She Had One Very Specific Rule For Him, Regarding The Wedding Cake!
“The bride had warned groom several dozen times — in my presence — if he smashed the cake in her face they would have issues. Using phrases like, ‘I am not kidding’ or ‘I am completely serious.’
Groom was a ‘good ‘ol boy’ type. His friends found out about his bride’s one stipulation about the wedding. She was flexible on a lot of other things, but no cake-smashing. They started making whip-cracking sounds, teasing him that he was ‘whipped’ and needed to, ‘Put His Foot Down And Show Her Who’s Boss.’
Yeah, he smashed the cake in her face.
She had it annulled.”
The Wedding Planner Ended Up In The Hospital?
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“I am an assistant to a wedding planner.
In a nutshell, I don’t have to do any of the planning. I just meet with the wedding planner and couple a day or two prior to do a walk through and figure out exactly where the couple wants what, and miscellaneous things. Day of the wedding, I am an extra set of hands to set everything up and help coordinate getting everyone where they should be. Basically just the wedding planner’s slave.
I will never forget this wedding. It was at a church in the middle of a ghetto neighborhood. Super small, no parking, free church. The ceremony was in the church room (what the heck is the name of that?!) and the reception is in a room in the back of the church. I show up the day of and the wedding planner gives me the look. You know the look – the ‘things just went sour’ look. Turns out the bride changed everything for the wedding. She canceled the rentals and bought everything from the dollar store. She had a write up three pages long (that she made the night before) about how she wants everything. We had planned for the rental company to set up tables (tablecloths, plated, silverware. Glassware, napkins, etc). So now I was running around frantically trying to get everything done. The dollar store stuff looked cheesy and gross. While I was running around like a chicken with no head, the pastor’s wife stopped the wedding planner (also running around) and started complaining/yelling about how we were behind schedule and ruining everything. Forgot to add, the wedding planner was 8 months pregnant at this point. The pastor’s wife yelled at the wedding planner so hard that the wedding planner ended up having an asthma attack. She calmed it down and left to go get her inhaler. Turns out, the asthma attack caused her to start having contractions, which definitely wasn’t great. Off to the ER, she went. Crap, I had two hours until the wedding and I had zero help. I ended up calling in one of the other assistants to help me. What a lifesaver.
Once we finished decorating, guests started arriving and we had about 20 minutes until the wedding started. We went to find the bride and informed her that the wedding planner was in the hospital but we had everything under control. Bride freaked the heck out. How dare she have to go to the ER?! The Maid of Honor got her under control and we told them one of us would come get them when it is ready to start. Perfect. We went to find the groom, told him the story of asthma/contractions/ER wedding planner. Did he freak out? No. He gave us both a huge hug and told us he will keep the bride happy. Wow, he was a great, big-hearted, person.
The wedding happened, the bride was acting extremely cruel toward everyone, and the groom is super fantastic. Groom smashed cake into the bride’s face during the cake ceremony and she stormed off. She and her bridesmaids got wasted outside in the back of the church for the rest of the wedding. Groom even helped us clean up at the end and then carried his passed out wife into his car.
I got an update recently from them: They are expecting their 5th kid. I feel very bad for the husband. He deserves a better wife.”
Their Marriage Did Not Last That Long
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“I’m the son of a man who works in the wedding industry and I work for him occasionally, here’s a story of a lovely fella we worked for.
So even before the wedding, the couple were absolute snobs. They treated us with little respect as we worked and always expected more when we gave them an amazing service. I know that sounds like I’m bragging but it was amazing, we made a pig look like a beautiful bride.
While the couple was getting wasted and dancing, one of the members of the staff went to check on the baby (it’s a hotel thing so you stay at where you get married). The staff member found a hornet in the baby’s room (south of France, can come in every now and then) because the bride and groom (bride was the mother) hadn’t closed the window like they were told to.
So the staff uses the bride’s shoe left on the ground (a boot, nothing special) to collect the hornet and release it outside. The groom came in, wasted, thought the staff was stealing from them, shouted at the staff in a pit of fury and our lovely, intern staff member ran off crying.
The wife then came in after and they had a row all night, various swears were thrown at each other.
We gave it six months, they gave it four.”
She Definitely Regretted Planning Her Boss’s Wedding
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“I am a wedding planner! (Amateur, but getting there). As a favor to the president of the company I work for, at my 8-5 job, I agreed to coordinate his wedding. This was his third wedding and the bride’s first wedding.
He’s a decent enough guy; wealthy but stingy, scatter-brained, stubborn, but has a lot of really good friends that said a lot of really great things about him at the wedding.
She’s ditsy, gorgeous, and younger than him by about 20 years.
They had been engaged for a while (over a year, I think) but waited until about six weeks before their wedding date to start really planning anything.
The guest list was over 300 people. The venue was an amazing barn in the middle of nowhere, minimal electrical power, no running water in the barn, but there were multiple homes on the property that could be rented out. They rented the entire property for a week, and it was covered in campers, trailers, etc.
The whole thing was a nightmare from planning through the reception. The live band didn’t have enough power and we ended up powering them from one of the RV’s generators (lesson learned here: let the venue talk to the band, don’t get in the middle). There was no seating chart, and there were about six different caterers running food stations around the barn.
Somehow a rumor got started that the wedding was at 5 pm when it was actually at 4 pm. So critical guests were arriving very late to the ceremony.
On this crazy large property, the ceremony site was up a steep hill, so a shuttle van had been rented and was driving guests up the hill, 15 at a time.
By the time the ceremony was ready to start, the bride was wasted, the bride’s dad was wasted, and the groom was wasted.
There was a drink station at the ceremony site, which was completely drained before the last of the guests were arriving at the top of the hill. The guests were livid.
The rest of the night went how it went. Water was poured from gallon jugs with spigots. The bar ran out of most of the drinks with a couple of hours to go. There was no propane in the heaters for the patio (this was in late fall; it was cold).
I left at around 11 pm (having arrived that day around 8 am).
I know the bride and groom had a stay-cation honeymoon planned, so I didn’t expect to see my boss at work for a few weeks (he’s often traveling for work anyway). What I heard later from a coworker who helped at the wedding was that the marriage didn’t even last the night.
The groom was found (by the father of the bride) in the middle of sleeping with one of the bridesmaids, that night, in the honeymoon/party house. The kicker is: more than half the bridesmaids were the bride’s sisters, so the odds are pretty good that he slept with one of them.
Upon hearing all this, I kept my mouth shut. I haven’t told a single person (save my husband, who was my assistant at the wedding). I had tried friending the bride on Facebook because I really wanted to see the pictures (the photographer was incredible), but she hasn’t accepted yet. I have not seen her at work since the wedding (she used to visit frequently), and my boss hasn’t ever worn a wedding ring.”
This Wedding Planner Has Dealt With So Many Different Brides!
“I have seen brides fight their grooms at the reception, I’ve seen a bride bash a family member over the head with a bottle, I’ve seen small children whip burning tea lights at guests from a floor above, I’ve seen a guest try to fake a slip and fall to sue the venue.
Probably the most ‘what the heck?’ was a very obviously arranged marriage. Most of the planning was done by the parents because they were local and the kids were ‘traveling overseas.’ Red flag. Day of, we meet the happy couple to be. I’m really bad at judging ages, but she seemed at least old enough to consent. And, I should add, she was gorgeous. Could have been a model. The groom, however, was almost a foot shorter than she, very lanky, and looked like he was squarely in the middle of an adolescent awkward phase. My staff and I had difficulty not giving any outward signs that we were very uncomfortable. The body language was perplexing and then just sad during photos. Culturally, it’s not uncommon for PDA to be kept to a minimum, but the way she leaned away from him and could barely look at him… She was so obviously miserable. To this day, I regret not offering to help her escape through a bathroom window. I told myself it was not my place to interfere and that I should just shut up and do my job. I will never take another client without a face to face with the bride first. I hope they’re not still together.
Unfortunately, it’s really common for brides to crash diet before the wedding. It’s stupid and I try my best to make sure my brides don’t, but unless you’re following them around 24/7, sometimes logic just doesn’t sink in.
I had another bride go full anorexic. I don’t know how long, maybe a few weeks? Months? We set up the bridal suite with a fruit and cheese tray, some crackers, juices, sodas. The girls were all getting ready and the food was leaving the plates. It took me a bit to notice that the bride wasn’t touching anything. She looked pale. She seemed off. Maybe it was just nerves? She complained of being woozy. Probably just jitters, right? No. She was so weak by the time the ceremony started that her dad had to practically drag her down the aisle and her groom had to help keep her steady at the altar. Once they sped through vows and kissed, she was run back to the suite to lie down and I had the chef make her some soup. The broth is better if you’ve gone a while without solids. They took no portraits, which was fine because she looked horrible. The only time she came out of the suite during the entire reception was when her dad (who was super mad) yelled at her to get the heck up and dance with him. He wanted his father/daughter dance and he’d paid through the nose for this wedding, so she’d have to suck it up. They didn’t even cut the cake. The groom sat by himself most of the reception, it was so sad. He wanted to sit with the bride, but she insisted at least one of them to be with the guests, but no one knew what was going on so they didn’t want to approach him. We had spread the word that she was ‘sick’ but people were still jumping to their own conclusions and it was just awkward all around.
Moral of the story: Ladies, your groom loves you just the way you are. You don’t have to change anything about yourself to be a beautiful bride. You are most beautiful when you are good to yourself.”
The Bride Had Demanded Lions For Her Wedding?
“The bride had been a total pain in the butt while planning her wedding. She wanted the most lavish food, the best beverage package, the most over-the-top decor. Fine, we can make your venue look like something Donald Trump might describe as ‘a little too gilded,’ whatever. After that was done, she demanded mirrors and disco balls, and anything else reflective we could cram into the space.
Then she demanded to interview all the wedding officiants because she wanted a ‘really hot guy’ to perform the ceremony. She complained that everyone she saw was, ‘like middle-aged or something,’ and insisted we had to find her someone that looked like Chris Evans because she wanted everyone in her pictures to be hot.
On the day of the wedding, she asked me to procure as many lions as I could get my hands on, and have them sitting around the head table. Because what you really need at an open bar are a bunch of apex predators. When informed she could not have lions at her reception, she dissolved into tears, complaining about her crappy little wedding (of 300 guests, cases of Cristal, and freaking lobster tail as the main), and how her little sister always got everything better than she did. We all knew that this was not about a marriage and was all about a party. When your wedding is just about out-doing someone else’s reception, there’s no hope for your relationship.
All the way through this mess, the groom had just rolled his eyes, and let his bride spend like a wasted sailor on leave. He never objected to any of her insane requests. Just let her have whatever she wanted. However, he didn’t even bother to come up to the suite while she was having a meltdown over the lions, because, ‘I’m too wasted to deal with this, and also I don’t want to have to hear her scream about seeing the dress.’
The bride was back a year later with a friend to help plan her wedding, sans ring.”
Nobody Wants To Work With A Bridezilla!
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“I had a wedding I coordinated where the bride literally went from this sweet, kind and very fun person, to a meltdown-laden bridezilla. It was bad. I knew it wasn’t going last the moment she arrived at the venue.
She tore up the guest list and was furious at the groom because his family, most of them either elderly and disabled, weren’t at the ceremony yet (they were five minutes late, and parking was awful). So she decided to start the ceremony even though they weren’t there yet. The groom had zero say as he was a really quiet guy. During the bridal procession down the aisle, people kept arriving and having to walk down the aisle to get to their seats. She insulted each member of his family as they would enter the venue.
Then, during the actual vows, the groom was so terrified, he literally couldn’t look at her. Instead, he did his vows while looking at the minister. She grabbed his face mid-vows, pointed his face to hers, then said, ‘Do them over…NOW!’ Probably the most cringe-worthy moment I’ve ever seen in my entire career. The guests tried to laugh it off, but we all felt bad for him.
The icing on the cake was during the toast. She decided to talk about his mom, then passive-aggressively insult her, then completely insult the crowd, then her new husband (yes, she was sober). After the dinner, about 75% of the guests just up and left.
There was so much more than happened, but it was a total nightmare. I knew that this one wouldn’t last. And it didn’t. They divorced a few weeks later. How do I know? She stiffed me on payment and kept blaming her now-ex-husband for not having any money and everything that went wrong in their marriage.
One of the things that always fascinates me is what people decide to do for their ‘cake.’ Sometimes they do cupcakes. Others I’ve seen the bride and groom do a full candy bar. Well, this cake was massive. The guest count was roughly 100, but this cake could’ve easily served close to 300. Very elaborate and shipped in from New York from some high-end bakery. There was Chinese lettering/design on the cake (The wedding theme included mariachis, Mexican food, etc) so the cake felt very out of place from a design perspective and it was apparent the groom had no idea what cake they were getting. But hey- it’s their day so I’m not one to rip apart the theme.
When it was time for the cake cutting, she grabbed the mic out of my hands, which she did numerous times throughout the evening, and told everyone to shut up. She started talking about how high-end the cake was and how people at this wedding should be happy to eat it.
The crowd goes from silent to upset…again.
Then she pointed out three of the symbols on the cake, which were the largest. I’ll never forget this because what followed was a silence I can only describe as ‘pin-drop-worthy.’ She said that they meant: ‘Obey, Listen and (I think) Service/Loyalty.’ She said that she expected these three traits from her husband at all times. And not in a joking way.
Room was silent the whole time the cake was being served.
This was during the toast and then I would like to give some clarity about the event as a whole.
When the toast started, traditionally the best man kicks it off, then the maid of honor, then anything goes. We had planned it in traditional order before the wedding, but the bride took my mic as I was introducing the best man and told the crowd to: ‘Look up. Look to the left and right. Look at the tables.’ At this point, we all thought it was going to be an Oprah moment and they would give the guests their favors, but instead she said that everyone should be both honored and appreciative that they were invited to the wedding, because she paid (not true) top dollar to have it at such a beautiful venue. The looks on the people’s faces were truly uncomfortable. Some were confused as to whether she had actually said what she said, and others were absolutely ticked. At that point, I knew this wedding was going to be off the rails.
Stress can completely change people. After being involved in the wedding industry for nearly 10 years- I can completely see why people become unhinged on their big day. It’s often two-fold:
-The bride and groom try to do everything themselves, one of them loses interest or leaves everything to one of them. Then, said person doesn’t enjoy the day at all, micromanages and has a near-psychotic breakdown.
-The bride and groom don’t take into account that THEY will be busy during the wedding and run it with the mentality that they can address everything encompassing the event (making sure dinner is on time, getting silverware for aunt Sally, managing the timeline, crowd control, etc).
Event management is hard. There is a lot that goes into it and a whole back-end that nobody ever sees. Plus you are trying to manage (crowd size) personalities and expectations, complaints, last minute changes, vendors… now take all that, and put those responsibilities on a bride and groom during their wedding day. Some can pull it off, but most do so at the expense of their sanity and enjoyment of the day.
Not saying that this was the case with this wedding, but I can empathize with why some people get branded a bridezilla or groomzilla.”
He Only Married Her Because She Was Pregnant?
“The bride got pregnant and the groom decided to ‘do the right thing and marry her.’ I am not sure it was the right thing to do. They decided to have a wedding at a casino in the little chapel and have the reception in the ballroom. She was so demanding, rude, insulting and difficult to the minister, that the minister said she was about to not perform the ceremony. This minister did weddings at a casino, where I am sure half of the marriages fall apart. The groom had to convince her to go through with the ceremony.
The minister was hard to hear and completely monotone. The chapel was not big. During the reception, her family member gave a toast and said something like, ‘Bride has never been happy in her life, but hopefully, this marriage will make her happy.’ They are still married two years later, but ‘joke’ about when they find their next husband or wife after they get divorced. She is the most unpleasant person and we all cringe when we have to see her.”
None Of The Parents Got Along With Each Other
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“I’ve been an event planner for many many years but one wedding stands out because it happened early in my career.
I don’t recall too much about the couple but the parents were unforgettable. Both sets were divorced and both hated each other. By the time the wedding came around, all four parents hated each other and had to be seated in the four corners of the room far away from each other – Strangest thing I’ve ever seen.
The worst part was that each and every one of them was sulking about the seating arrangements. It has been at least 25 years since that wedding. I often wondered how long that marriage lasted with that many immature parents in the picture…”
He Clearly Did Not Care That Much For His Future Wife
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“This was a whirlwind relationship; they only dated three months before engagement and were engaged for six months before the wedding. So the bride and groom only knew each for nine months total on their wedding day.
I knew for a fact that the groom had hooked up with another girl just two nights before because it was at a party at my house. I wasn’t cool with it but I was trying not to judge. Come to find out later that the bride had also fooled around on her own the night before the wedding.
None of those flags were what did it for me though. The moment I knew this wasn’t going to last was when we were all gathered in the groom’s room before the wedding. Of course, people were drinking and generally playing around, but the groom had brought his Xbox and was playing Madden. The time came for us all to go to the altar and the dude wouldn’t leave his Madden game because it was the 3rd quarter.
The whole groom’s party was 15 minutes late to the altar, which in the grand scheme is nothing, but I saw where his priorities were. Infidelities aside, the couple never got along and ended up divorcing nine months after. All in all, they didn’t even last for two years.”
Such A Waste Of Money On The Wedding Flowers!
“In the days before Pinterest, I was working as a florist in a very expensive shop. A young bride came in for her initial consultation and we go through her scrapbooks with ideas, then she was flipping through our photo books and then oohing and ahhing over everything. She came to one pricey high-style bouquet- very architectural, with unexpected elements and she says, ‘Oh, I love that! Not for a first wedding, but I’m so going to have it for my second!’
Then she gives this naughty little smile that one could tell she thought was cute and pulled a second wedding scrapbook out of her designer bag and writes down the design number!
Apparently, she actually was planning her second wedding. No idea how long they actually lasted, but I’ve heard it said that the more expensive the wedding, the quicker the divorce!
The flowers alone for that wedding were over $10,000- and this was about 20 years ago.”