What went wrong at your wedding that makes you laugh today?

I don’t actually remember anything going “wrong.” We had a small, relaxed wedding… and I didn’t have major expectations. Maybe that’s why? There wasn’t much that could go wrong.
The person who married us was late. I was waiting upstairs for my cue, so I started to wonder why no one came to get me.. but that wasn’t particularly traumatic or funny.

The rehearsal dinner was in a room that has a couple parrots on perches. My father was talking to a friend of the groom. They are both kind of know-it-all men (M.D.s). The room was buzzing with the conversations of many people, but as my dad and Joe argued, their voices got louder and louder. The conversations of the crowd quieted a bit and there was a lull, at which point, my father said loudly, “Well, who do you think you are? God?” The parrots squawked very loudly. And we all laughed. Nice moment

I said, “I do.”

@Hawaii_Jake I’m sorry it didn’t work out. Hawaiian weddings, I imagine, are always beautiful, but of course, the beauty of the setting doesn’t guarantee success for anybody.

@Sunny2 : Thank you. I wasn’t living in Hawai’i when I got married, but I do now. My ex lives here with the kids, so I get to be in their lives. They’re out of school this week, so this will be fun. I have regrets, but my children are not one of them.

My mother-in-law insisted we use her church’s pastor to marry us. My wife had grown up going to his church, but neither of us is particularly religious so I really just wanted to go with someone who was legal and would be comfortable with the whole thing. I actually wanted a sea captain, but that’s another story.

It was important to my wife’s mom so we went with the pastor. We met with him twice to go over what we wanted to include and how things would go. Both time we seemed to be in agreement that something quick and friendly, with lots of love talk but not so much god talk would be best. He gave me an outline he said he’d work from and seemed like a nice guy, so I didn’t really worry about it.

The big day comes and the first words out his mouth are “You’re marrying the wrong person” after which he proceeded to explain to us and our friends and family that we weren’t marrying each other, we were marrying god. And how life wasn’t about having a good time or feeling good, it was about living in service to the community, your family, and of course, god. The last part grated because my outlook is pretty much the exact opposite.

He basically ambushed us and we stared at each other trying to act cool while I planned the most polite way to shut him down and restart. At some point I looked at him, shot lightning with my eyeballs and he moved things along quickly to the vows.

We can laugh about it now, but at the time it seemed like a pretty big deal. I have no idea if he just mixed us up with some other couple, or if he fully intended to ambush us the entire time and just told us what we wanted to hear. I didn’t say anything to him after that, I didn’t see a way the conversation could have gone well.

For what it’s worth, my new mother-in-law thought it was beautiful.

@funkdaddy good story!!

Pretty much nothing went wrong. It was a perfect weekend. Our wedding was the culmination of a weekend away with friends. One guest was a little challenging, but really not enough to spoil the wonderful time we had.

I should say that if anything did go wrong (pink instead of white chair covers), we chose not to see it as a problem. Little things like that were details we knew about but nobody else did and we were not going to let little things affect our happy mood.

2 hours before the wedding my wife set her dress on fire.

Never got married, but at my brother’s wedding… one of the bridesmaids was trashed and made a speech about how his wife stole him from her one night and how my brother and her were together first. SO FUNNY… Yeah they’re divorced.

Getting dive-bombed by the territorial hummingbird all during the ceremony.

I remember lots… not much of it was very good.

Wedding starts: I walk in from the side room, to the front of the church, and stand there.
My Mom begins waving at me franticly, and mouths the words “I can’t get my video camera to work!” She always had trouble with it, and I was always able to get it to run.
I knew we had another camera running, so I just said not to worry about it. She immediately began to sulk. Got all that on the back up tape. Kind of amusing.
The next thing was when the Pastor got to the “repeat after me” section, and forgot to show my wife the words. She couldn’t repeat them, because she’s deaf, and needed to read what he said. That took a bit of the pace of the wedding out.
The third thing was when we walked across the hall to the Fireside Room, where the reception was being held, the room was over 100 degrees (this is in Oakland, which had very mild weather, including this day). That caused most of the guests to leave fairly quickly, which was fine with me. We had a honeymoon to get to.

It wasin the vwery early 90’s.. A week before the wedding I went to get my hair permed (remember those?) When the stylist removed the perm rods she gasped and said “Oh No!”
I had a fried frizzy perm for all my wedding pictures.

My brother, who was 14 at the time and a groomsman, keeled over in a dead faint during the ceremony. We’re in the middle of rapturous vows and we hear a “thud.”

damned iPhone! sorry for al the typos up there!!

Everything went wrong. And none of it was funny.

The woman who was making all of the bridesmaids’ dresses and my gown fell ill and spent the two weeks before the wedding in hospital. She did not tell me this. She showed up an hour before curtains with a sewing machine and about a thousand pieces of green satin. My dress never got a liner. The bridesmaids were literally sewn into their dresses.

This made the whole thing start an hour and a half late. My uncle, the pastor, who f*king hates me and was incredibly bitter that I was marrying my hubby instead of his daughter, decided to take that time to break into standup comedy at the expense of the bride and groom.

The actual service was okay, I guess. It was a fantasy theme wedding, and my mom showed up wearing… I don’t know what. Short skirt, no sleeves… ridiculous. Whatever it was, it wasn’t what we had picked out together. Oh, and the pastor was wearing some suit that made him look like the admiral of the French navy circa 1775.

While I was getting dressed there were people I don’t even know just wandering in and out of the dressing area. One of them left the door open, and who walks by the open door but the groom. Oi. Jackass that left the door open didn’t even stay for the wedding.

About ten people stayed for the “reception”, during which the pastor’s wife started setting up the church yard sale that was taking place the next week.

I had to clean everything up myself.

And they gave away my wedding cake I didn’t even get to take some home.

I want a do-over.

@Seek_Kolinahr I hope you get a chance to renew your vows and have it the way you want it.

I was best man at my brother’s wedding a few years ago and just before the service we met the minister to go over the procedure we were to follow in church. While we were discussing rings and who would say what and when, the minister began acting a little strangely. He apologised and said he was upset as his wife had just left him.

It felt very odd, but he pulled himself together and got us through the ceremony. It was not the most auspicious start to a marriage but my brother is still very happily married ten years on. I don’t believe the minister’s wife ever came back to him.

We chose to have a cake which was made at a restaurant we liked. They said they would frost it, but they had no way to decorate it, which was fine with us. We really liked the torte they made. I ordered 4 small yellow roses from a florist to go on top. I delivered these to the kitchen where the reception was and asked them to arrange them on the cake, picturing the four flowers on top of the second and only tier. When we came into the room after the ceremony, there was the cake with the roses. The roses were each in a test tube and the test tubes were stuck at angles at 4 random spots on the cake. It makes me laugh to this day. So much for a kind of do-it-yourself wedding.

1½ weeks before my first wedding, the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 destroyed our chosen church and reception hall. My now ex husband and I used to joke about it being a sign we shouldn’t have married but at the time, we were going crazy to find last minute accommodations for several hundred guests, most from out of town if not from out of state.

We were halfway to the registry office when I realised that we’d left the flowers behind, and we had to go back for them. Also my parents got lost, and were in the middle of a blazing rown when they finally did arrive.

My wedding, 45 years ago, went pretty well, mostly because my only job was to show up. I was stationed in Illinois so my buddies got me drunk and put me on the plane to Pittsburgh other than the fact that I got off in Philadelphia instead of Pittsburgh was the ticket checkers problem, she let me get on the wrong plane. They immediately transferred me to another plane and I made it to Pittsburgh. My advice is to get drunk on the plane not before the trip.

Ironically, at the reception my Dad took away my beer because I was under 21 and illegal in Pennsylvania. I told him that I just got married and was getting laid tonight, had orders to Vietnam, and was a Petty Officer in the Navy. None of this held much weight and he kept the beer.