50 Disappointed Guests Reveal The Worst Wedding They Suffered Through

1. The bride’s aunt died on the dance floor while dancing.

2. I was at a dry wedding where the main theme was “books”. You were assigned to read a book prior to the wedding and were sat with people who read that same book to create conversation. Interesting idea, but a majority of people aren’t going to do it. People were also purposely not put with people they knew, in attempt to make people socialize with others. Basically all we did is make a few sentences about how we didn’t read the book, and left after a being served an inedible dinner and headed to a bar.

3. Ugh. I had friends get married in a “forest.” It was a stretch of meager woods between two cornfields. Mosquitoes galore. We had to sit on logs that were covered in damp moss, the mud was ankle deep in places, and the ceremony was inaudible due to a tractor plowing the field. They served food out a “charming old cottage” that was actually a rotting former chicken coop that the groom literally dragged in from elsewhere. The entire event was a nightmare.

4. They did a potluck wedding, but no one brought any food. Everyone left after the first dance.

5. A coastal wedding. In England. In January.

The weather here is unpredictable at the best of times and the Bride and Groom decided to have their wedding at a castle right by the sea – of course, it being January, the weather was atrocious, high winds coming directly off the sea and pissing rain ALL DAY. It was freezing and the reception was in a marquee… there were very few heaters.

I remember I specifically bought a new outfit for this wedding and was able to wear it again to the next one because I didn’t take off my coat the entire time. It was hideous.

6. My friend’s wedding. Here are some of the highlights:

• Him telling us the day before that he was either going to marry her or break up with her the next day.

• Him getting drunk on the morning of the wedding and stinking of cheap rum.

• His family falling out on the day of the wedding and half of them deciding not to attend.

• His best man’s speech turning in to a fundamentalist Christian lecture about the holy spirit.

• Him desperately searching for a honeymoon on the hotel computer because he had forgotten to book anything.

They’re divorced now.

7. Went to a wedding at a lake, it had stunningly beautiful scenery which looked great on the wedding photos. What you couldn’t see on the wedding photos were the algae that had formed in the lake due to the warm summer and the resulting death stench from the algae killing all the wildlife in the lake.

8. My wife’s and my mutual friend hates Star Wars. Just can’t stand it.

Her husband’s is a crazed fan.

When they moved in together, he took an entire wall – literally the entire thing, top to bottom, floor to ceiling – and hung his action figures (still in box) on nails.

She planned their wedding, he made lots of changes. Before the ceremony, he had the chapel play that never ending bar song. When he walked to the front of the chapel, he had Darth Vader’s Imperial March playing. She walked down the aisle to the Star Wars theme song.

She hated the entire thing and was visibly bothered by it. He thought it was amazing, a life dream. They tell their son, Anakin, about their wedding day all the time. Nope, not a joke.

9. Went to a wedding once where you could just feel the tension in the air. One of the sets of in-laws didn’t seem to like the new spouse (can’t remember which side). Before the ceremony, mother freaked out and I’m pretty sure they gave her some drugs to calm her down. The ceremony goes ok until the vows. The couple wrote their own. Cool idea. But they wrote them in heavy sarcasm. I’m a fan of sarcasm but there’s a time and a place for everything. Wedding vows is not the time or the place for sarcasm.

10. Catholic mass wedding. Bride walks down the isle and the preacher starts to do his thing. It’s a large church so he’s hooked up to a mic and speaker system. About a minute in the connection starts to go out. The speakers are making horrible sounds and his words are breaking up terribly. Nobody every came out to try to fix it. He didn’t even take his mic off and just try to speak loudly. He just continued like that for the remainder of the ceremony. All that accompanied by children screaming in the back and their parents didn’t bother taking them outside, I was horrified for the bride.

This was what cemented my No Kids policy for my own wedding ceremony.

11. You want to kill a wedding? Put speeches an hour after dinner and have that happen for three hours. I think speeches started around 8 pm, by the time the video tributes and the people talking about how great everyone is ended, it was 11 o clock and everyone was just done. Not a lot of time to dance and socialize left over when the venue was closing at midnight. I was feeling sick so I should have left sooner.

12. A former boss held his wedding at the family cottage on a lake. The “theme” of the wedding appeared to be “get the lake house ready for the wedding.” Centerpieces were candid photos of the whole family cleaning trees, planting flowers. ALL speeches were nothing but praise for the family coming together to create such a nice wedding site. It was like the wedding itself wasn’t important, just the fact that they got ready for it.

13. The wedding party was late for EVERYTHING. They were an hour late to the ceremony, they were two hours late for dinner, then they decided to do speeches before the meal so there went another hour. Then they played a stupid game where they played a song and if your table guessed the song you could go get in line for the buffet. My table went last because none of us had very much knowledge of country music and by that time it was another hour gone by.

We ate cold roast beef and the scrapings of a Caesar salad at 9:30 at night. It was also in a small town where nothing was open past 6 and it was over an hour to the next nearest town.

14. First, the very long Catholic ceremony’s sermon had the premise of “get her pregnant as soon as possible.”

Second, it turned out to be a dry wedding.

Third, the only food was an appetizer buffet.

Fourth, I was the guest of an ex-boyfriend, so I knew literally 3 people there, all of whom were in the wedding party, so it was difficult to spend time with them.

I left very sober, hungry, confused and bewildered. 0/10 Terrible time.

15. Definitely not as horrible as some of these, but my fiance and some friends of his went to their old bosses wedding. The food was mediocre (extremely small portions, like shitty sliders and pizza pockets) and we never ate because we had figured it was just the appetizers and that the food would be out shortly after, so the entire time we were STARVING. Also my best friend’s ex boyfriend was seated next to us sulking and sighing the entire time (they had just broken up that week) and being extra weepy when the slow dance songs came on. Fiance and i congratulated the couple and left ASAP and went to Burger King. Chicken fries were 10/10

16. It was pretty obvious that none of the non-family guests liked the bride. The BM toast was all about their friendship and how he got himself a hot wife that will hopefully let them hang out together, bride side of ceremony empty besides relatives, no one went to do bouquet toss, MOH was really a good friend of the groom who toasted for him to be happy and said nothing about the bride except she was pretty.

Food was pretty inedible. Venue was not accessible, and some guests were handicapped.

And also everyone left after dessert. The wedding ended very early.

17. Went to a Viking heathen wedding, cosplay and all the mead. We got there late because of traffic and missed the ceremony but we were in time for the reception to start. Only, the bride was already plastered. And she was a mean drunk who started a pretty big fight with her husband in front of everyone.

All the guests moved to an area where the fighting wasn’t as loud, and eventually the wife went to bed with their 9 month old baby and the groom’s friends were consoling the groom.

I spent my time with the other women trying to move the baby out of the bed that the bride had passed out in, and left at 11.

Wasn’t much fun.

18. My older sister’s wedding.

• My parents originally weren’t going to attend because she was marrying a Jew and they were conservative-Christians who were against them being together (and very vocal about it) from day one.

• My dad cheated on my mom and was in the process of leaving her for his secretary, but they both decided to attend the ceremony and act like they were still together for my sister’s sake. “Awkward” doesn’t even begin to describe that scenario.

• The groom’s came from a very wealthy family, so most of the people there were the “hootie-patootie” types I can’t stand to be around.

• My dad decided to make a spectacle of himself, so he got drunk and insulted some of the groom’s family members.

My older brother couldn’t make it to the wedding because he and his wife were expecting their baby right around the same date. Trust me if I could have gotten some girl knocked-up to get out of going I would have…..

19. Groom was very into techno. No DJ, so they had a Spotify playlist that was exclusively dance music. No one danced.

Someone hacked the laptop, started putting on 00s rock music – the Killers etc. Everyone was on the floor. Groom grabbed the laptop back (mid song), techno goes back on, everyone leaves dance floor.

It was awful.

Please for the love of God play decent music (or at least stuff other people might have heard of).

20. We went to a wedding for one of my wife’s old college friends. The wedding ceremony was nice, but the reception was pretty bad. We get seated at a table full of strangers, so that was awkward. Then came time for the dessert bar. We were all told there wasn’t going to be dinner, just desserts. So we all get in line for the deserts. There were all kinds of nice looking cakes, cookies, pies, etc, but once we got to the end of the table…suddenly a carving station. The poor cook was having to plate rib roast on top of plates full of deserts. Who planned to have the carving station at the end and not the beginning of the line? Once we got back to our table, we noticed there was no music to be heard, no DJ or band and no dance floor. Also the only thing to drink was water or iced tea. So sitting at a table with nothing to do but eat meat-soaked cakes was someone’s idea of a swell time. I later found out the church where the wedding and reception were held at was one of those that banned dancing because “it was of the Devil.” I seriously thought something like that only existed in Footloose, and I thought that was a dumb and unrealistic premise.

21. I went to a family friend’s wedding.

It was over 3 hours long (I fell asleep so it may have been longer)

Why was it so long you ask?

The parents of the bride and groom each gave a power-point presentation on biblical verses (not about the couple).

22. They wanted to be traditional and accommodating to all their family’s desires. It was too formal, there were 8-9 speeches and the wedding ceremony lasted for an hour and a half. It just felt sooo thick and stuffy.

The reception between the ceremony and dinner was only 30 minutes, so everyone quickly had two beers. Then it was a single glass of wine with the main course. After 3-4 lifeless hours of speeches the dance-floor opened up at like 10pm and they opened the bar.

People hit the bar HARD at this point and some got way too drunk. At midnight there was a fist fight.

Why was it bad? Well I wouldn’t call it a disaster, it was just boring. They wanted to do too much, and included too many people in the planning process. It didn’t leave any room for people to have fun and talk to family or friends. Waiting so long to serve booze didn’t keep people sober, it made people drink way to hard at the end.

Long story short, you don’t need to hire entertainers, just move it all along and let people have a couple of drinks, dance and chat with relatives/friends.

23. Went to a couple of dry weddings when I was first in college, both of which were for Christian couples that were my age who wanted to get married so they could finally have sex.

Both were okay, but awkward. One was held in a reception hall that had an inexplicable amount of Wizard of Oz paraphernalia behind glass cases. The tables were too close together. It was hard watching the Maid of Honor give the speech since she was the bride’s unmarried older sister who had a child. She was trying not to cry the whole time. For the other dry-Christian wedding, I snuck in booze and shared, but because the dinner line was hours-long, I ran out of alcohol before the dancing. And the dancing was terrible. The worst choice of songs was topped off by playing “Kryptonite” as a dance song with lots of dorky white teenagers trying to dance to it. I still get an extra bump of cringe every time I hear that song.

For those curious, Kryptonite couple is divorced. Wizard of Oz couple is together to my knowledge.

24. We were told it was going to be open bar, and it wasn’t.

The only free thing was water and ice.

The liquor store down the road made brisk business that day. The bar at the venue did not.

Bar manager tried to kick people out for bringing their own booze in until the groom’s parents intervened, as it would have resulted in an empty room.

Turns out the bride decided on this about a week before the wedding to save a bit of cash without informing anyone.

25. Outdoor backyard wedding. It was raining, mud everywhere, heels ruined.

The bride was my bratty cousin. I held the umbrella for her so she didn’t get wet.(I was suppose to with other bridesmaids, but they refused, and I got chewed out if I tried to stop.)

There also wasn’t enough food. So wet, ruined heels, no food.

As soon as the bride went inside for the bathroom, I got outta there. I stuffed my face with fast food on the way home.

26. One of my cousin’s wedding. The couple were both were really happy and sweet. Everyone was having a good time and were a bit tipsy from all the alcohol. Out came our weird aunt and kept grinding against every visible male member present. Needless to say watching your 40 something aunt rub her butt against another 40 something relative is not a pretty sight. That was forever immortalized in their wedding video.

27. Shotgun wedding between a couple 17 year old kids. They clearly didn’t want to get married and their relationship was only physical, it was super cringy when they tried to do a toast but couldn’t give the bride and groom any champagne.

28. Hyper religious wedding.. The ceremony was super long and all about GOD FIRST, the couple second.. And how the wife should obey the husband and about how they needed to have kids now.

Thankfully there was alcohol but we were the only table drinking it. The bar staff were bored out of their minds. My ex was seated at the same table as my (then boyfriend) husband and I. The best man’s speech was about the tickle fights him, the groom and the other religious guys would have… And when the groom (who was a friend of mine from high school) came over to our table to say hi, a guy from the table behind him kept stroking his ear? It honestly was really sad the amount of closeted gay guys there was in that room.

Also I made the mistake of mentioning to some religious chick that I lived with my boyfriend and she suddenly turned away and stopped talking to me.

29. It was my brothers wedding. There were a lot of trashy and classic things. But in retrospect what really made it bad was that it foreshadowed a lot of bad.

At his own wedding he stole his thunder by announcing they were pregnant after hiding it to that point. And did it minutes before the ceremony for everyone to hear.

Bride looked pissed through the entire thing, I’m pretty sure she didn’t approve. I don’t just mean the ceremony, i mean the entire night.

Announced during his speech that “that whole table of assholes who RSVPed and didn’t bother to show up” and he pointed to a table no one would have noticed, “They are WRONG. I will be a great husband, the best husband. And, the BEST father. They will see.”

So yeah, he walked out on her when the baby was something like 2 months old to be with another girl he knocked up who was something like 6 months pregnant.

30. Fancy wedding at an award-winning restaurant, groom was head chef. Maybe 100 or so guests. Stoked to eat some great food.

We show up, realize they had the wedding itself on a boat an hour earlier with only a dozen or so of the closest guests. Kinda weird walking in and seeing the bride in her dress just shmoozing with everyone but cool, whatever floats your boat (lol).

Open bar! Everyone grabs their drinks and starts to get a bit tipsy. Food starts coming out. Everyone is lined up buffet style. Four of those hotel pans of food come out and are quickly emptied. The rest of the crowd (maybe 60-70 people) wait around in line for 10, 15, 20 minutes. Most sit back down or grab another drink.

Another half hour passes. People get more drunk. Food still isn’t coming out. Bride, groom, and family seem completely unfazed. There was a cheese/meat board but everything was gone in the first 10 minutes except for a giant wheel of parmesan, which people started hacking at desperately with forks.

Flash forward two hours. Everyone is completely trashed and angry/confused AF. Still no food. We’re in a restaurant. The groom is a chef. What is happening. A drunk 13 year old girl stole my hat.

We went to Taco Bell.

Six months later, the bride messages me on Facebook asking if my now husband and I would like them to cater our upcoming wedding.

31. They ran out of bottled water at a reception in a non air conditioned church in July. There weren’t cups on the tables either so we couldn’t even fill them at a sink or drinking fountain. There was no alcohol which is fine but I don’t really dance without being a few drinks deep. We left immediately after the cake cutting, drenched in sweat.

32. I’m going to say my cousin’s daughters wedding. It was in Labor Day weekend and it felt like the hottest day ever. First of all, I’m not a fan of people having weddings on a holiday weekend but whatever, not why this was bad.

We drove an hour to get to this barn in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere. All the chairs were set up in this field in the beating sun, the service was about 45 minutes and I thought the groom was going to pass out. He was 300lbs and had the suit jacket with the vest still on. We finally made it through the service and we got into the barn for the reception. No fans and no air conditioning. It was 100 people crammed into a barn in 98 degree weather. This was the barn’s first wedding with everything “brand new”. My mother went to sit down and the chair split in half. Thank god my uncle didn’t sit there like he wanted to because he had just gotten major back surgery and the ambulance would have had to come and find this barn in the middle of the woods.

My mom, my dad, my uncle, and myself went to sit under the shade of an Apple tree until dinner was served and then got the hell out of there.

It would have been a beautiful wedding if it wasn’t the same temperature as Hell.

33. My brother’s wasn’t bad, but it was kind of annoying. It was held in a place where no microphones were allowed (due to the presence of tropical birds who would be upset by them) and the registrar who was doing the service had no concept of vocal projection, so we were just sitting there desperately trying to make out what she was saying so we could follow. I look grumpy in every photo due to straining myself to hear, and I was in the second row! We were essentially just watching a woman’s lips flapping while my sister-in-law was wearing a nice dress.

34. Went to a couple’s wedding who were both on their second wedding. The dude was rich so everything was pretty nice. Except they decided a DJ wasn’t needed. She made a playlist from Youtube and had that playing.

The levels on all the songs were different, we had to wait for shitty wifi to play load the songs, and someone had to keep changing the playlist when it finished. But that wasn’t the worst part.

More than half the songs were Pitbull. He was on every playlist, sometimes in a row, and songs were repeated.

I should add in that they definitely had the money for it, as they had a guy playing guitar the whole time. No singing. Just acoustic guitar while pictures were being taken.

35. I’ve never been to a bad wedding, but I’ve been to weddings with bad moments. One of the worst was a catholic wedding where the priest was cracking sexist jokes, covering horrible stereotypes. He talked for almost 30 minutes, and it was like a terrible stand-up show. He said things like-

-As we all know, men and women are different. Women love shopping, and men love working with their hands. So men, when you wife goes shopping and buys you new stuff, just know that’s what women are like. I mean, women, am I right??

-Men, when you come home from work and the kids want to play, and your wife wants a break, remember she’s been home with them all day and need a break too.

-Men and women’s brains are different. While men’s brains are organized and logical, women’s brains are like a bowl of spaghetti. So when you’re having communication problems, just remember you love spaghetti and it makes sense to her!

My husband and I were trying really hard not to laugh. Other than that, it was a lovely and super fun wedding!

36. My brother’s wedding. My parents and I have helped him through a lot of trouble in his life – prison, addiction etc. He’s clean and clear now but I don’t think he’s ever understood what those years did to our family. And in typical white people fashion we never talk about it.

His wife was wedding CRAZY so it was all about her, which is fine except. Her family had all the front tables, we were stuck down the back behind his ‘rehab family’ – they had 3 hours of speeches where no one thanked or acknowledged my mum or dad. Who had given them $20k for the wedding.

We were then the last table to get to go to the buffet by which time nothing was left. Oh and of course there was no alcohol.

My husband and I went through McDonalds on the way home.

It just showed me that people never change, he’s still an idiot. Now he’s just an idiot with a wife.

37. Parents of the bride were divorced and it was clearly not amicable. The bride didn’t seem to have much backbone so instead of telling them to put aside their shit, they ran amok. She walked down the aisle with her natural dad but then her in-law dad stood with her at the altar. She had to do two separate father-daughter dances to two complete songs. The bio dad was hooked up with a loud trashy girl a good 15-20 years younger than her bio mom so she decided to wear a low cut dress that looked more for nightclubbing while the ex wife stared daggers at her all night. It was most awkward 4 hours of my life.

38. Friend’s wedding. Her and fiancé have a pretty clear idea of what they want. They involved family in some minor stuff but basically said to guests and relatives that money based help was super appreciated as they weren’t that well off, but otherwise – they’d got it sorted.

The groom’s mother can’t deal with this, and so her response is to make the whole day about her.

She changed the groom’s tie on the day without telling him because “she likes that one better”, she insists the bride’s makeup people do her hair exactly like the bride’s, she holds up the whole wedding party by fussing over who goes in what car to the point that the groom is late to the church. She snatched the mic so she could make her own speech as well as the father of the bride and then complained about their music choice during their first dance and delayed the cake cutting by saying it couldn’t happen without her there but then deciding she needed to go home and change dress before the next round of photos.

It was just so incredibly awkward for everyone, because both the bride and the groom were clearly barely holding back from losing their temper with her the whole day and she just made them both miserable rather than just letting them enjoy their own wedding.

39. The bride and groom totally skimped on the food. It was a long day from church (1pm) to dancing (9pm) and we were starving and miles away from the nearest town.

After a long mass, we were able to get half a scone with jam and cream, then wait for dinner at 5pm. The plated three course meal had no options and the portions were tiny and the food was not filling. My “fruit salad and ice cream” desert looked like carrot shavings.

There wasn’t any evening snacks for the people who stayed to dance, and they didn’t even cut the cake.

We were starving and that’s just not a feeling you can ignore at an event no matter how pretty the Pinterest.

40. It’s a toss up between the one where the bridal and groom party took a 5 1/2 hour detour between the ceremony and the reception for photos (a reception where no food was to be served prior to their arrival with only a cash bar that also wouldn’t serve until their arrival).

And a totally dry wedding where the groom put a large cash gift from one of the bride’s family members under his plate only to forget until after the reception was cleaned up (cue myself and several groomsmen inside a dumpster emptying and searching every bag in vain hopes of finding the lost money while the bride literally wept and wailed in the groom’s arms).

41. My fiancé’s brother got married earlier this year.

The married couple in question have a tendency for executing 85% of the plan and leaving the rest to other people to figure out.

I was one of the groomsmen and between his mother and myself, we became the last 15%.

He wanted every groomsmen to drive from where we were staying to the venue (a barn) separately because “We all have cool cars and it will look cool for us to arrive in a convoy”. I responded with questioning if the venue allowed cars to stay overnight (I knew the guest count and the amount of alcohol he brought so I knew it was going to be one of those weddings). He said “probably”.

Normal wedding stuff. Nice event. Bartenders have the heaviest of pours. People are starting to get really drunk. Towards the end the bartender starts handing entire bottles to attendees to get rid of it. Groom was double fisting wine bottles at one point.

10pm. The venue owners asks me and my soon to be mother-in-law, why we haven’t started cleaning up yet and when she was going to get her final check. Come to find out not only had the couple not paid the final payment, they declined the cleanup fee saying “the grooms mother will handle that” and never told anyone else about it. The Mom obviously loses her mind and sends me to go find the groom because explanations are needed. I find him face down in a field surrounded by a pool of his own vomit with the other groomsmen trying to pick him up (he’s a big boy at 6’5” 260lbs). I get him up and carry him back to the barn where his buddies nurse him back to life.

I come back to report to his mom who is furiously cleaning up. Needless to say my report did not help her fury. Come to find out they absolutely refused to allow cars to stay overnight at the venue so after we finished cleaning, brought the groom back to life, had his mom write a check, we then spent the next two hours getting drunk folks and cars to the various hotels they were staying at.

42. Went to my cousin’s wedding, in November, in New York, that took place in a barn, with no heating whatsoever.

Everyone was freezing their asses off. The Bride’s dead Father had recorded a message for her. She didn’t know about it. They had to stop the wedding for an hour while she cried. The bridesmaids cried with her. 10/10 worst wedding I’ve ever been to.

(Also the food was mediocre)

43. My brother’s wedding. My family is mormon and he got married inside the mormon temple. You can only watch the ceremony if you are a mormon with a mormon bishops approval. I didn’t have approval and neither did my parents.

So my brothers wedding consisted of me watching kids on the lawn of a mormon temple in the summer heat while my parents openly wept.

44. Oh man this one is easy. It was on a beach on a day where the wind decided it wanted to make a point that it was boss. Wind coming off the ocean tends to cut through clothing really easily and this was an outside wedding at night.

45. A sibling’s wedding.

It was a shotgun wedding, with the bride looking like a 7-months pregnant satin sausage, the groom drunk off his ass (despite not being legally old enough to drink), the ceremony being performed by the local “indian” amongst the motorcycle gang the bride’s dad belonged to, while the groom’s mother and step-mother (who previously had restraining orders against one other) took a time out from their on-going feud to share shots out of the same flask, at a VFW hall off a major highway.

Did I mention there were turkey vultures circling the building as we arrived?!

46. Probably my cousin’s wedding. It was nice, there was nothing wrong with the wedding itself. But a lot of people were/are very confused by their relationship. It doesn’t seem like they are in love, they could be 2 strangers on the bus, that’s how much chemistry they have. It just didn’t seem like they were right for each other and just got married because they felt like it was the next step. I talked to my sister about it the other day and turns out that a few months after they got married my cousin asked our aunt (her mother) how she could get an annulment… but then a week later she found out she was pregnant… They’re still together today – she’s due this Winter. N one knows she talked to her mom about it except me, my mom and my sister. I don’t even think her husband knows.

47. Went to a low-cost wedding. It wasn’t the low budget that made it bad, but several things stemming from that.

1. They never specified that it was a casual wedding to anyone other than close friends and family. The invitations were pretty fancy looking so I went out and bought a simple yellow sundress because I didn’t have anything nice to wear at the time. I showed up overdressed. Most people were in t-shirts and dirty jeans. The other 1/3rd were more dressed up than the entire wedding party.

2. It was at a public park, it was crowded and there were dogs shitting everywhere and one couple in a very loud argument that you could hear across the park.

3. The reception was held in this tiny community room you could rent. It stunk like cigarettes. Most of the guests left the ceremony and went directly to the reception, because that’s what the invitation said to do. After an hour passed without the bride or groom showing up, some caterers wheeled in some food and left. No one wanted to start eating before the bride and groom showed up, so the food just sat there getting cold. Another hour went by without the couple showing up, and eventually people got hungry enough to just say fuck it and serve themselves. I’m just being honest when I say the food was absolutely disgusting. Vienna sausages in a now cold, sweet sauce, wilted veggie platter, cold canned chili. There also wasn’t nearly enough food for all the guests they invited so by the time the people in the back of the line got up there, nothing was left. Two more hours passed before the bride and groom finally showed up. So that’s four hours we were all sitting in this tiny, stinky room, with no music, no dancing, no nothing. FOUR HOURS. Once they got there the bride and groom just went over to their table and sat there. It became apparent that nothing was actually planned for the reception other than those 3 cold trays of food for 50+ people. At that point me and the group of people I came with decided to say congrats and leave. I don’t even know why we stayed for so long.

And yes they are still happily married 10+ years later. It was just a very poorly planned budget wedding.

48. It was actually a really nice wedding, but it was an outdoor venue and it was unseasonably cold and it was raining.

The venue where the wedding was held was outdoors, but it was like…a huge covered patio (like, even enough for the 120-150 guests to have seats under the roof).

Anyway, instead of the seasonal average of like 65-70, we had 45 with wind and rain. Even if my tux with the jacket and all, it was chilly. The bridesmaids were shivering. The rain was blowing in because the patio was covered, but there weren’t walls or anything…

I love the idea of outdoor weddings, but I don’t think I’d do it. I’ve been to four and only once has had the weather be cooperative.

49. This was because of my wife’s family. We wanted to keep the wedding very small. We were very young and some thought we were too young to get married, so this was the reasoning for keeping it small. I had my parents, brother and 4 friends. My wife invited her parents, brother and grandmother. Her grandmother took it upon herself to invite the entire side of my wife’s family. We had over 100 unexpected guests that acted as if they were insulted that they had to be there.

The good news is, my wife kicks ass, going on 15 years.

50. My “best”friend’s wedding. She should never have married her husband. She is only with him because she doesn’t think she can do better and no one else had really expressed interest. It was painful to watch her just lock herself into this darkness/nihilation of self. I could see she even knew that’s what was happening, somewhere deep inside. So many things happened which made it clear what was happening and even why. To bullet the despair:

• She spent the evening before with my husband and I talking about any guy she had ever had an interest in or flirtation with. It was like she was mouring all of her lost chances. No excitement, no mention of her husband to be. We jokingly (but not that jokingly) offered to just take her home with us, 6 hours away

• She had no plans for getting ready the next day. Asked me at 10 PM to do her hair and makeup and arranged for the photographer to come to my hotel to document this. We also drove her to the wedding.

• Neither I nor my husband (her second best friend) were invited to be in her wedding party. It was strange, and so many people the next day would say “Oh, you’re her best friend! She talks about you all the time!” and look confused. Her matron of honor and bridesmaid were her husband’s best man’s family. They did not contribute to helping her get ready. It was like she didn’t want us, the people who care about her, involved in this.

• Her parents had not been in touch for days and came 15 minutes late to the ceremony, never calling her beforehand. She had clearly learned her lack of value at home…

• His vows were mostly jokes for the audience. Loving her was never mentioned.

• Despite her asking him not to, he violently smushed the cake in her face. I helped her clean up. It was deeply up her nostrils, in her hair, in her eyes. Bridemaids tried to take pictures while laughing until I menacingly threw them out of the bathroom. It took me a while to make her vaugely presntable again. I offered again to just take her with me, far less jokingly. This time she was quiet and a little teary but did not respond.

• Best man’s speech was about her husband mostly, with a story about how clumsy she is. I had to walk outside. My husband had to calm me down as I cried and yelled about it all, before people heard me.

In the end, this was her choice. She spent the following ten years- so far- feeding the worst, saddest parts of herself. She’s become completely self-involved (I guess she needs to because no one else in her life is taking care of her). We haven’t actually spoken in about 3 years, though she emails with my husband (again, about herself only). She still calls me her BFF on facebook and refers to my daughter as her niece, though my daughter doesn’t know her at all. Thank God they never had children. I know they haven’t had sex in at least 4 years.

It was a wedding, but it felt like watching someone commit suicide.