She looks like a perfect bride-to-be. But when Katherine saw her reflection, she gasped. One damning word had changed everything…

Katherine Rose Woller slipped on her exquisitely embroidered ivory tulle gown and stared into the mirror at the upscale bridal atelier in Manhattan.

It was a little over two weeks until her wedding day. After her final dress fitting with top designer Monique Lhuillier, she was due to return to her home city of Boulder, Colorado, where the six-figure ceremony was booked for June 15, 2019.

But rather than burst with pride and excitement at the sight of her elegant reflection, Katherine recoiled in horror.

‘I didn’t recognize myself,’ she says. ‘It was a façade — not an accurate representation of the woman I was and the future I wanted.’

Gasping for air in that panic-stricken moment, she breathed the word: ‘Enough.’

The dramatic realization that she didn’t want to get married led Katherine to jilt her fiancé. She didn’t quite dump him at the altar, but her change of mind 14 days before the wedding had massive repercussions.

Not only did it break her fiancé’s hearts, it also devastated their friends and families. Still, four-and-a-half years on, Katherine insists she made the right choice — for everyone.

Writing in her newly published book, Calling It Off: Memoir of an Almost Bride, she refers to her decision as a ‘required act of bravery’.

She says she and her former fiancé — whom she identifies as Mr. Ex in the book to protect his privacy — have since agreed they dodged a bullet.

They found true happiness with more compatible partners. In fact, three years after being left in the lurch, Mr. Ex, who has just become a father, went so far as to thank his runaway bride for what she’d done.

‘He said my leaving him was the greatest gift he could have received,’ Katherine says. ‘It validated what we already knew.’

Katherine, who worked for a not-for-profit trade association, whose longest romance prior to Mr. Ex had lasted two years, met her fiancé in the fall of 2016. She was 29; he was 31.

They started flirting while playing a casual game of volleyball at a popular day club in downtown Denver with bars, a swimming pool and other leisure facilities.

‘It was pure joy for a late twenty-something who was just looking for a good time,’ Katherine writes in her memoir of the ‘Sunday Funday’ experience. ‘I guess it’s no surprise I found a very good looking, very good time in Mr. Ex there as well.’

She was attracted to his muscular frame and strong jaw. ‘Sorry ma’am,’ he said in his deep Southern drawl when he bumped into her during a clumsy maneuver on the volleyball court.

‘Who are you calling ma’am, sir?’ she retorted, pretending to be offended. He asked her name before messaging her on Facebook, suggesting they hung out for drinks with some of his friends.

‘Sorry, I’m not interested in that,’ Katherine replied.

When her admirer asked what she would be interested in, she said: ‘A proper date’. As her 30th birthday approached, she was looking for a serious relationship, not the chance to widen her friendship circle.

Two weeks later, Katherine recalls in her memoir, Mr. Ex ‘slid into my DMs and proclaimed we were going out on a proper date.’

Thrilled, she accepted. ‘The rest, as they say, is history,’ she writes.

It didn’t take long before they fell in love and became inseparable. Within months, Mr. Ex, who worked in hospitality, had moved into her two-bedroom apartment after complications with his existing lease.

‘We had a great time,’ Katherine, by then pursuing a marketing career because it was a better fit, said. ‘We bonded over sports and an active lifestyle.’

They visited Florida with Mr. Ex’s family, including his brother and mother, with whom he was close.

‘Lightness was the glue of our relationship,’ Katherine recalls.

But her biological clock was ticking. ‘After a lifetime of societal programming telling me I should get married and pop out 2.5 kids by 25, I became singularly focused on getting engaged to my love before my sell-by date,’ she writes.

Katherine, who was raised in Oklahoma City, said her Mid-Western background was a factor — she was raised to believe marriage and children signaled ‘perfect womanhood’.

So, with barely any discussion, after a year together, the pair put their feet in the starting blocks and raced towards the altar.

They chose Katherine’s diamond, oval-cut engagement ring together before Mr. Ex went down on one knee during a vacation in France in June 2018.

To her surprise, his bride-to-be, who’d been anticipating the proposal for months, felt dissociated. ‘It was anti-climactic, and I sensed a flatness inside,’ she says.

The disappointment grew when Mr. Ex cut the trip short, insisting on returning to his familiar environment in Colorado four days early because he said he was impatient to get home. ‘He was outside of his comfort zone,’ Katharine said, noting that he wasn’t as ‘culturally curious’ as her.

‘I guess it was a red flag that he was much more of a homebody than me,’ Katherine says. While she liked to travel, he was more comfortable in a familiar environment.

Ignoring his dwindling enthusiasm for adventure, she threw herself into the wedding planning. They settled on a majestic, five-star hotel with expansive grounds in Colorado Springs. Katherine’s mom covered most of the six-figure expense for the 300-guest bonanza.

‘She was gracious in helping us arrange the wedding that we wanted — romantic, performative and over-top with the color themes of gold, pink and white,’ Katherine says. ‘The flowers were roses, dahlias, and blush peonies. My friends called it Marie Antoinette on steroids.’

But the relationship between the two of them was becoming strained. Katherine, a self-confessed ‘Type A’ full of determination and drive, struggled to find the same qualities in Mr. Ex. 

He wanted to settle, while she needed to strive.

‘I became sullen and self-medicated with wine,’ says Katherine. ‘Mr. Ex had his own vices, but he’d see me drinking after work and say, “Have you even eaten yet?” Of course, I had not.’

Still, she chose to plow on. ‘I put the doubts to the back of my brain,’ she says. ‘I moved towards something I thought I wanted, in pursuit of something I had to accomplish within a certain timeline.’

Seven months before the wedding, Katherine flew to New York to select her gowns — one for the ceremony, the other for the reception. She was accompanied by her mother and two friends.

‘Welcome to the episode I still refer to as the Great Kleinfeld’s Dress Fiasco of 2018,’ she writes in her book, referencing the world-famous bridal store in New York City where reality TV show Say Yes to the Dress is filmed.

The attendants fussed around with outfits and veils. Her mother and the rest of the party cooed at successive looks. Somehow, Katherine ended up wearing one particularly bulky dress on top of another.

‘Maybe it was the heat, or how I now felt physically trapped as well,’ she writes. ‘My head started pounding and sweat careened down my back like someone had turned on a faucet under my dress.’

She ran to a far corner of the store and cowered, wanting to disappear. When her mother and friends rushed over to comfort her, Katherine sobbed: ‘I’m just really overwhelmed.’

A deep sense of shame — plus the guilt over letting down Mr. Ex, their families, and friends — stopped her from confiding in anyone. But, after the pressure mounted, in February, four months before the big day, she told her therapist she was having doubts.

‘It wasn’t her position to tell me what to do,’ Katherine says. ‘But she allowed me to explore what it might mean for my future if I called it off.

‘We developed percentages when she’d ask which way I was leaning. If it had been a good week, it was 90 per cent I can do this, and 10 per cent I can’t.

‘If it had been a bad week, it was 75 per cent to 25 per cent.’

Katherine says that, until that pivotal moment at Monique Lhuillier’s atelier — when she flew to New York alone for the final fitting — she never reached 100 per cent in terms of calling it off. She clung to the belief that marriage at 32 swiftly followed by children was an expected and necessary goal.

But seeing her bridal self reflected back at her at the salon was a wakeup call.

‘I saw this stoic, resolved, practiced reflection, but she wasn’t me,’ she says. ‘She was choosing to stay rather than run.

‘Her over-the-top, out-of-control wedding was not authentic to me in any way, shape, or form. Her husband-to-be was not my forever future. This life, this future staring back at me, this could not be me.

‘It would not to be. I declared, “Enough”.’

Katherine’s flight back to Colorado was delayed by an intense snowstorm in New York. She spent a day in her hotel room, thinking through the ramifications of her decision. 

Would she ever meet someone else? Even if she were to, would her beloved, elderly grandfather still be alive to see her married? Was she going to miss her window to have a baby?

Then, of course, there was Mr. Ex.

‘I knew it was going to devastate him in the immediate aftermath,’ she says. ‘It was going to break his heart — just like the decision was breaking mine and would do the same to our families.’

‘But I wasn’t worried about his mental health — of him possibly hurting himself. He had a resilient personality and close group of friends.’

Most of all, she knew that the short-term heartache was the necessary sacrifice to avoid a lifetime of regret.

‘I kept thinking, “If it’s not right for me, it’s not right for him”,’ Katherine says. ‘We were not meant to be together, and I knew that was true for both of us. I knew he was going to find a more aligned and happier partner down the road that would create the life he was hoping for.’

Mr. Ex was, understandably, stunned when she called things off. It happened after he asked her whether she’d like a pair of pearl earrings as a wedding present from him.

Katherine said she didn’t want anything at all. Her fiancé looked perplexed.

‘I braced for impact,’ Katherine writes. ‘And, with a deep breath, I said, “I don’t want you to buy me anything because I do not want to marry you”.’

Mr. Ex desperately tried to change her mind. Mid-outrage, he called his mother on speakerphone to tell her the news. ‘Katherine just called off the wedding,’ he said, as if to guilt her into changing her mind.

Dejected, he left that night.

When the couple broke the news to their families, Katherine’s mother cried in shock. Mr. Ex’s family was surprisingly kind, his mom – once she’d got over her initial shock – texting Katherine to say she was there to support both her son and almost daughter-in-law.

‘They showed me nothing but respect,’ Katherine, who spent the following month returning wedding gifts, remembers. The only thing she kept was her engagement ring, which she plans to have repurposed into a pendant.

On the cancelled wedding date, many of their guests with non-refundable flights took a mini-break and stayed at the hotel anyway. Her mother — still on the hook for the cost of the wedding — even hosted a party that night. ‘I heard it was a fun time,’ Katherine says, noting that the band performed into the early hours.

As for the absent bride, she holed up in her family’s cabin deep in the Colorado woods. A girlfriend consoled her as she wept with exhaustion. Another friend accompanied her on the trip to Maui that was supposed to have been her honeymoon.

Three months later, Katherine met Mr. Ex at the home they’d once shared. He came to pick up what remained of his belongings.

‘We had both done some processing and healing,’ she says. ‘There was obviously some sadness because, even though we were not meant to be partners, there was love and a shared history and so many memories.’

Katherine says she felt tearful when Mr. Ex hugged her as he left. ‘I wish you well,’ he said.

It was three years before they saw each other again — at the somewhat incongruous location of a second-hand car dealership in Boulder. Mr. Ex was in the process of selling a truck they’d once owned together. He needed Katherine to sign over the title in person.

She’d learned through mutual friends that he had an adoring fiancé and had a new baby. She congratulated him as he gave her a side-hug.

‘Then he said something I truly hoped that I’d hear,’ she says. ‘He simply said, “Thank you”.’

Katherine met her now husband Joseph, 42, a renewable energy manager — whom she calls ‘funny, smart, warm and kind’ — in November 2019. They wed two years later in a low-key ceremony in Montana, before welcoming a daughter, Rose, in January 2024.

Katherine was 37 at the time. ‘I was considered of “advanced maternal age”, but I didn’t care,’ she says. ‘My biological clock had quietened down — I was focused on building a fulfilling life and relationship before I got pregnant.’

She hopes her story will challenge the stigma and blame when other brides — or grooms — cancel wedding plans.

Its message also applies to similar dilemmas. ‘I hope it inspires people to listen to their gut and escape what makes them unhappy,’ Katherine says.

‘It might be a toxic marriage or a hated job, but you owe it to yourself — and others — to find the courage to call it quits.’

‘Calling It Off: Memoir of an Almost Bride’ by Katherine Rose Woller is out now.