That doesn’t mean that anybody who stays doesn’t love themselves, or doesn’t respect themselves. It really is so hard, quite frankly.”
The feeling of empowerment comes from knowing, “Well, at the end of the day I am always going to do right by myself,” she says, “to the point where I was willing to upend my life and create so much pain for myself.”
In therapy sessions with women who are dealing with broken engagement, Rebekah says she sees trust issues. Sometimes the client has lost trust in their partner, but almost always they have lost trust in themselves. She works with these clients to hisse attention to their own values, their sense of their own power, and the qualities they want in their lives and future partnerships. They grieve milestones, such as the wedding date and the anniversary of the engagement. They celebrate their resilience.
“You really don’t know your own strength until you have to use it to get through something so excruciating,” she says.
After Alexis got engaged, she planned an elaborate brunch to ask 10 women to be her bridesmaids. The date of the brunch fell two weeks after Alexis called off her engagement. All 10 women showed up, wearing black. Alexis wore white and posed next to a Canva-made sign, dripping in white roses, that announced in looping cursive, “Thank God Alexis Didn’t Marry Him.”
She captioned the photos, “Change of plans.”
