Marriage is what brings us together, and when people are brought together, disasters occur. We can’t help it—we’re animals. Even (or especially) at a ceremony that represents the civilizing of our baser urges, people get drunk, try to have sex, cry, throw tantrums, fight, have unanticipated bodily functions, and most of all, ruin everything. But everyone loves these stories and videos, and that’s why they’re so eager to share them when they’re asked online, like in the AskReddit forum, over and over and over and over. Here are 23 of the best of the worst things to happen at weddings.
1. Let’s start off with a story that could have turned out terribly but ends up being kind of awesome, as told by bridesmaid foxymoron.
I was a bridesmaid at this wedding. The groom’s ex girlfriend (who was not invited) snuck into the church, and as the bride and groom were exchanging vows, started smashing dishes and throwing pots and pans around the church kitchen in the basement. Groom’s sister dragged her outside and sat on her until the cops came. You can clearly hear the smashing on the wedding video.
Rachel, the sis was Air Force, former ice skater with thighs that could stop a freight train (we called her Wonder Thighs). There she was with her lilac satin bridesmaid’s gown hiked up around her waist, elegant up-do falling down, and bouquet shredded all over the church yard – basically sitting on Cheryl’s face, pinning her shoulders with those magnificent thighs. Cheryl had been making the groom and family miserable for months so Rachel seized the opportunity to take Cheryl down… all the way down… I’m talking DOWNTOWN!
2. Poorly aimed bouquets have been known to send a bridesmaid crashing, but airplanes are usually safe from flying flowers. Usually. (Read more.)
Photo Credit: Someecards
3. This Silicon Valley wedding attended by Anne_Hedonia_11 has more hints of incest and a higher body-count than your average Game of Thrones episode.
Wedding was at a Napa Valley winery, during the tech boom of the 90s. Groom: frat-boyish VC funder on the climb. Bride: Blonde, brittle, glossy. Both prone to using marketing/techspeak in conversation (“Let’s right-click on that and drill down,” “It’s not an IRL shop, more of a clicks-and-mortar thing”, etc.).
The wedding invitation was in the form of a merger announcement in a mocked-up Wall Street Journal page. As in: “Smith Global announces merger with Jones Limited. Combination delivers significant potential to drive long-term affection growth and market share of love.” That kind of thing. Still, the guy was a friend, and my date and I went to show our support.
The first really weird thing that happened: The bride’s twin brother came out before the wedding, got the bride to perch on a stool in front of everyone, and serenaded her, on his knees, with a guitar. He wrote the song. It was a love ballad with such barely-concealed incestuous longing that everyone was frozen with discomfort. He sang of how beautiful his sister was, how any man would be luck to have her. I can’t remember the whole thing, but this lyric seared itself into my brain: “Lips touching… tongues dancing… They give each other the looook that can mean just one thiiiiiing…”. It was not done for laughs; he was crying as he sang, and everyone watching looked like they wanted to drop through the floor.
Then the wedding. Two sets of chairs set up in a lovely courtyard garden, aisle down the middle leading to a bower. We all seated ourselves, on the chairs, which had white upholstery.
The ceremony itself wasn’t that bad – my date and I thought things might be picking up. It didn’t last too long, and there were no more lurid songs from Bride’s bro. But then it ended, and the minister said:
“And now, I ask each of you to reach under your chairs for the small, white envelope you will find there. Each one contains a live Monarch butterfly. We will release them into the air and let them soar free, as a symbol of the love these two have for each other.”
Everyone. Froze. Whoever had set up the area had put the envelopes ON, not under, the chairs. White envelopes. Little white envelopes, on snow-white chair seats. Open-mouthed with horror, all the guests reached down and found the envelopes. We opened them. Most were dead – squashed into bloody smears. But a good amount were just horribly maimed, these poor butterflies that had been sat on for the better part of 45 minutes. We watched in shock as these broken-assed, mangled butterflies, missing a wing or some legs or a tail, flopped onto the ground and twitched out their death agonies.
Moral: No incest. No live butterflies. That is all.
4. “But what about terrible mother-of-the-bride stories?” you ask. Well, l0destone delivers.
After the vows and the kiss, as the couple was walking together down the aisle, the mother of the bride stopped the recessional and announced that she and her husband were renewing their vows right then and there. The husband was mortified, but went along with it.
After all, they paid for the wedding, and the band, and the flowers, and they didn’t want all of that to “go to waste”.
Once they had renewed their vows, the bride’s mother invited everyone to the “joint reception”. Throughout the reception, the mother loudly and repeatedly commented on how many gifts the bride and groom had received and how no one had bothered to bring a gift for the mother and husband. Never mind the fact that none of the guests (nor the wedding party, the planners, nor anyone else) knew the brides parents would be exchanging vows.
Towards the end, after a whole night of drinking, the drunken and sobbing mother accused the bride of stealing the mother’s “special day”, called her a whole bunch of mean things in front of her friends and family, then grabbed the wedding cake and left.
The bride and groom had another ceremony a few weeks later. No parents were invited.
5. Although nobody misbehaves here, this bride and groom’s big day goes from “beautiful” to “a deleted scene from Dune” in under 2 minutes.
6. It may be the bride’s day, and she may get what she wants, but that doesn’t mean it won’t suck for everyone involved (even if it’s the venue’s fault). That’s the moral of size_matters_not‘s story, which has no happy endings.
The hotel brought the wrong main meal during the reception, and rather than just shrug it off and get compensation later, the bride insisted they cook the whole thing from scratch. For 100 people.
This essentially brings the reception to an end as now all the guests have to wait an extra 2-3 hours to get dinner, pushing back the speeches to the end of the night. The evening guests waited in the bar all night, then went home without ever seeing the happy couple. There was no time for dancing.
That marriage didn’t last.
7. You know a wedding is a disaster when the worst person there isn’t the castle employee who described guests as acting like “peasants with money.” (Read more)
Photo Credit: Someecards
8. So far, no one’s been flat-out left at the altar yet. And certainly not in front of a bunch of kids. All of whom are the bride’s students. Enter jurassic_snark.
My entire fourth grade class was in attendance at our teacher’s wedding where she was left at the altar.
The whole situation was ugly. My teacher was the bride and was about 3/4 down the aisle when the groom decided he couldn’t do it. He walked off to the side and at first my teacher and her father didn’t notice and kept walking, smiling radiantly. There was about a minute of really solid confusion (last minute cold feet? bathroom emergency?) before everyone realized what was going on. My teacher was whisked out of the church and an announcement was made that there was not going to be a wedding. This happened the second or third week of June; she didn’t come back for the last week of school.
9. OK, but people get cold feet. What about a really bitter and dramatic revelation that everyone will always remember. Oh, purplepatch is so glad you asked.
My dad went to a society wedding in the 90s in the UK. The ceremony went ahead without incident and they had got to the speeches. The groom stood up, said “I’d like to thank my beautiful wife and my brilliant best man, as they’ve been fucking each other for the past 6 months, cheers!”
He downed his drink and walked out the back to stunned silence.
Apparently the father of the bride went round putting the corks back in the bottles shouting “Parties over, everyone out”. He seemed to think he could get money back on the booze.
10. There are objectively “worse” wedding guests, but the idea that this person mokachill observed at a friend’s wedding thought they were clever is insanely infuriating. Either that, or she was just crazy.
Not my wedding i was just a guest. Woman walking around introducing herself as “the grooms third wife” (it was his second wedding)… She was asked to leave not long after.
11. Although it’s unclear whether the marriage ended up working out, this amazing disaster story from Ireland involving crime families, hard cider, and lots of blood ended up dooming the hotel that redditor VoteAlanKelly worked at. (Note: the “Gardaí” are the Irish police.)
I didn’t attend, but I worked at one that was a disaster. It was many years ago when I was a barman in an Irish hotel.
The hotel was struggling, and so took a wedding booking from a well known criminal family, involved in drugs and burglary. Their daughter was marrying a member of a similar family from the other side of the country.
These families were very large, so the wedding was huge. The bride has asked us not to serve vodka, which was making people pretty angry as they were all in for the vodka and redbull. Most switched to cider, and we’d an entire shed full of the stuff.
About two hours into the reception shit hit the fan. The first sign something was wrong was that all the women suddenly made a beeline for the door. Thankfully one of the floor managers had seen this before and pulled the waitresses out the moment she saw it.
Once the women were clear of the floor the men started laying into one another. I saw a bottle fly past and we pulled the shutter down over the bar.
It was the biggest brawl I’ve ever seen, easily fifty men pucking the heads off one another. Someone drove a car into our emergency exit. Chairs went through windows. The fight spilled out to the rest of the Hotel, while the staff were locked behind the bar or in the kitchen.
We called the Gardaí, but they took their time coming as they obviously didn’t want to get into the middle of a massive brawl and were happy to let them tire each other out. We didn’t have enough security to make any difference as the owners were morons and couldn’t afford it anyway.
Finally when it was over we had to comp every other guest. We had a shed still full of cider, which we essentially had to do 3 for 2 offers on for months.
We spent the rest of that night, until about four in the morning, cleaning up blood (I’ve never seen so much fucking blood before or since), and glass, and human shit.
The place never recovered. We had to cancel the next 3 weddings due to the damage, and once word got around we couldn’t get any more. Locals avoided the place. It was sold six months later at a huge loss.
12. Racism is a family affair, sometimes on both sides of a wedding, as BANNEDFROMALAMO can attest.
My father in law made a drunken and racist rant about me at our wedding. It was hilarious because my father made a drunken racist rant about my wife during the rehearsal dinner.
I am seriously looking forward to some family reunion time where I can accidentally have them both go out on my fishing boat and just let nature take its course.
13. Speaking up during the “objection” part of the wedding never makes anyone popular, but sometimes you should really pay attention to them. Or at least, Mr. Scratchwell‘s dad should have.
True story: My Father has been married 5 times, and at the last wedding it happened – twice.
July 7th, 2007 the family and friends began to gather; all of us taking turns trying to talk him out of marrying the woman he had only met a few months before, but his mind was set. Since the date was so popular and arrangements were made so late the “minister” was a used car salesman with a certificate from an online site. The wedding and reception were held in my fathers back yard that happened to be right next door to his best friend, which he proves to be that day… I was resigned to my fate of best man that day ( my first and only time with that honor) when the ceremony began. My father began with a speech explaining how two people could meet and fall in love in such a short time and that he knew it was hard to believe… and that’s when his best friend, just in time from his fishing trip, raised his Tanqueray and tonic to ask, “is this the part where we object? Cause I’d like to!” In all my life I’ve never witnessed the mix of relief/shock/humor/horror and all the other emotions this stirred… my sister cried, his friends laughed, her family cringed, but my sweet grandmother was so stoic I’ll never forget. My father calmly said, “no Bud not yet” and went on; he began to talk about other relationships and people and how he knew this a marriage thay would last. And that’s when our hero spoke again, “How about now? I REALLY need to object to this!” The same sentiment was felt throughout and yet my father replied, “no Bud we’re not doing that” and then turned to the minster and said, “we should probably skip that part.” The ceremony went on… and so did the marriage- for about 6 months.
Tl; dr my dad’s best friend objected at his wedding and my dad wished he had listened.
14. Here’s not one, but two instances of people in the Great Lakes region engaging in their favorite activity—standing over a lake—when everything goes wrong and you can listen to them shout “oh my god” in their wonderful accents.
15. Not all objections result in the objector and the objectee staying friends, as saphiresgirl found out when she did the right thing.
Bride was my best friend. I was MOH. She knew her fiancé from a young age. They had a long distance relationship. He was in a band (worked at a gas station) in LA and she was in the Navy. She was about to go on a 6 month deployment, so they got engaged. I don’t know why.
She gets back from deployment, and tells me that she cheated on him the whole time. He was planning a trip out to where she was stationed, and I told her she needed to tell him. It wasn’t just sex, she claimed it was a relationship with this other guy for 6 months.
Well, during his visit she only tells him she was drunk and sad one night and kissed someone. But she tells me that the whole truth was told.
I offered condolences to the would be groom, and in that conversation we realize she told us different stories. He went back to her, demanded the truth. They broke up the next day.
She and I didn’t speak for a while. She ended up telling me the relationship wouldn’t have worked anyway. She’s happy now, recently married. Edit: when I said we are “repairing our friendship” I mean we have spoken once in 3.5 years. I figured since she’s married now I would say congratulations. I did, and she said thank you and a few other pleasantries. Nothing more than that.
16. When asked what someone should never, ever do for a wedding, punkwalrus had a really good answer.
Have a ridiculously expensive wedding at a resort and expect all guests to front the cost.
My wife and I were invited to a couple’s wedding in Jamaica. The cost per person was $1000 for 4 days, not including food or air fare, during a busy tourist season. It was also a themed wedding, and not a fun theme like Renaissance garb, but some kind of Italian clothing where everyone had to match. You had to show up to some place, get fitted for the style, and buy the suit or dress. For a guy it was about $350, but depending on the women’s size, up to $1200 for a dress. I have no idea how much a bridesmaid or usher had to pay; this was just to be a guest.
We declined, along with a majority of those invited. The bride gave everyone a hard time, especially because the $1000/person was ONLY if some minimum purchased was reached. The fact we wouldn’t pay meant others would be forced to pay more. I just didn’t have the estimated $5000 plus time off work to go.
They had the wedding anyway, but out of several hundred they planned for, 30 came. The groom had to change his best man twice because his first two couldn’t pay the steep fees required. This was flaunted as “well, now we know who our REAL friends are…”
Marriage lasted 7 months. I forgot why they split up.
17. This is what happens when one Philly wedding party has a cash bar and another Philly wedding has an open bar. Three people were arrested. Philly.
18. At least mothers and mothers-in-law have some excuse for stealing attention, unlike this incredibly egotistical aunt who both upstaged 2beagles‘ wedding and 2beagles’ brother-in-law’s wedding.
Had her two sons, both groomsmen, escort her down the aisle. Last minute. While we couldn’t do anything about it. And while it wasn’t done at the rehearsal. She is just one of the 3 aunts we had at our wedding. I had to deeply apologize to the other two that they weren’t similarly honored. And she’s just not that important. But we must always create drama and be the center of attention, musn’t we?
At my BIL’s wedding, she hadn’t been speaking to him for months before. Ignored him on the way into the church. Went up to him WHILE HE WAS WAITING AT THE ALTAR, though just before the processional, to make up. Gotta wait for the moment of highest drama, with a full audience in the church, don’t you know. Bonus if you get to distract him from his own wedding and focus on you.
19. There are only like 3 or 4 times in life when it’s really not OK to make a joke. This is one of them. (Read more)
Photo Credit: Someecards
20. Although it’s not pleasant to know the bride in magicalhands2014‘s tale burned her bridges with everyone in her life, it’s still somewhat satisfying.
I was at the wedding for one of my sisters friends who was the bride. The Bride never showed up at the wedding and no one could find her. After several hours the groom and his family all went home. Turned out the bride went for a wild night of partying and sleapt with some guy she met at a club. She was passed out drunk at his place all day long before she came around and realized she missed her own wedding. She was out with a friend that did nothing to stop her from getting wasted and screwing around (I think her freind let her get carried away because she thought the bride wouldn’t have been a good wife and figured it was the easiest way to get the couple to split up).
The father of the bride was mad as hell about the expense of the wedding that came out of his pocket. The groom has since moved on with his own life, discovering the woman he was going to marry had cheated on him the night before their wedding made him break it off. He hasn’t gotten married but I hear he’s dating someone and it looks serious enough they may get married soon. The Bride has been having problems trying to get the respect of her family back after that stunt. She once tried to talk to me when I was single to see if we could go out. I told her flat out I had no interest in dating a woman who cheats like she does. We’ve not spoken since, much to my relief.
21. Although many brides can’t wait to get out of their uncomfortable dresses, the idea of an unscheduled undressing is definitely many women’s worst nightmare.
22. Here, ladies and gentlemen (especially ladies), is the worst-case scenario for a wedding that still ends in marriage, from a wedding planner who had to make a throwaway account so as not to be identified. Warning: Really, really gross.
I work as an event planner. It was the wedding of two fairly wealthy families, and the bride had decided on a rather rural, “shabby chic” aesthetic. The reception, she decided, would take place on family property, in a historic barn. This caused a huge flurry of issues, between having to have the barn cleaned, the fact that we needed auxiliary tents as the barn wasn’t large enough, and the fact that the property lacked electricity and running water. The latter was solved with a bank of generators, tubs of water for catering, and a side tent with portajohns hidden inside.
The bride had, to be honest, been quite a bridezilla, but it’s my job to deal with those things. At this point, the ceremony had ended, cocktail hour is shutting down, professional photos were taken. We were prepping to transition to the entrance of the bridal party, which would be followed immediately by first dance and cake cutting. During this, the dinner would be staged, so every aspect was being fairly carefully timed out.
I was speaking to the caterer when I happened to glance over and see the most curious blend of expressions pass over the bride’s face, and she frantically waved down my assistant. A few moments later, my headset beeped on, and my assistant said “we have an issue”. It turns out that the bride had gambled on a fart and lost in a big way. Now, the bride was wearing a huge, full ball gown, with a fitted, bones strapless top in a sort of embellished mesh. Underneath, she had a shaper garment and hoops and slips. We had already realized there was zero way of her going to the bathroom: we had issues getting her into a limo, and having her use a portajohns meant one of us would have to get personal. That was my assistants job. I radioed to everyone to expect a fifteen minute delay, and they headed towards the tent.
The fifteen minutes pass. Then twenty. Finally, my earpiece beeps on. “The previous issue is more than we anticipated.” I ran over to find my assistant looking horrified.
The bride, it turns out, had been using some health shakes in an attempt to fix last minute bloating. This had mixed poorly with the cocktails from earlier, and she had eaten a fairly decent breakfast. The substance that had come out of her body as a result defied explanation. It was slimy, oily even, with stringy bits and the consistency of hair gel. Not only had it been a rather profound accident, but the smell was unrivaled. Generally, a substance no human body should emit.
But the thing that set it over the edge was that the shaper the bride wore was a latex deal that came down over the thighs and up to her bra. Waterproof, the poo had just sort of filled it, like a water balloon of horror. My assistant had opened up the snap crotch and just released the evil trickling down the brides thighs.
My assistant quickly sealed it back up and she and the bride vainly tried to wipe up the goo, dry, with toilet paper. This just spread it around, so they decide to give up.
Now I have a shell shocked assistant and a crying bride. You can smell her four feet away. The bride is just flipping out that she’s making her guests wait, that she has a choreographed dance waiting to happen, and she needs to be introduced NOW. I’m just looking at her manicured nails. Residue of diarrhea are just imbedded in her nail bed. I start trying to scrape the poo out with a fabric stain wipe, while the bride insists that the show must go on, immediately. I give in that this is an issue which will have to wait, and signal to start introductions. The groom looks vaguely disconcerted by his new wife’s odor, but I tell my assistant to distract him until they take the floor. Introductions happen, the dance starts, and we find some fresh horror.
The dance was a choreographed affair, and as the groom spun his bride around, hand on her waist, he is squishing the poo up the insides of the waist trainer, up and out the back waistband. To our horror, we watch as a oily stain spread across the mid back of the gown. As we are still cringing from this, the groom sets his hand firmly in the middle of the poo stain.
Action had to be taken as soon as the couple left the dance floor, it was obvious, and I left my assistant in charge while I made preparations. She kept radioing me: the stain was spreading, she could smell the poo from her spot by the dj. They were cutting the cake now. They were feeding the cake to each other, both now with shit stained fingers. Each was looking downright repulsed.
As they left the dance floor, I had someone rush wet naps to the groom and to bring me the bride. The support tent was closed down for me, and I pulled a tub of clean water from the caterers. She walked in to find me in dish gloves and a poncho, like American Psycho, The five minutes, I was sponging down a sobbing, naked bride, while I questioned every life decision that lead to this point.
The diarrhea was everywhere, spread in a thin layer across her body. It may be the most disgusting thing I’ve ever dealt with. With her clean, I threw away the waist shaper, and scrubbed down the $15 k wedding gown back in a plastic basin. The inner lining was a loss, and I cut it out completely.
Dressed again,and offered a Xanax, the bride was little worse for wear, except for missing her dinner. The support tent smelled like a sewer and just was closed for the remainder of the event. The groom was a sport, never directly saying anything, but asking if we could cancel the garter toss as he didn’t really want to go under her skirt.
Pictures from the event appeared in a magazine. Still photos, away from the smell, were beautiful.
This post originally published by our partners at Someecards.
