Wedded Bliss or the Bridal Blues? : After That Dizzying Courtship and Dreamlike Nuptials, Could There Be Crying, Pouting, Sulking--Screaming?

It wasn’t a perfect wedding.

(It rained.)

Nor was it a perfect honeymoon.

(She cried--a lot.)

As a matter of fact, the first months of newlywed life weren’t exactly idyllic, either.

(They argued, sulked, even yelled at each other.)

No, being a newlywed was not the blissful experience Sandra Leah Heidenrich had dreamed about. Not even close.

She was baffled by the chasm between her bridal fantasies and the realities of everyday married life. So she started asking around, trying to find out if other women had experienced depression during what was supposed to be one of the happiest times of their lives.

Bingo. She discovered she wasn’t the first to battle the bridal blues. And soon she was writing a master’s thesis on the seldom-talked-about, post-wedding letdown, which at worst can be so traumatic that it convinces both partners they’ve made a terrible mistake that nothing short of divorce can repair.

Fortunately, Heidenrich’s marriage survived her year of blues, which inspired her to write “Bride Illusion: Depression in Newlywed Women” as a student in counseling psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara.

That project was a kind of therapy for Heidenrich, whose first impulse was to hide her depression because it was “an unacceptable response to one of life’s most romanticized events.”

She was ashamed of feelings that undermined the “inviolate happiness of the wedding”--until she began to talk to other women who seemed relieved to be able to admit that newlywed life had fallen far short of their expectations, too.

Her recently completed thesis is based on interviews with just 10 women, but they had such similar experiences as newlyweds that she’s convinced she has stumbled upon something significant. An intern at the Laguna Beach Community Counseling Clinic, Heidenrich plans to expand her study of bridal blues and write a book on the subject. (To participate, write P.O. Box 45400-386, Laguna Beach, Calif. 92652, or call (714) 494-7454.)

Nearly all of the women Heidenrich interviewed reported that they felt sad and angry during their first months of marriage. Most also felt lonely, disillusioned and trapped. Some said they lost interest in sex. They were often tired, tearful--even physically ill. They were, in short, miserable.

One woman said she felt like she was in “a deep, dark, lonely tunnel with no light at the end.”

After Heidenrich emerged from that “tunnel,” she could see that it might not have been so dark if she had been able to put aside her happily-ever-after vision of marriage and understand that this is “a tremendous passage in your life and there’s a lot to work out.”

Ironically, the adjustments a woman faces after the wedding are often intensely private, although she feels guilty about separating herself from the man with whom she is starting a new life.

A photograph that Heidenrich used to illustrate her thesis shows a young woman diving into a swimming pool in her bridal gown. She is, symbolically, plunging into her own emotional depths to redefine herself, Heidenrich explains.

Depression is often part of this process, the Laguna Beach resident says, because a woman loses a part of herself when she marries. “We move from maidenhood to being a wife and mother, and the maiden in us dies.”

For Heidenrich, this sense of loss was particularly intense because she was 35 when she married for the first time two years ago.

“I’d had a long, intense period of being my maiden self--the part of me that is independent, autonomous. The longer you’re in that role, the more strength you draw from it,” she explains.

After she married, she was surprised to find herself feeling “devalued as a woman” because she no longer had the same kind of independence she had enjoyed when she was single. But she eventually realized that she had to “reconfigure” her inner self as though she was taking a puzzle apart and putting it back together.

“You need faith and trust that you can pull these pieces together again as you meld your values and desires with someone else’s,” she says.

While she was working on that, there were more practical problems to deal with in her marriage. Things she hadn’t anticipated when she was in a “dream state” before the wedding.

Her 42-year-old husband, Denny Freidenrich, had been married before. He has a son, now 10, whose loyalty to his mother made it difficult for him to accept a stepmother. He was holding back emotionally, and while Heidenrich was trying to win his affection, she was also struggling with her uncertainty over how and when to act on her own convictions about effective parenting.

Meanwhile, there was a crisis that forced Heidenrich to deal with another strong dose of reality.

Denny suffered a serious back injury that had no place in his new bride’s picture of the perfect mate. Instead of feeling sympathy for him, she was angry. Now she understands that seeing her husband’s “fragile, vulnerable side” frightened her because she wasn’t sure she could meet his needs and couldn’t see how he was going to be able to meet hers.

Heidenrich’s mood swings frequently mystified her husband. Her gregarious nature gave way after the wedding to quiet periods of introspection that seemed as out of character as her bursts of anger. Somehow, he managed to keep it all in perspective.

“I felt it wasn’t me she was angry with but some ghost,” he says. “I tried to tell myself not to take it personally and to go about just being me. If I had taken everything personally, it would have made it very, very difficult.”

He says he wasn’t aware that his wife was depressed, though he knew she was trying to “come to grips with some new realities in her life.”

One of those realities was the conflict between her roles as a wife, stepmother and career woman.

Heidenrich, who supervises libraries and media programs for the Saddleback Valley Unified School District, says she was expecting a more equal division of household labor than her husband, whose mother was a full-time homemaker. A feminist at heart, she was surprised to find herself arguing with her husband about a question as basic as who should do what around the house.

It was one more glitch in her fantasy of married life, which had been unraveling since the wedding.

Heidenrich was able to readjust her self-image and her expectations and work things out with her husband with the help of a therapist and the female friends who talked about their own bouts of newlywed depression.

Janie Ingalls, a Huntington Beach resident who has been married for 24 years, didn’t have that kind of support when she was an unhappy newlywed.

She couldn’t even share her feelings with her husband. “I didn’t know how to talk about it. I didn’t really know how depressed I was,” she says.

She gave up her career in nursing and neglected her friendships after the wedding, thinking she should devote her life to her marriage.

“I had the illusion that marriage would fill my needs,” she says. “I was absolutely appalled during the first few months at how alone I felt. I slept a lot. I just lost interest in things. I had quite a few tearful times. I suddenly felt like I didn’t have anybody I could confide in.”

Her husband sensed her distress and tried to help.

“He wore himself out trying to be what I told him he should be,” she says.

After they were married, they discovered major differences in their personalities that didn’t seem significant when they were caught up in the romance of dating.

For example, Ingalls explains: “My husband is an introvert and I’m an extrovert, and I was shocked that he needed so much time alone. I took that as a rejection. I thought he didn’t love me.”

She was afraid to share her feelings with anyone because she didn’t want to be seen as a failure. She finally came up with her own solution--having a baby.

“I had this sense of a void, so I got pregnant about three months into the marriage,” she says. “I expected it to somehow make me feel whole, but it didn’t.”

Only in the past few years has Ingalls been able to fully understand her newlywed depression. She is convinced it would have been less traumatic if she had not walked down the aisle with such unrealistic expectations--and if she had known her depression was part of a natural period of adjustment rather than a sign of failure.

Heidenrich believes depression can be a “constructive and creative time of drawing into yourself,” and she hopes to help other newlywed women see it that way.

New marriages will have a better survival rate if women can deal openly with depression instead of feeling they have to hide it, she says. As one woman who participated in Heidenrich’s study observed: “The depression made us look at issues much faster and drew us closer together with a better understanding of each other. We were both feeling judged and not accepted. Today we have a much deeper acceptance and respect for marriage and for each other as individuals.”