Weddings are supposed to be a time of joy and happiness…but often times life has different plans. These guests share the crazy drama that derailed a wedding.
Where’s The Wedding?!
“My husband and I were invited to the wedding of a military buddy of his. We were running a little late but weren’t too worried. We got onto the base and headed for the main chapel (there are three or four chapels on base). When we got to the main chapel, it was apparent that there was no wedding going on. Looked at the invitation again. It just said Post chapel and gave an address. So obviously, this wasn’t the post chapel that the bride had intended and I whipped out my phone to look up the address. We drove to that part of the base and found the place. It was some sort of administration building, definitely not a chapel.
We were confused, but we found a building with Chaplain’s office in the directory so we figured we’d been invited to a civil ceremony. The building was locked. We were now thoroughly confused and late at this point.
As we were wondering what we should do, we see an older gentleman in a tuxedo wandering around. He’s clearly in the same boat as us. Turns out he’s the groom’s father and he doesn’t have any more idea what’s going on than we do. After a few more minutes, a soldier arrives. He’s the chaplain’s assistant and he’s looking for lost wedding guests (namely the groom’s father). Turns out the bride put down the wrong address and the wrong chapel name on the invitation.
By the time we got to the wedding (which they had delayed because the groom’s dad was missing), the bride was in tears. I felt so bad for her.
They finally started the wedding, and the chaplain gave an awkward sermon about being clothed in Jesus’ love and losing his place several times. Finally, as the ceremony was over and the guests began to applaud, a bat fell down out of the ceiling and died.
Craziest wedding I’d ever been to.”
Hot Mic
“Good friends getting married; it was a medium-sized wedding (no more than 75 people, including the bridal party and groomsmen). The bride’s sister-in-law is ticked off about something mighty. It was a wedding and reception by a lake, and everyone knew the venue, so we dressed accordingly– shirts and comfortable trousers, sundresses and sandals, etc. Sister-in-law is dressed like she’s heading out for an evening of dinner and dancing. Sky-high heels, tight dress, rhinestones everywhere. She looks gorgeous! But it’s not comfortable. And we’re outside.
The ceremony is sweet… except for the words ‘stupid bugs… ‘lousy pine needles, goddang dirt…’ that is being picked up from the small (yet apparently mighty) microphone up front.
Right after the ceremony, we walk over to the gazebo/picnic area where the reception will be, and the sister-in-law starts lobbing her high heels at her husband, screeching about what an awful day it is, gashes her husband’s eyebrow open. While people are scrambling to get him napkins because facial wounds bleed like a gusher, and try to get him into a car to drive him to the hospital for stitches she decides to up the ante. She says ‘I can’t take this anymore!’ and throws herself off of the dock in a dramatic swan dive.
The problem is, the lake at that point was only four feet deep, and marshy, so instead of suicide, she just sort of… bobbed? along in the water because everyone’s more concerned with her husband’s eye/face. Sister-in-law’s father just turns towards the lake, tells her to get her butt out of there, and cut the foolishness.
They pile into two cars and drove off. It was surreal.”
Now That’s Some Serious Drama
“It was my then-business partner’s second marriage, to a prominent lawyer. She was 40-ish but behaved like a Cosmo-swilling sorority sister and was obsessed with optics, image, and status. The wedding was a two-nighter at a banquet/event center in the city.
When my wife and I showed up we discovered the guests had been partitioned into an A list and a B list. We were on the shorter A list who were invited for drinks, the ceremony, and a sit-down dinner. The B-listers had been told to appear 2.5 hours later for cake and dancing.
During dinner, the already-half-in-the-bag bride stood up and told us A-listers we were her ‘real friends,’ the ‘cream of the crop,’ and our standing with her was reflected in the fine catered dinner we were eating.
Things ran long and the B-listers began assembling outside. They were not allowed in but the place had storefront-type windows and you could see what was going on there from the street. We were having creme brulees. It began to rain and the B-listers had to stand outside getting wet and staring at us while the banquet part of the evening wrapped up. They clearly had not been apprised of the two-tier deal.
The favored A-listers were in acute discomfort. A gang of the bride’s alleged best friends, similar sorority types in little black dresses, talked major snark about her for the rest of the evening, mocking her dress, her weight, her choice of husband, and especially the uncool structure of the event.
Finally, the door was thrown open, and angry damp B-listers straggled in bearing rain-washed gifts. The groom was nowhere in sight and the by-now-inebriated bride was doing the electric slide by herself on the dance floor. The room was thick with tension and weirdness and my wife and I slipped out before the cake-cutting. (Later I would tell the bride how nice the cake-cutting, etc. had been and she said she had seen me and all the A-listers front and center.)
The marriage lasted about three years. Four months in the bride made a serious pass at me in the office. Shortly thereafter the lovemaking was over and she was sleeping on the sofa (she said). The whole wedding/marriage seemed to be merely a hook for a big party and a pretext for classifying her friends into first class and economy.”
They’re Gonna Need More Cake Than That…
“While in high school, a recently graduated friend got pregnant and ‘had’ to get married. Both sets of parents were incensed that their good religious children had messed around before marriage and both sets of parents were convinced that the other parent’s child was to blame. His parents thought the bride was ‘no better than a street walking floozy’, her parents thought the groom was an ‘opportunistic pedo’ (she was 18, he was 20).
Then there were the cultural slurs thrown around – mostly by his family since they were white and the bride’s family was Hispanic. When the father of the groom asked if the bride’s family planned on serving ‘dirty rice, heh heh’ at the reception . . .I thought the grandmother of the bride was going body slam the idiot out the door.
So we get to the day of the wedding and the bride’s six brothers spend the day skulking around like they’ve got weapons hidden in their suits. The groom’s family continued to try to convince him that he should ‘At least wait until the kid is born so we can find out if it’s yours or not,’ right up until he went to stand at the altar.
After a very quick ceremony, the whole crowd heads off to the reception being held in the rec room of an apartment complex. The bride and groom try to make the best of it – there was no dancing or even music (because of their religion) and the food was just snack-type stuff. It was a whole room of unhappy family members sucking down red punch and bad attitudes.
Then comes the coup de prick – the groom’s sister (who was a good 15 years older than the groom) had volunteered to provide the wedding cake as she’d been making really fancy cakes for family birthdays for years. The bride was kind of excited about this since it was really the only gesture of welcome she got from the groom’s family.
Sister took off right after the ceremony to go and pick up the cake and after an hour, had still not shown up. After another 30 minutes, the bride was ready to just break a chocolate cookie with the groom and be done with it when Sister arrives – carrying three store-bought coconut cakes.
Correction – three of the smallest store-bought cakes ever in existence AND they were obviously not fresh cakes (they had discount stickers on the boxes). Each cake said it served six people and there were over 70 people at the reception plus they were coconut – which the bride was allergic to. The groom’s sister had obviously spent an hour or so driving around to different stores looking for the worst of all cakes for this wedding. (And she never even tried to explain why she did not make the cake herself as she had offered to do)
I don’t think the bride stopped crying for days and the groom just looked like he wanted to shoot his whole family.”
A Chaotic Catholic Wedding
“A cousin was getting married. They were young, the girl was 17 and pregnant, and my cousin was only a year older if that. But they were nice kids. I take that back. The bride was a very nice girl. My cousin was a lazy loser. Still, family, you know?
The bride was Catholic and the wedding was going to be in her church. My family wasn’t Catholic, with the exception of my uncle’s wife. Aunt Mary telephoned the bride the night before the wedding, to welcome her to the family and to express Catholic solidarity. She tried to make the girl feel welcome, started talking to her about the wedding preparations, and then asked the seemingly innocuous question, ‘What does your dress look like?’
According to people who heard Mary’s end of the conversation, Mary then totally went off on the girl. ‘What? How DARE you wear a white dress to a Catholic wedding when you’re pregnant! How DARE you desecrate the Host like that?’
I understand she left the poor girl in tears.
So the next day we went to the wedding, then across the street to the Knights of Columbus Hall for the reception. It was quite a blowout, with a live band and a cash bar. The bride looked radiant. The groom looked stoned.
I was hoping there weren’t going to be any more scenes from Aunt Mary. There weren’t. But then my Aunt Dorothy, my mother’s sister, walked up to the bar, waited until there was a pause in the music, and started shouting at the bartender. ‘How DARE you serve spirits at a teenage wedding? If it wasn’t for people like you she would have never gotten KNOCKED UP in the first place!’
A little later I went up to the girl and apologized on the behalf of my whole family. The marriage, such as it was, lasted six months. She had the baby, moved back in with her parents, and filed for divorce.”
A Series Of Unfortunate Events
When my dad got remarried, it was the worst event I’d ever been to. It started four hours late because the bride decided that she just had to have Olive Garden before the ceremony started, so she loaded up all these half-made-up bridesmaids into a couple cars and drove to Olive Garden, where we waited for like two hours for enough space for all of us.
We finally got back to the church and finished with the makeup. None of the bridesmaids had matching dresses because the bride decided on a dress like a week before the wedding, so she said for everyone to pick the closest thing they could find at the bridal shop. And the make up guy was a friend of hers who claimed to be a runway make up artist, but we all ended up looking like cheap 80s floozy.
So their ceremony finally starts four hours late with a bunch of mismatched bridesmaids in horrible make-up and giant hair while two of the bride’s friends just decided to stand up next to the bridesmaids like they were part of the ceremony too, for some reason.
At the reception, there was a guy with a guitar paid to sing and play, but one of those two friends decided she was going to be the main entertainment for the evening, and she grabbed the guy’s mic and started singing in the most awful tone – deaf screechy voice I’ve ever heard.
Finally, it was all over and we could leave, and I went to my car in the parking lot… and someone had slashed my tires. All four of them.
This Should Never Happen To Anybody
“I was assaulted.
A wedding day is supposed to be a happy, fun-filled day. My wedding day was a lot of things, some happy, some sad, new and old. One thing I never expected was to be a victim to random assault.
A cousin who was close with my parents and grandparents came. At the reception after the first dance, with the parents dancing, and food, he came up to me and said he wanted a dance. I chuckled and brushed it off. While my father had grown up vacationing and babysitting their kids, I had only seen them a handful of times in my life and the last being in my teens. It was odd to have what I considered a stranger asking me to dance. I had never wanted to dance with any other man aside from my father, grandfather, and husband on my wedding day.
He was persistent. After doing my rounds and greeting everyone yet another slower song came on and there he was! Come on let’s have a quick dance. My husband chuckled and said have fun.
Off we went to the dance floor. I thought the worst part was going to be the awkward conversation. I was wrong. He held me so tight, that I felt like I could barely move and then he started grinding his crotch against my leg when I tried to pull away. And I’ll never forget what he said to me: ‘I always dance with brides on their wedding day, and you weren’t going to get away.’
I looked over his shoulder feeling horrified, shocked, and panicked because I couldn’t believe what was happening. Was this really happening on my wedding day? The photographer is snapping away giving me a smiley face with the previous understanding that I would only dance with the important men in my life, my husband is watching and chatting with guests, his wife was watching and all eyes are on the bride with the fluffy bottomed dress while some strange man is ruining her day and violating her. This went on for over two minutes until the song finally started to end and I pulled away and quickly went to my husband. I pulled him aside and told him what had happened.
My husband was furious, enraged, and ready to kill this man. I stopped him, begged him not to make a scene, and asked that he keep a close eye on me and make sure that man stays away from me.
Well, no more than 20 minutes later this man finds his opportunity and walks up to me with his wife and says his goodbyes, and thanks me for the dance with a wink. I went to the bridal suite and cried alone. I could not believe any person would do this to a bride on their wedding day. He is a sick man.
There are a lot of things I won’t forget from my wedding day, and unfortunately, that is one of them. That is what I wish hadn’t happened.”
A Sad Ending To A Happy Wedding
“Not crazy, and not at the wedding, but after.
My niece got married at a very fun, family-filled celebration at her parent’s place. While partying afterward, some of us casually noticed that a cousin wasn’t there. This was odd, as he was always at family occasions, but most of us didn’t think too much about it.
Flash forward to late the next day. Hubby and I had just pulled into our cabin on the Oregon coast that we had rented for a few days. Immediately my phone rang..it was my daughter. She had been trying to call for a while but the phone reception had been bad. The call was bad news.
Our cousin, the one who wasn’t at the wedding, was dead.
After the wedding, his two brothers went to his house to see what was going on, as he had been unreachable by phone. They discovered their brother had died of a bullet wound to the head.
This rocked the family. Our cousin wasn’t the type to be in trouble in any way, although he had suffered from depression. Hubby began to think back…cousin had recently quit his job, and claimed he was looking for another, but instead took a tour of Greece and Eastern Europe. To us, he still seemed his same jovial self, but hubby surmised that something was up. Had he gotten involved in something illegal? Or did his depression just get the better of him? We’ll never know.
The camping trip was canceled, and we turned around and headed home to support the family, especially our kids. They were in their late teens and were considerably upset. As were we.”
“We Never Spoke To Her Again”
“I was a guest at my sorority sister’s wedding (I am going to name her Amanda). We had shared a room in the sorority house so we were pretty close. The day before the wedding, another sister (we’ll call her Rachel) and I traveled an hour and a half to get to our friend’s hometown where the wedding was being held. Rachel and I were not bridesmaids but we were going to spend the night at Amanda’s house with the rest of the wedding party. She had invited us to prove we were special even if we weren’t bridesmaids.
From the minute Rachel and I stepped into the house Amanda’s mother had us doing little tasks: Go pick up the pizza, set the table, etc. Little things, but still things you don’t ask a guest to do. The next morning Amanda’s mom woke us up and told us to go find Amanda. Apparently, she had spent the night with her lover, not her fiancé, or in her own bed. Can you imagine how uncomfortable we were to be put in that situation? It gets worse.
We had to fetch breakfast, bobby pins, hairspray, and shoes. I had to fix hair. I used to fix hair for all the girls living in the house at that time, but I had no prior knowledge I would be required to style the entire bridal party and bride. Rachel had to iron Amanda’s dress. By this time we realized we hadn’t been invited as special guests but as servants.
We were late for the reception after the wedding because we had to gather all the various detritus left after seven girls finished prepping for a formal event. Dinner had already been served and Amanda’s mother immediately herded us to the kitchen and instructed us to wash dishes. I was in shock, even more so when Rachel picked up a dish. But I started laughing when she tossed it to the floor. We left, went to McDonald’s, and never spoke to Amanda again.”
Cruel Summer
“My parents had a pretty disastrous wedding. I wasn’t there to witness it but my parents and the guests tell the stories all the time.
The wedding was in July, they were expecting a hot, sunny day but it ended up being a major downpour. My mother had a taxi scheduled to take her from her hotel to the church, due to the rain the taxi was super late. As my mother was waiting, in her wedding dress, she gets hit by a car. She gets knocked to the ground, but it wasn’t hard enough to break any bones so she just walks it off. Unfortunately, her dress picked up a lot of the mud from her fall and a big chunk of lace was torn. It turns out the car that hit her was actually the taxi that was supposed to pick her up.
She finally makes it to the church, my father was in tears, on the verge of a nervous breakdown thinking that she wasn’t going to show. Again, because of the rain, about a third of the guests didn’t make it. The rest of the ceremony went okay.
At the reception, the hotel was understaffed due to the rain and the DJ couldn’t make it (again, due to the rain) so the reception consisted of guests sitting around in a silent room waiting for food. A plus one soon decides that she is literally dying of hunger so she goes up and cuts a slice of the wedding cake for herself before my parents had taken pictures with the cake or sliced it. On the positive side, later on they discovered that a restaurant in the hotel had a jukebox so the restaurant lets them move it into the banquet hall and they’re able to pop in some quarters to get music playing.
It was a disaster at the time, but now they look back at it and laugh.”
“I’ve Been To Frat Parties That Were Classier…”
“Where do I start?
They sent the invitations over Facebook by creating an event page. And no; they weren’t teenagers, or even in their 20s.
One person was wearing a plain colored but bright shirt that looked like it came from the dollar store and threadbare jeans to the wedding. (I normally wouldn’t snark about what/where someone bought their clothes, but I was wearing dress pants and a shirt and tie I got from Goodwill, and I was better dressed than they were!) They were one of the people who were getting married.
The couple had brought a CD for the little player with internal speakers in the hall. I guess they didn’t bother to make sure it would work beforehand, because the player wasn’t able to read the CD. Of course, they didn’t bring a laptop and portable speakers. There was no music at the wedding.
They insisted on having the wedding on a weekday that was also a holiday, so everyone was either working or getting ready to celebrate the nighttime holiday. They were worried there would not be two people to observe the wedding, which was a legal requirement, so they made my friend and I promise to be there. I guess they did that with two other people as well because there were four people in attendance.
The reception was at a small chain bar. It’s not like they even went there multiple times a month and the place had personal meaning to them. They didn’t even have a reserved area and the guests were expected to pay for their own food and drinks, so pretty much the ‘wedding party’ consisted of a normal meal out at a mediocre place. There wasn’t even a wedding cake.
It’s not as if they felt the wedding was something insignificant. They’ve been married for years now and still gush about their ‘special day’ …I’ve been to frat parties that were more put together than this wedding.”