Wedding horror stories and other faux pas.

I wasn't invited to my fiancé's cousin's wedding but my fiancé was- we were engaged six months at the time hahaha. Apparently the bride forgot about me lol

So going through wedding planning has made me realize what mistakes my younger self made as a guest haha. The first wedding I attended by myself as an adult, I swear I checked the website but I somehow didn’t notice anything about the dress code. I seriously thought you were just generally supposed to “dress up” and didn’t seek out any other info. It was an evening wedding in the winter, and now I remember thinking how fancy the moms of the bride and groom looked in their ballgowns. But I also now have no idea whether the knee length dress, tights, and cute but practical boots I wore were wayyyy more casual than anyone else. Also when working on our save the dates, the topic of RSVPs came up and FH admitted that he never turned one in before and always just waited until the couple reached out to let them know. I was like ok I will kill our guests who do that. 😂

I was recently a bridesmaid in a friend's wedding. Choosing a dress for her mother had been a struggle through the entire process because he mom kept choosing white or very close to white dresses and trying to pass them off. They had finally landed on a pink dress to match the bridesmaids. My friends dress was white and blush. The day of her wedding her mom excuses herself to get ready and comes back wearing a blush dress my friend had never seen before the exact color of my friends bridal gown. We were all absolutely shocked, I thought my friend was going to lose it but she handled it really gracefully. We get to the reception and all my friend's aunts were wearing white dresses. After the wedding she confronted her mom about it and it turns out her mom told all her sisters to wear white because it was appropriate for a summer wedding and my friend wasnt wearing only white anyway. My friend still thinks it was retaliation because she wouldnt agree to any of the white dress choices her mother wanted. It's still an issue between them 3 years later and her mom refuses to apologize.

Another one was a bad DJ experience so not the bride and groom faux pas necessarily. We went to a large 200+ person wedding where they had buffet style dinner, no problem. Well, to dismiss tables to dinner the DJ decided to do trivia about the bride and groom but didnt go in any particular order of tables to keep track of who had been dismissed for food or not. If no table got the question right he wouldnt just dismiss one of the tables, he would try another question until some table got it right. It took over an hour for all the tables to get dismissed for dinner and totally ruined my friend's timeline. We ended up being the last table to be dismissed because we caught on way too late that the trivia was a serious thing. By the time we sat down with our food it was only like 10 minutes until they started their formal dances at a different part of the venue. Easily the worst experience I've ever had at a wedding.

Pre-printed thank you cards with a giant picture of the wedding couple but zero personalization. This is the tackiest, vainest, low-budget, laziest thing I've ever seen. I saw one once among my mom's mail like her friend's granddaughter can't bear to acknowledge the hundreds of dollars my mother just gifted her for her crass future. Printed envelope, too, like a robot spat it out.

Once I saw an older female guest get on the mic and talked about a bride's ex-boyfriend and how the groom is a suitable runner-up. Throughout dinner, guests were wondering if the ex died or something.

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That reminds me.

I was at a wedding, and there were a lot of empty tables because COVID. Well My table was last to go up to the buffet, and when we got back our entire table was bussed. No drinks, no silverware. They started with our table because it was in the back of the room, and we had to hnt them down so we could eat.

Another wedding I went to was family style meals. I sat with a bunch of strangers and my date. I don't even like family style meals with my own family, much less strangers.

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YES! I literally was just talking to a friend who is doing her thank you cards. I said how she was running ahead of schedule, and most thank you cards take a couple months. I pointed out the fastest one i received was because it was a generic "Thank you for coming to celebrate."

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So is she invited to yours? lol

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I feel like family style is such a hassle, especially for a wedding where lots of guests probably wont know each other. Small intimate family gatherings are really the only place i wouldnt feel awkward about it.

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You'd really hate me lol. I'm not even sending thank you cards.

I was at a wedding with the two cringiest toasts you could imagine. The bride was an identical twin. The twin was sloppy drunk when she gave the first toast, which was all about how they were always the "Jones" twins but now the bride is a "Smith" so they aren't the Jones twins anymore and they can't use their secret twin language anymore because they have to include the groom. She started crying and was led away.

Then, just to kick the girl when she was down, their father gave the next toast all about how given how much this wedding cost it's a good thing that the twin didn't have any romantic prospects. The silence was deafening.

This was 20 years ago and I still wince when I think about it. I hope somebody got the poor girl counseling.

View Quoted Comment If be paranoid that you never got my gift of I didn't get a thank you card or some acknowledgement.

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We're doing a speech at the wedding and will reach out personally to those who send gifts but don't attend. I just hate thank you cards and see them as a waste when I receive them.

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Nope! But that's only because he has a bajillion cousins so we chose not to invite any in order to keep our budget in line

View Quoted Comment Stop, no, this is awful!!!

One of the worst weddings I went to the bride and groom had the normal maid of honor and bes tnan speeches but then they also asked another person on each side of their bridal party to give a speech and this was a huge mistake. The guy the groom picked was black out drunk and during his speech he tried to joke about when he first heard about the bride and how he asked if the groom was sure the bride wasn't a man. Every single guest was horrified but it got worse. He was so drunk he restarted the speech and got to the joke and he once again said about the bride being a man. The bride definitely isn't a man and she was so embarrassed. They ended up having to cut the groomsman's mic because of just how drunk he was.

View Quoted Comment Was your fiancé close to that cousin? She might have not even known you two were together

View Quoted Comment That's awful! How long was the bride with her ex?

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Not super close but his extended family of his mom's side is incredibly involved in one another's lives so yes she knew! She legitimately just forgot. It was actually funny other than rude because she remembered a week before the wedding actually but by then I was planning my own and didnt want to stress her out by redoing the seating chart