She Called Off Her Wedding on Her Wedding Day

And came out a stronger, more powerful version of herself.

There’s a moment some people talk themselves out of acknowledging.

That quiet, heavy feeling that something is wrong — even when everything looks right on paper.

In this episode of The Scarlet Edit, I sat down with Emily Kuch to talk about what happens when that feeling shows up on the one day you’re “not supposed” to question anything: your wedding day.

Emily had been in a relationship for nearly ten years. They met young, grew up together, built a life, and eventually got engaged. From the outside, it looked like the natural next step. Inside, something was unraveling.

On the morning of her wedding — hair done, makeup finished, ocean outside the window — she realized she couldn’t go through with it.

She called it off.

One of the hardest parts of this story isn’t the decision itself — it’s everything surrounding it.

The destination wedding.
The guests who traveled.
The vendors who were booked.
The money already spent.
The pressure to “just get through the day.”

Emily talks openly about how easy it is to start thinking about everyone else before yourself. About how once you’re engaged, the momentum feels impossible to stop. About how calling something off can feel more terrifying than staying in something that doesn’t feel right.

That’s how people end up saying they knew on their wedding day that they shouldn’t be doing this.

Emily chose not to ignore that knowing.

On the morning of the ceremony, she met privately with her fiancé. What started as a conversation turned into confirmation: this wasn’t something either of them could move forward with.

She walked away.

While guests gathered and plans continued without her, Emily stepped onto the balcony of her hotel room in shock. Friends and family rallied around her. Someone ordered food. Someone brought champagne. Everyone quietly adjusted.

And just like that, the life she thought she was walking into disappeared.

Calling off the wedding wasn’t the end of the story — it was the beginning of something much harder.

Emily left Hawaii with two suitcases and her dog. No home. No job. No clear plan. Her belongings were tied up across the country. Her identity had been wrapped up in a relationship that no longer existed.

She talks about what it feels like to start over in your thirties after spending your entire adult life with one person. About questioning what parts of yourself were truly yours. About realizing how many decisions you’d stopped making on your own.

Even something as simple as dating again felt foreign.

She also speaks honestly about healing — and how talk therapy wasn’t the right first step for her. Talking about the event over and over only made her feel worse. Instead, she listened to a different instinct: movement, distance, and change.

She booked a solo retreat in Bali.

No explanations. No labels. Just space.

Sometimes healing isn’t about analyzing what happened. Sometimes it’s about creating new experiences, new neural pathways, and new ways of trusting yourself again.

Years later, what Emily is most proud of isn’t that she called off her wedding.

It’s that she learned how to make decisions on her own again.

After a decade of partnership, she had to rebuild self-trust. To stop asking for permission. To stop outsourcing certainty. To choose discomfort over predictability.

Not making a decision is a decision.

And choosing yourself is not a failure.

This episode isn’t really about weddings.

It’s about listening to yourself when the stakes feel impossibly high. It’s about letting go of shame. It’s about trusting that your life doesn’t end because one version of it does.

If you’re standing at a crossroads — in a relationship, an engagement, or a life that doesn’t feel aligned — you’re not alone.

And you’re not wrong for questioning it.

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