4 Divorced-Girl Tricks For Surviving The Wedding Season With Grace

Tossing the invites into the trash isn’t your ONLY option.

The trees are leafing out. 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 that their invitation is just another reminder of your failure?

Honestly, no, they don’t understand your pain. Unless you’ve been through 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 unopened and grabbing a pint of Haagen-Dazs, a bottle of wine and/or Tinder.

Option 1: 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 friend will understand.

Option 2: Take a friend 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!)

Option 3: Go to the wedding. If you want to attend the wedding, but just 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.

Option 4: Continue tossing the invites. 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 with 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.

Look, there’s no one right way to deal with wedding season when you’re newly divorced or even in the midst of it. But sometimes looking at the options will open up new possibilities and maybe even bring a little fun into what has been a pretty depressing divorce.

I’m Dr. Karen Finn, a divorce coach and advisor helping people just like you who are wondering how to move forward after divorce. You can join my newsletter list for free weekly advice. If you’re ready to take the first step toward working with me as your personal coach, you can schedule an introductory private coaching session.

Looking for more tips on how to deal with divorce? You’ll find what you’re looking for in Life After Divorce.

 This article originally appeared on YourTango.