Woman Says Her $50K Wedding 'Ruined' Her Life After 'Snowballing' Out of Control: 'Life Isn't a Disney Movie'

“It's this whole societal thing. As women, we're taught to want the day to be perfect," bride Lucinda Rose said

A British woman says the tremendous stress of planning her lavish wedding left her feeling "broken" and "burnt out" for months.

Lucinda Rose, a child psychologist from Cheshire, England, told SWNS she was excited to plan all of the details of her big day with her now-husband Ian Brown — but the wedding "took over my life from the second we booked the venue."

Brown, 43, popped the question in January 2023 after 16 months of dating, and the pair set their date and secured their wedding venue for September.

"We paid this massive deposit, so there was a lot of pressure to get it right. It was a massive mental and financial load and it just kept snowballing," Rose, 39, recalled.

While their original vision was to invite 50 guests and spend just £15,000 (about $19,000), their invite list quickly grew to 120 people and their budget ballooned to £40,000 (about $50,000). Rose, swept up in the momentum of the occasion, decided to splash out on a fireworks display, a string quartet, a horse and carriage and an ice cream van.

Related: How To Plan A Wedding Author Reveals 5 Mistakes Brides Make When Planning Their Special Day

As costs continued to spiral, Rose took on several time-consuming DIY projects to save money, including assembling bags of confetti and decanting shots of limoncello into mini-bottles for her guests.

Before long, the wedding planning process had become completely overwhelming for the bride-to-be.

"The month before the wedding, I was so consumed with doing, making, finding and buying wedding things that I barely slept and hardly saw Ian," she recalled.

She said the stress not only prevented her from enjoying her wedding day when it finally came, but it impacted her for months afterwards, as well.

"I started to feel a sense of dread about it — and on the actual day, I could hardly focus," she continued. "For months after the wedding, my memory of the day was completely gone ... I felt ashamed that I felt that way."

While the wedding went off "perfectly," Rose said that for a long time, she couldn't even bring herself to talk about what should have been a happy occasion.

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"The wedding ruined my life for three months,” she explained. “It's this whole societal thing. As women, we're taught to want the day to be perfect — but at the end of the day, life isn't a Disney movie."

She added that what she was feeling was more than just the "wedding blues." Rose said "it was literally burnout."

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She expected to feel relief once the wedding was over, but her exhaustion persisted and she grappled with guilt.

"At times, I couldn't wait for the wedding to be over — but then when it finally was, I was too burnt out to do anything. It was the emotional side too, thinking, 'Why don't I feel like others?' and the guilt over the money spent," Rose explained.

When she tried to open up to Brown about her feelings, she found that she couldn't "verbalize why I was so broken, and I felt guilty and ashamed about it."

However, when she shared her feelings online, she discovered she was not alone and others also had experienced post-wedding burnout.

She said she hopes her story will help other brides and grooms avoid succumbing to the pressures of trying to plan a "perfect" wedding day.

"As women in particular, we're so conditioned to think our wedding will be the best day of your life. So it's lonely and isolating when you don’t feel the way people expect you to," Rose said. "It made me feel so much better to have others tell me that was what they went through too — more people should be open about it."

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