(According to the Huffington Post, at least)
Those are great, but my favorite headline may be from USA Today:
In other news, there’s also this thing called the New Hampshire Primary today… but who wants to read about that when you can read about eating roadkill and Kim Kardashian being compared to a dog??
Narcissists want weddings, not marriage
By Ashley Strickland, Special to CNN(CNN) — When Kim Kardashian announced her engagement to basketball player Kris Humphries, a public hype began that was only formerly rivaled by the royal wedding in April.
This heralded event was to be America’s own version of the royal wedding, if only in terms of build-up and opulence. Now, 72 days later, the relationship has been given an equally public ending, the wedding fanfare forgotten and replaced with public humiliation.
For celebrities, this kind of entanglement and collapse happens frequently and in the all-knowing eye of the public spotlight. But our own relationships are heading into a similar tailspin due to one common factor: narcissism, according to psychotherapist and divorce coach Micki McWade.
Shows like “Bridezillas” and “Say Yes to the Dress” have encouraged a cultural fascination with weddings, but 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.”
“There is a much more materialistic emphasis today on the wedding,” McWade said. “If couples are dating for six months and then get into this big wedding planning, they really don’t know the person they are marrying.”
McWade refers to this rush as the “pink cloud period,” where couples in the first year of a relationship don’t recognize faults within one another. But sometimes, the extensive planning of a costly wedding can expose a couple’s differences in compatibility, values or beliefs.
“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.
Fabick believes that the financial stress of planning a wedding can also cause fractures down the road.
“It gets a little crazy when you have these lavish weddings where the money could be invested in a home or something that would take some stress off of the union, and that’s part of the show,” he 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,” she said. “I believe that relationship high isn’t over for two years, but the high will go right out the window if you’re not on the same page.”
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.
McWade believes that Americans are more predisposed to narcissism because of the inventive and explorative history of our country. Narcissism fueled this push for independent thought and creation, but it in turn “conquered the culture to some degree.”
Parents have an unfortunate tendency to create narcissists, by forcing their children to become what their parents want in order to receive love, or if a son — after all, 70% of narcissists are men — believes he is the central focus of a family, according to McWade’s research.
A higher rate of divorce and lack of intact families are also causing a spread of narcissism, Fabick said.
While she applies a 12-step program to people facing divorce in her book “Getting Up, Getting Over, Getting On: A Twelve-Step Guide to Divorce Recovery,” the tips also apply to those entering relationships. Knowing and appreciating yourself will allow for a better relationship on both sides, 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.”
Narcissist? Fame seeker? No, I just want true love!
I’ve been pretty busy and haven’t had much of a chance to blog recently, so I figured I would sum up this past week’s most interesting stories:
1. For those of you who care, Kim Kardashian just filed for divorce… after being married for 72 days. And just a refresher: the wedding cost $10 million. And Kim made about $18 million off of it.
So there are several things I just don’t understand. First, why is Kim Kardashian still relevant? I wish the media would just stop following her and her attention-seeking family so we didn’t have to hear about them anymore. Please go away, “Kardashian Klan.”
Second, for everyone that things that homosexuality ruins the sanctity of marriage… please turn to exhibit A, Kim Kardashian. Are you joking? So it’s completely okay for a fame-seeking, attention-obsessed socialite to get millions of dollars thrown at her for her obscenely extravagant wedding, only to seek a divorce 72 days later, but a truly loving same-sex couple cannot be together? Interesting. Kim Kardashian sure as hell didn’t get married for “true love.”
And of course, I just have to share some of the tweets that have been floating around since the divorce news came out…
Aaaaand cut. No more talk of the Kardashians. On to the next one.
2. For those of you who care who live under a rock, Jessica Simpson is pregnant. Yeah, everyone knew that already. But she decided to make it “official” on Halloween. Next story…
3. As referenced above (in tweet #3), Jet Blue apparently left airline passengers stranded on the tarmac for more than seven hours because of poor weather and overcorwding at the airport.
Have we not been through this before? How many other stories like this have there been and still the airlines don’t get it?? Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? I guess this means that airlines are run by insane people?
4. Apparently Herman Cain faced sexual harassment allegations in the 90′s. This little fun fact just came out in the last couple of days. He first denied knowing anything about it, then tried to explain how the allegations were “baseless” and settled out of court.
I don’t know what to think about this. Part of me is just so immune to political messes like this that it doesn’t even faze me. Part of me wants to shake him (and Kim K, and Jet Blue employees…) and ask him why the hell did you think you could lie about the existence of these allegations?? The truth always comes out, my friend. Even if the allegations were false, they still existed.
So it looks like Obama will be around for another 4 years since no on in the Republican party seems to be sane/intelligent/normal. Except for Huntsman. But no one seems to care about him for some reason.
5. And of course, this little tidbit: the world population just surpassed 7 billion. This is great news. Now we can wait longer at the Post Office lines and my commute to work will now take an hour and 45 minutes as opposed to an hour and a half.
And there is your important news for the past week. You’re welcome.
That was sarcasm. I’m pretty sure any normal family would be “appalled.” Welcome to the wonderful world of reality television, Humphries family! I’m sure you were thrilled that your son just took part in a staged $10 million wedding.
I wonder when the divorce will be?
I want to sincerely thank this kid for making my Monday that much more entertaining…
Plus, I don’t know who actually wants to hear any more about Kim Kardshian and her obscenely extravagant wedding. I would much rather watch this kid make dozens of faces on national television.
