What Caroline and Rory can teach us about cutting the strings that control us

Rory McIlroy created a media storm by calling off his wedding to Caroline Wozniacki, but did he do her a favour, asks Suzanne Harrington.

SO you’ve sent out the invites, flashed the ring, tried on the frock, invited Bill Clinton, and then your fiance phones you out of the blue — because yes, this allegedly happened by phone, taking an alleged three minutes — and breaks up with you.

Just like that.

Out of nowhere.

The wedding is off, the engagement is off, the relationship is off. Cancel the flowers, the venue, the hairdresser. It’s not happening.

All of this, as you know, happened in public to Danish tennis player Caroline Wozniacki, when her marriage plans to golfer Rory McIlroy were abruptly ended. Having sought out her parents’ permission before proposing to her last New Year’s Eve with a diamond on a boat in Sydney Harbour, his sudden retraction, says Wozniacki, “came as a bit of a shock”.

Immediately McIlroy is cast as a cad, and Wozniacki as a victim. McIlroy won his next tournament, Wozniacki lost hers. Public sympathy is largely with the tennis player, who appears to have been swept along in the current of McIlroy’s mood swings and mind games. He broke up with her for posting a photo of him on Twitter, then proposed, then broke up with her again.

There is no other social humiliation quite like calling off a wedding: illogically, we deem it less humiliating to marry and break up shortly afterwards than to call the whole thing off before it has even happened. A recent plotline on long running BBC radio drama The Archers portrayed a character being jilted at the altar by her fiancée of 15 years; the humiliation aspect was given more emphasis than the heartbreak. It happened to Kieffer Sutherland in 1991 when Julia Roberts called off their wedding just days in advance.

But was McIlroy ultimately doing Wozniacki an enormous favour? Despite him saying that the sending out of wedding invitations “made me realise that I wasn’t ready for all that marriage entails” (two biggies being monogamy and parenthood, which may not sound like much fun when you are 23 and 25), what if he had proceeded with the wedding rather than go with his true feelings? Had McIlroy been a people pleaser, he would have gone ahead.

Ciara, a 30-something health professional, did exactly that, marrying her first husband when she was 24. She had been on the rebound when she met M, who swept her along. He was keen to marry her, and overwhelmed by his romanticism, she never stopped to think if this was what she really wanted. Instead she organised an elaborate wedding on a Greek island for friends and family.

As the date grew nearer, so did her dreams — nightmares — of being chased. She dismissed them as normal pre-wedding nerves, and didn’t confide in anyone. The nightmares got worse, and more intense, but she still went ahead with the wedding. Within weeks she knew she had made a serious mistake. They separated within a year, in an acrimonious divorce that lasted far longer than their courtship.

“I was afraid of letting everyone down,” she says. “I was too embarrassed to call it off, so I just went ahead with it. I realise how insane that sounds now.”

People pleasing comes in all forms — not just trudging up the aisle rather than daring to upset your wedding planner. I know a vegetarian who has choked down steak at dinner parties; another who has cancelled holiday plans on the whim of a controlling family member. People pleasers are really nice individuals who would do anything for you — but the difference between being nice and being a people pleaser is that the latter sublimates their own autonomy and true feelings, and gets lost in compliance and approval-seeking. This leads to seething resentment, at themselves and everyone else. So it’s not terribly healthy.

“People pleasing is largely driven by emotional fears,” writes Dr Harriet Braiker in The Disease To Please: Curing The People Pleasing Syndrome. “Fear of rejection, abandonment, conflict or confrontation, criticism, rejection, being alone, anger. As a people pleaser you hold the belief that by being nice and always doing things for others you will avoid these emotions in yourself and others.

“This defensive belief has a two-way effect. First, you use your niceness to deter and dodge negative emotions aimed at you from others — so long as you’re nice and always try to do things to please others, why would anyone want to get angry or reject or criticise you? Second, by being so invested in your own niceness, you don’t allow yourself to feel or express negative emotions towards others.”

You may not wish to emulate Rory McIlroy — apart from on the golf course — but if you have people-pleasing tendencies then you could benefit from standing in front on the mirror and practising the word ‘No’. Liberate yourself.