The F word - (fiancee) - by Kelly Bare - 3/07

[Smartmarriages]

The F Word: A Fiancée Shares Her Story, From "I Will" to "I Do"
Kelly Bare

I'm so proud of this one. Kelly Bare attended the Smart Marriages conference
as a journalist from Tango Magazine and she "got it" so well that she then
attended THREE marriage education classes (Pairs, RE, MST) and with her
fiancee/now husband, Jonathan. She weaves the wisdom of many of our experts
into her book and makes it not just entertaining but user-friendly and
digestible.  Buy it for anyone you know that is entering the engagement
tunnel. - diane 

Click here to order for only $11 and get Kelly to sign it in Denver:
http://www.smartmarriages.com/booklist.html

> She uses that goofy incident as a springboard for a serious issue: Infidelity.
> She talks to relationship experts, does research. She talks about the
> importance of premarital education. She and her fiancé attended 40 hours worth
> of such classes, and it helped them learn how to communicate and see the
> other’s point of view.

F stands for the frazzled, frustrated, freaked-out fiancee
BY COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star
Mar 05, 2007 

Kelly Bare has a photo of herself on her wedding day. She thinks it says a
lot about the whole engagement process. It’s morning. She’s lying on the
sloping lawn of the Lied Lodge in Nebraska City, trying to perform yoga
stretches with some of her wedding guests. But she can’t. Instead of an
eagle pose, she says, she’s in “corpse pose.”

The guests politely pretend not to notice.

She’d had a little too much fun at the rehearsal dinner the previous night
and was hungover. She had a headache.
But something else was making her sick – stage fright, for the first time in
her life. The thought of being center stage in a few hours with 200 pairs of
eyes on her was something she hadn’t really processed until the morning of
her wedding.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, was it?

Her mom, seeing her sad state, walked over and told her three magic words:

Get some sleep.

One word. “The F Word.”

Fiancée.

Bare, a 1994 Lincoln Southeast graduate and former BackPage columnist who’s
now a writer in New York City — and a happy newlywed — has written a book
about the emotional roller coaster leading up to her wedding day.

“The F Word: A Fiancée Shares Her Story From ‘I Will’ to ‘I Do’” is frank.
It’s funny. It’s filled with tips she learned, sometimes the hard way, like
on her wedding day (don’t drink too much the night before), so other women
can be prepared for the up-and-down ride.

And know they’re not the only ones feeling like Alice in Wonderland.

“It’s not easy to merge your life with someone else’s,” the 30-year-old says
in a phone interview from New York. “It’s almost like people create a
revisionist history about their engagements, because it’s such a stressful
time, such a unique time. It’s often hard to get your head around it, but
once you come out the other side you go, ‘Oh, that was nice.’

“But when you’re really in it, it’s not easy. … I was trying to be
analytical, with a rawness and honesty I don’t think is out there.”

And she hopes her book is entertaining, too.

In a chapter called “Hot for Classmate,” she and her fiancé go to a
relationships class. She later gets an e-mail from a guy in the class – a
guy who’d been there with his girlfriend – asking if Bare would go out with
him, “if the attraction was mutual.”

She uses that goofy incident as a springboard for a serious issue:
Infidelity. She talks to relationship experts, does research. She talks
about the importance of premarital education. She and her fiancé attended 40
hours worth of such classes, and it helped them learn how to communicate and
see the other’s point of view.

The book is told in real time – through journal entries and essays she wrote
over the course of her yearlong engagement to Jonathan Cohen, a man she
discovered, after moving into his 600-square-foot studio apartment not long
after “I Will,” had a thing for wastebaskets. He had five of them.

I don’t even want to think about the feng shui ramifications – all I know is
that I couldn’t go anywhere without tripping over a barrel of trash, and it
was annoying. He liked the convenience, and the basketball practice: You
could basically throw something away from any spot in the apartment. …

She negotiated it down to three.

I suppose the move was just the beginning of a long, perhaps endless,
negotiation. …

The book begins with Jonathan’s proposal one rainy Saturday morning in bed.
She’s staring at the back of his head thinking how happy she is with him
when he rolls over, yawns and pops the question, saying he’d been thinking
how happy he is with her. He pulls a black box from the pocket of his pants.

She writes of how they laugh and cry and don’t even open the box for a long
time, how it was perfect, very organic, very them … the sheer joy of the
moment …

And then:

Are you sitting there making little “gag me” motions with your finger?
Seriously, you can admit it. No offense taken. It’s a little sickening to
me, even, to read it all spelled out like that …

She writes of mine fields she emerged from unscathed, such as how she
wrestled with how best to tell her longtime ex-boyfriend about the
engagement. She decides to do this over lunch, not via e-mail or phone or
the grapevine of mutual friends.

She writes of the pressure to have a baby before her eggs get too old, like
the older women she saw one night at a women’s networking group. They’re
grilling the night’s speaker, an egg-freezing expert who tells them the
truth about their old eggs. One woman throws up her hands: “Why didn’t my
gynecologist tell me any of this?”

She writes about the expectations of two sets of parents. (Her mom, Nancy,
is a social worker with Lincoln Public Schools; her dad is chief of staff to
Gov. Dave Heineman.) Her family is Christian; Jonathan’s is Jewish. His
family wants the future kids to be raised Jewish; she can’t imagine not
celebrating Christmas.

Fights. Sex. Ambivalence. Frustration. Religion.

Bare says “The F Word” is about subjects you don’t normally read in bridal
magazines and on bridal Web sites, which tend to talk about the material
trappings of the wedding day like the dress and the ceremony and the
honeymoon hotspots.

She also writes of her happiness — and she tried to do it all, she says,
with a spirit of love.

She made sure Jonathan approved every single word.

“I wasn’t willing to bare it all. So maybe it doesn’t make for the world’s
juiciest memoir. But there’s still enough juice in there for people. I think
the juice comes from being honest about all the feelings.

”It’s like you fell down the rabbit hole, like Alice in Wonderland. You take
a step and plummet into this world you didn’t know existed and didn’t know
how you were going to feel.”

Like an eagle at times. But like a corpse at times, too.

So did she use the “F-word” a lot while visiting this strange world?

She laughs.

“I’m sure I did. But I tried to censor my own profanity.”

--------------------
10 tips for surviving your engagement”

1. After you get engaged, put a moratorium on planning — or even talking
about planning — for at least six weeks. Or longer. Take time to let things
soak in.

2. Once you decide when and where you’re getting married, pat yourselves on
the back. If you accomplish that, the two of you can handle anything else in
this process.

3. Take marriage education courses. I give detailed descriptions of this
somewhat mysterious (but growing) field and specific recommendations in the
book, but www.smartmarriages.org is a great place to find a class to get you
started.

4. Limit your consumption of wedding media. Take magazines and TheKnot.com
in small doses.

5. Treat your in-laws like family from the moment you get engaged. But
remember: Blood fights with blood. Let your husband-to-be handle his side of
the family; you handle yours. And no matter which side of the aisle they’ll
be sitting on, the people who love you and want to be a part of the wedding
deserve your caring and consideration. Be as diplomatic as you possibly can
be. It’s not just your day.

6. Find a candid, caring, recently married female friend who can be your
sounding board. Go to her first when you’re upset.

7. Make time for yourself. No matter how busy you get, don’t abandon your
old routines. In fact, guard your “alone time” even more fiercely. Work out
at least once a week; don’t even think about skipping. Yoga is the ideal
engagement exercise. I also recommend keeping a journal.

8. Try to take the long view: Don’t let your imagination stall at the
wedding day. (That approach is good both for keeping things in perspective
and for keeping you out of debt.)

9. Honor glances backwards at previous relationships — yours, and your
fiancé’s.

10. Don’t be afraid of or discouraged by fighting with your fiancé. Allow
for ebbs and flows in every kind of emotion during your engagement —
including how fondly you think of each other.

— from Kelly Bare’s book, “The F Word


Story Photo:
http://journalstar.com/articles/2007/03/05/living/gz/books/doc45e5bf70882542
16535489.txt

Writer Kelly Bare gives her tips and advice to fianc�©es in her book “The F
Word: A Fianc�©e Shares Her Story From ‘I Will’ to ‘I Do’.” (Courtesy photo)


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