Wedding vs. Marriage

Here's a wedding story that will help us to all feel more smug about judging those IT'S MY WEDDING!!! people.

Narcissists want weddings, not marriage.

...It is our own entitlement that causes us to obsess over a one-day event. While couples are waiting to get married until their late 20s and early 30s, they may rush into the engagement and wedding planning, McWade said."We all have a degree of narcissism," McWade said. "It can be triggered by an event like this; then people get very warped."

Not every wedding turns into a narcissistic circus, and they aren't all about the expense.

"The wedding is, on the one hand, a healthy way of making a public commitment to each other and acknowledging that you're part of a web of family and friends that helps to nourish the relationship," said Stephen Fabick, a consulting psychologist who specializes in conflict resolution. "But on the other hand, it preps like a cancer, where the focus is on the show and not the long-term or reality of the relationship."

crazy bitch hat

"The emphasis today is largely on the wedding and not on the marriage," she said. "Because you're getting married, people think you're entitled to opulence." And when the wedding becomes about "me" instead of "we" or "her big day" and not "our big day," it can be a warning sign that perhaps this is a union best avoided.

Surviving the task of planning a wedding together and ultimately living together for years and years means being able to support each other during basic decisions or rough patches. Couples who have dated for less than a year often can't even ride out small conflicts or navigate differences, McWade said.

After sitting with couples through countless meetings with lawyers as they face down the disappointment of divorce, McWade has a few tips for entering into a marriage that works. Namely, she doesn't believe that people should become engaged before a year of dating.

"You should know that person for a year and not just get caught up in the hormones, because a lot of the attraction is very physical, but that does not mean that people are able to live together for the rest of their lives,"

Second only to addiction, McWade claims, narcissism is the ultimate relationship killer and a significant factor in many of the divorce cases she has witnessed.

Narcissists lack self-esteem and live in an internal world, one that they can attract another person to and form a relationship around because they can read other people and manipulate them. It becomes a parasitic relationship, with all of the affection going to the narcissist, McWade said.

"The best type of relationship is one where people are really independent on their own, and then they get together to share their experiences and love for each other," she said. "That they have full lives on both sides and that both people are pretty balanced on each side, and to be able to maintain that for a year -- that's the best."

This article was written in response to the Kardashian divorce news that shocked the world as much as blue skies and green grass.