Wedding Guests Reveal Their Deliciously Awful Ceremony Catastrophes
Ah weddings, where so much is supposed to go right but most things don't. Imagine the priest dropping dead, or the roof caving in. Or the groom hitting on everyone, throwing his wedding ring, and the honeymoon still happening. Vegas at 2 A.M. doesn't seem like such a bad idea, does it?
DrillWormBazookaMan asked: Couples whose wedding was an absolute catastrophe, what happened?
Submissions have been edited for clarity, context, and profanity.
Unwanted guests, stolen gifts. Thanks, mother-in-law.
Two things.
70 more guest showed up than were invited. Turns out MIL was inviting people and not telling us. We ran out of chairs, food, everything. Except wine, we had plenty of that.
Someone stole the wedding gifts.
Ooof.
The wedding was nothing as expected but the marriage has been nothing but a blessing.
It rained non stop, the venue was outside with a gazebo type structure, we still held it there, just closer to the middle so we wouldn't get wet.
We had a low budget wedding, so no live band, just a dj. We gave him the music for the first husband/wife song at rehearsal and all was good. Once it was time for the dance he played the wrong song 3 times, until my husband had it and left me standing in the middle while he went to put the damn music himself.
We hired a professional photographer and also asked our families to take pics with the 3 cameras that we had. We have a total of 10 picture for the whole thing. The professional photographer only had 6 good pictures, everything else was ruined for some reason. The pictures taken with our cameras were all ruined also, this was 17 years ago so i am fuzzy on the details, but all in all, we only got 4 pictures from those cameras.
we were to stay at a hotel in the honeymoon suite and then the next day travel to our honeymoon destination. When we arrived to the hotel (around 1 in the morning i think) they had already given the honeymoon suite to a family because they forgot it was reserved, so we had to stay in a regular room.
EDIT: just to clarify because a lot are asking: This is a third world country, very poor, and at the time we had just started rebuilding after a long war. Customer service was non existing, technology for the pictures was really really bad, so it was a very different time/place from what we would know as normal now, or what we would expect now. At the time, if things went sideways you tough it out and move on. There was no compensation, refunds, or anything like that.
Probably not the best timing.
So my cousin recently got married to his long term partner and the actual wedding itself went really well.
The reception directly after the ceremony however was marred somewhat by the brides parents announcing half way through the night and completely out of the blue that they would be divorcing...
Rain + weak roof = smashed cake.
Not my wedding, but a close friend's colleague.
So much went wrong, but I'll summarise:
unexpected heavy rain
wedding ceremony shifted to inside venue
ceiling collapsed from heavy rainfall right on top of elaborate wedding cake
Luckily the bride and groom had a VERY good sense of humour and iirc the venue refunded a fair amount of what they had paid out of goodwill.
My kinda wedding.
My wedding was awesome, but there was some craziness:
An ambulance was called when one of my groomsmen decided to take a bite out of his pint glass and eat it (on a dare he drunkenly made to himself). My wife and I only learned of this after the fact (as they were good about keeping it away from us).
We had our roommate become a reverend online (Universal Life Church) to marry us who did a great job, but many of the guests thought we just hired a Catholic priest (we come from Catholic families) -- e.g., we just referred to him as Reverend <first name>. Several friends were impressed with the Reverend busting moves on the dance floor and then expressed surprise when he was drunkenly making out with a large black man.
We had an open bar until midnight and then a lower-key cash bar for two hours after that (most guests stayed at the venue which was also a hotel). Our "priest" and someone described as a "large black man" were observed stealing a bottle of Grey Goose from the cash bar, so the next morning when we were finalizing everything we got to pay $300 for it or they could call the authorities. Also, we had given our reverend a bottle of Johnnie Walker (along with the other groomsmen), but he just never opened his groomsmen gift.
Genius.
My aunt and uncle were getting married outside in fall, at a beautiful garden. All the guests arrived but the priest did not. Finally they got a call from the hospital saying the priest had food poisoning.
So they grabbed a waiter, sent a groomsman to the Halloween store, and had a wedding where they were "married" by a suspiciously waitery-looking priest.
Sounds like a killer time.
My sister's. As we were sitting down to eat, a guest started screaming. The grooms mother went into cardiac arrest. I called 911. They came and attended to her and as we were outside watching them load her into the ambulance, I heard more screaming. Someone ran out and told me that they had better come back into the venue. I run inside and see my grandfather laying on the floor. I ended up riding with him to the hospital. I think he just fainted from the commotion but we didn't know that at the time. They took both of them to the same hospital. Doctor look at both of them as they were being wheeled in and remarked "Must have been one hell of a party."
Moral: it could always be worse.
Not my wedding but my parents'. I wasn't around to experience it but their friends and family still talk about it to this day.
The main culprit was the heavy, heavy rain that caused minor flooding and tons of road closures.
Mother was very late to the church, my father broke down convinced that she was going to be a no-show. Not only was the taxi that was taking her to the church late due to road closures it also managed to hit her as she was running to get in causing a small rip and minor staining on her dress.
A few members of the bridal party were so late they completely missed the ceremony.
At the hotel reception the DJ could not figure out how to get to the venue due to road closures (and being unfamiliar with the area). The first half of the reception was basically quiet until the groomsmen found that the restaurant in the hotel had a jukebox. The restaurant let them move it to the banquet hall where they payed quarters for music.
Almost half of their guests did not come, again due to the rain.
The hotel was understaffed due to the road closures so food took a VERY long time to come out. A guest who must have been literally dying of hunger helped herself to the wedding cake prior to it being cut.
It really sucked on the day but now they look back on it and laugh. Whenever we're at a wedding now and the bride is on the verge of tears due to things not going perfectly my mom will always say, "Don't worry about it, I got hit by a car on my wedding day and everything still worked out."
Do you believe in omens?
When I was about 12, I was an usher in my older cousin's wedding. The pastor had a heart attack mid-ceremony and died on the way to the hospital. Everybody waited in the church basement / "Fellowship hall" while my dad gave CPR and waited for the EMTs. After the EMTs left, the assistant pastor finished the ceremony. The marriage did not last last more than a few weeks.
This marriage is off to a great start.
Not my wedding, but the groom kissed me on the dance floor and the priest was a creep and grabbed my friends butt. The groom accused the bride of cheating with the bartender (who is gay and a friend of ours for years) the groom ended up throwing his ring into the woods at the end of the night. The bride stayed in a friends hotel while he went home and went into a rage.
They are actually on their honeymoon at the moment, idiots.
Yeah that's pretty funny.
Not my wedding, but I was working a wedding for dinner service and during the recpetion out in the yard of an event hall, as the bride was walking down the aisle, the automatic sprinklers turned on under everyones chairs and everyone went running and was soaking wet. Honestly, it seemed they thought it was more funny than anything but I cant even imagine.
Whoa.
Wedding reception set up anentire wedding for approx 400 guests...with the totally wrong colour scheme, flowers and food. There was a wedding the next day, and unbelievably the bride and groom of that wedding...had exactly the same names. First AND last.
Everything, literally everything, went wrong.
Not mine but at my sister's wedding (marrying a marine she just met) I got into a fist fight, best man threw up during speech, her dress caught on fire, my uncle announced he was leaving my aunt for a 21 year old, drunk cousin spilled the beans about my sister being pregnant to my very conservative grandma and we all got food poisoning for the caterer. Hopefully her next one this winter is better.
Seared into their memory.
My friend's venue burned down during the reception. They were in the paper and on the evening news. The venue made things right with all of it, but that was a heck of a way to start a marriage.
That is one strange pastor.
A friend's wedding, worst one i've been to: 1. One of the bridesmaids said she would be part of the party and play the piano for the whole ceremony ONLY if the bride refused to use the "submit to husbands will" bullshit during vows. Bride agreed and then an hour before the ceremony told the bridesmaid that she was going back on her promise. Have you every heard wedding music played angrily on a piano? How about having the piano player need to stare at you while you're in the pews the whole time to try and keep their cool? 2. During the sermon portion of this wedding, the pastor started the speech with "If there is one thing I know about this marriage, it is that this WILL NOT LAST."
Edit: Additional detail sort of requested and now provided. The pastor followed his statement up with some bullsh*t about real marriage not starting until you get to heaven (this marriage on earth never lasts) and then it lasts forever, and he used a sh*tty self-centered metaphor to emphasize the point, and that was the entire sermon. -99/10 would not attend this ceremony again.