Post-wedding Blues among Newlywed Women - Essay Example

Some brides experience the intercourse as slightly discomforting and unsatisfying. Rather than accepting that this is a usual, normal experience that will eventually go away through repetition, she could sustain a negative form of fear or anxiety that will ruin the marriage. This usually results in depression. This essay argues that postnuptial depression or post-wedding blues among newlywed women is very real and common. Postnuptial depression is a widespread but rarely studied issue. Signs involve buying Martha Steward Weddings in secret, attending bridal shows simply to know the current trend in the market, and trying to make an appointment with the wedding planner because she misses her.

Postnuptial depression may not be classified as a clinical finding, yet it has moved into the marriage dictionary in recent years, and newlywed women will attest to its reality. Depression normally happens soon after the wedding, according to psychiatrists, as newlywed women start realizing that dreams of how their relationship or spouse will change after the wedding are too idealistic. Worse, as soon as the excitement of the wedding dries out, couples are forced to abandon their deeply treasured and often enduring ‘bride and groom’ limelight and simply deal with reality.

A San Francisco psychologist, Dr. Michelle Gannon, reports there has been an increase recently in the number of newlyweds who seek help for their postnuptial depression. According to psychiatrists, most people feel a certain extent of disillusionment after the wedding, but 5 to 10 per cent of newlywed couples experience severe enough regret, disappointment, or unhappiness to compel them to look for professional counseling. The medical head of the Moonview Sanctuary in California, Dr. Terry Eagan, refers to post-wedding blues as the undisclosed sorrow—women who suffer from it are usually quite ashamed to disclose it to anyone.

One newlywed woman admitted that “A lot of my friends had experienced it. It was just hard for us to admit that we were happy in our marriages and yet so indescribably sad on some level.” 

According to therapists, the alleged honeymoon period actually is not. Yet numerous couples fall into the erroneous idea that when they begin fighting over time, money, or sex—problems that every married couple encounters—it can appear disastrous. Gannon says she always explains to her patients the fallacy behind this belief. She usually says to them that fighting or troubles in marriage are normal. Even couples who lived together prior to marriage and who have seemingly moderated their expectations and resolved their minor differences are still vulnerable to postnuptial depression. As stated by Gannon, “People who have been living together think they’re going to feel something different once they’re married.” However, the truth is there is no fairylike or supernatural change that accompanies a wedding.

Indeed, if anything becomes different after the wedding, it could be the biological aspects of the newlyweds—which could simply aggravate postnuptial depression. When individuals are freshly infatuated—or experience a reawakening of love immediately after becoming engaged—their bodies produce and discharge higher quantities of the happy hormones oxytocin and dopamine, which encourage love and attachment; however, as the relationship progresses, the quantities of these hormones decline. This partly explains post-wedding blues among newlywed women. For numerous couples, it is not about quarreling or sex; in spite of good communication and satisfying sex life, they still feel lost. The reason could be that after weeks or months preoccupied with wedding preparations and receiving a great deal of attention from different people, the abrupt return to reality can be an astonishment.