I hung up on my fiancé last week.

I can't really explain why. He had called me to talk about the relative merits of the potential wedding venues we'd visited. We weren't arguing. He hadn't done anything wrong. And even if he had, we're not the kind of couple that has big explosive fights over the phone and hangs up on one another. We're talk-things-out people. The best explanation I can come up with is that, at that moment, my hand knew something my brain didn't: I just couldn't handle talking about the wedding.

I know wedding planning is stressful. But I was so sure we'd avoid any drama. We're fortunate to have a budget that's big enough to keep us from worrying too much about money, which has been a source of stress for other couples we know. We have a long time to plan. Nobody's pregnant. Even the one thing that would be an automatic stressor in many wedding situations -- a set of divorced parents -- is remarkably drama-free in our case.

And yet, at the very beginning of the process, with 14 months still to go and dozens of tasks yet to be undertaken, I found myself pulling the phone away from my ear and robotically, as though controlled by an outside force, touching the "end call" button.

I apologized later. (He'd assumed the call had been dropped. We have iPhones. It happens.) I explained to him that I hadn't been angry or upset -- just overwhelmed. He got over it. (I think.)

But in the back of my mind, a worrisome thought started to rear its ugly head: Am I that bride?

A few years ago, I was supposed to sing the Lord's Prayer at a friend's wedding ceremony in a small town in the Midwest. About six weeks before the wedding, I realized that the weekend I was supposed to be in Iowa was also the weekend I needed to move out of my New York apartment and ship everything I owned back to Alaska before heading to Pennsylvania for the summer. There was no way I was going to be able to get to this wedding. As soon as I realized I couldn't be there, I called the bride to let her know, and to apologize. I felt terrible.

Until an hour later, when the groom called me at work.

He'd worked himself into a righteous lather, and he spent 15 minutes unleashing a stream of invective that reduced me to tears -- in my office. He played every card in the guilt deck. I was a terrible friend. I was selfish. And I had ruined not only the bride's day, but potentially the entire wedding.

He called back later to offer a grudging, halfhearted apology (which he took pains to assure me was issued only because they'd managed to find someone else to take my place). Looking back, I realize the moment probably had less to do with me than it did with the tidal wave of concerns they probably felt crashing down on them six weeks before their wedding. Nobody likes to be verbally abused, though -- especially over something about which they already feel upset -- and the incident had a permanent impact on my relationship with both the bride and the groom, who until that point had both been close friends.

With apologies to Charles Dickens -- weddings can be the best of times or the worst of times. Or both at the same time. In the case of that Iowa wedding, a friendship was soured permanently. I have another friend whose relationship with her mother is still recovering from a five-year-old morning-of-the-wedding blowout. But other bonds can be strengthened by the shared experience of a wedding. I was my best friend's maid of honor a few years ago, and she still talks about the moment when I planted myself between her mother, her stepmother and her mother-in-law-to-be, brandished a pair of floral shears, and submarined a discussion about centerpieces that was threatening to degenerate into an argument.

After the hanging-up incident, my fiancé and I realized that, when it comes to talking about our wedding, we need to be open with one another about what we're thinking and how we're feeling. We're still trying to pick a venue, but now we tend to begin those conversations with "Is now a good time to talk about the wedding?" Bottom line -- even when we disagree with each other (or our parents, or whoever else ends up involved in planning our wedding), it's only because we both want it to be as good as we imagine it can be. Everything else can be figured out.