Wedding Stories

My mum and dad got married 71 years ago - yesterday. My dad was brought up by an authoritarian Victorian grandma, after his mum and dad abandoned him. My mum was the eldest girl of her family ( of 7) and, from the age of 13 (when her mum died) she was in charge of the household. On Saturday she will be 94; my dad´s 91.
We got married 40 years ago.
 
My husband and I have been together for 32 years <edit-nearly 33 now really>. We were older when we met and it took a while for us to "sign on the dotted line" as they say.
Our wedding was very simple, less than 100 guests-family and very good friends-it was more of just a party, loads of good food, beer and wine, music and dancing. I don't think we even spent $1000USD.
We rented a lovely open air hall with very large patios on either side.
When it was time to get out, we just moved the party, food and all, to a friends HUGE back yard and went on until, I can't remember.
I had warned DH not to drink too much Beer with his buddies and yet I was the one who got pissed :laugh:
 
I got married 13 hours (by car) away from my family, in my wife's hometown.

I mentioned before (I think) that weddings are not a big deal in my family. Most of the time, we just go to the JP. The most recent wedding among my siblings, no one was even told until a couple of months later ("Oh, yeah, we got married a while back..."), and that's happened more than once.

MrsT's family are much more...normal...where weddings are concerned. Nothing over-the-top, but a couple of hundred guests, a church, a hall for the reception, the standard stuff.

Because of the distance, only my folks and my brother Lee (as my best man) attended from my side.

The plan, for months, was that Lee and my folks would drive up together. It just made sense. Lee was single at the time, 33yo. My dad was 50yo. Dad ended up having foot surgery, and couldn't drive anyway, so that worked out...

...except that three days before they were scheduled to leave, my brother backed out and said he was driving himself.

Why? Because he'd just taken up with an 18yo hottie who said if they went up on their own, she'd, um, make it worth his while with a whole lot of...personal attention, if you get my meaning.

Sorry, Dad! Sorry, Tasty!

So the Monday before my wedding, my mom called to say they weren't coming.

Frankly, I wasn't surprised, because again, weddings have very little priority in my family. I was kind of surprised they'd agreed to come in the first place.

I told MrsT, though, and she had a problem with it: "My family will really take this badly if your mom and dad can't even bother to show up for our wedding. It'll be pretty offensive to them, and me. You better talk to Lee and get it straightened out!"

Lee wouldn't budge, because he's always been ruled by his rooster. Always.

Mom eventually agreed to drive (she hates driving), and Dad did do a little driving, so it was all back on.

That was the first thing he did to screw up our wedding.

The day they were due to arrive was a Thursday. Tuxes for the groomsmen had all been measured for except for Lee, and the tux shop agreed to a last-minute fitting for him Thursday afternoon, no later than 3PM. The shop closed at 5PM. We were to be married Saturday morning.

My folks arrived to the hotel just after noon. Lee said he'd be there around the same time.

1PM...no Lee. 2PM...no Lee...3PM...no Lee.

We kept checking with the front desk, and they finally told us he'd checked in, sometime between 3:30PM-4PM. They wouldn't give out his room number, but they called the room for us a few times, no answer.

I explained what was going on, and the receptionist finally slipped me the room number. Up I went, ready to kick his rear end for all the drama he was causing.

Room door was half open, so I knocked and went in, asking what the 🤬 was he thinking, dragging all this out and not letting us know the moment he arrived, when I made it past the bathroom area and into the bedroom part and there they were, upside down and inside out with each other, going at it like rabid hyenas.

Well.

I really started yelling then, and had him backed up against the window, bare butt and all, and of course, Mom and Dad had followed me up and Mom had all but fainted at the sight and ran from the room crying.

I told him he had five minutes to get dressed and get his azz down to the car to go for his fitting, because it was less than an hour before they closed and it would be too late.

He started to argue that he didn't need a fitting, he was sure everything would fit, but by then our dad showed up and told him he to shut up and get dressed and do as he was told, and he did.

The tux place wasn't happy with him at all, but they did a quick fitting and got everything ready in time for Saturday, but for the rest of the day, all he complained about was "being sticky" during his fitting - well, whose fault was that?

That's the second thing he did to royally screw up our wedding. More to follow later.
 
flyinglentris said:
Just curious ...

If not for love and affection, what reasons drive people to get married?

- to have a family
- financial support
- to have someone look after them
- to have someone there to clean the house and cook food
- to meet other people's expectations
- because you have a shotgun pointed at you
- unwanted pregnancy
- to force a claim on a good looking partner as a gratification or personal accessory
- great sex
- fixed marriage setup by family matriarchs/patriarchs
- companionship due to loneliness
- mail order
- contract marriage as is often done in Hollywood between actors and actresses
- to satisfy a career advancement motive
- to intentionally have a claim on a partner's wealth or alimony after a divorce
- because mom wanted you to
- got snockered and woke up married
- ???
Click to expand...
We married because I was not allowed to stay on disability with a partner with a high income. So my husband married me only 3 months after meeting me because I would lose my income. And also to protect me so I can get a widow pension instead of disability if he dies unexpectedly. The house we bought is also bought in my name as another layer of protection for me. My husband is very loving and protective, I am a very Lucky lady
 
The reason we married was mainly for the legal/financial benefit. Otherwise, we would have just pulled a Kurt Russell-Goldie Hawn and shacked up in perpetuity.

flyinglentris mentioned a handful of entitlements given to married couples, and being that I was active duty military at the time, there are a whole host of other allowances granted to legally married couples, versus civil/domestic partnerships, some obvious (access to free healthcare) and some not so obvious (cohabitating as an unmarried couple was against regulation at the time, though rarely enforced. However, if your superiors felt the need to tighten the leash a little, they could have your permit to reside off-base cancelled, and back to the barracks/dormitory for you).

We already intended to stay together for the foreseeable future, but when I got orders to relocate, we made the decision to make it official, so she could easily (and more affordable) come along.
 
I'll also add that I'm much like caseydog with respect to marriage, being neither for nor against.

What I'm for is two people being on the same page with their marriage - if he wants to stay home and bake bread and clean the house, while she busts her hump making the income, that's cool, and same goes for the opposite.

If it's an open marriage as far as relationships go...who am I to judge, as long as everyone is in agreement? If it's the other way round and it's a completely celibate union, more power to you, if that's what you both want.

I feel the same way about unmarried relationships, same-sex relationships, etc. If it were announced tomorrow that multiple people could marry each other, I'd be fine with that (though divorces would get interesting, no doubt) as long as everyone was open about it.

What I'm fervently against is people just assuming that marriage is the only kind of relationship that's meaningful or worthwhile or "legitimate," and the assumption that getting married is just "what you do," without giving any thought to what they really want.

I feel the same way about all of life's so-called scripted parts: going to university, getting married, getting a 9-to-5 job, having kids, getting fat, retiring, guilting your kids into having grandkids, and dying.

You get one life. Don't want to get married? Don't. Don't want to have kids? Don't. Want to be an artist or a working musician or some other non-standard job? Do it.
 
Reasons for marriage are as varied as people.
I was 20 for my first marriage. My high school boyfriend. I was clueless. I had no idea what marriage meant. I do not know what I thought. My Husband (George) and I have been together for 30+ years (a long story).
Our decision to marry was based on practicality. Louisiana is a community property state. An unmarried couple can will their estate to their partner. The partner will have to pay $$$ in taxes. A married couple owns 1/2 of all property and financial recourses and 1/2 of the spouse's resources. Convoluted and need an attorney kind of laws. The impetus was to protect me.
In my mind our marriage was a formalization of our existing relationship. I love George, George loves me.
I was not prepared for the intense love and passion in George's eyes when he said his vows. I was not prepared for the huge shift of emotion inside of me. I felt the love and passion of the young woman who met him so many years ago. Our vows resonated with both of us.
I do not know how to describe the shift in our relationship.
I am a very happy Wife with a very happy Husband.
I love calling him Husband.
 
Here's the third wedding faux pas my brother (well, his girlfriend Trish) made:

My brother spent most of his career with Fuji, on the film development side of things. He'd met his girlfriend there; she was interning or entry-level or whatever, as an in-lab photographer or something like that.

We had rehearsal Friday morning, and as best man, Lee was there, so she came along to take pictures, and she was working with some kind of specialized camera that she wasn't familiar with, which she kept mentioning to Lee, and he'd help her out with it.

We got lined up, and the minister explained what would happen on Saturday and where we should stand and all that.

What's a giant church with 10 people in it like? Quiet and echoey. Someone so much as whispers, it bounces all round the room and back again a dozen times.

We got lined up, short pause with silence, then we all heard the camera make a funny noise, followed by Trish saying, "Well, fu--!," which then reverberated in every direction as a vulgar echo: "WELL, FU--!...Well, fu--!, well, fu--!, well, f---!," on and on.

That was followed right on its filthy little heels by, "SORRY, JESUS!...SOrry Jesus!..Sorry jesus!...sorry, jesus!...sorry, jes...!"

Keep in mind, I was marrying well above my station in life, joining a locally-prominent, well-off family, and it was common for people to ask me, "How'd a hillbilly like you manage that?" - and any work I'd done in the last two years to prove I wasn't some kind of unpolished rube went right down the toilet with that.

One more to go...
 
My best man got the whole church full of people laughing. At one point, my bride and I were to kneel to be blessed by the minister. As we knelt, I heard laughter from everyone behind me. My bride, the minister and I had no idea why.

After the ceremony, my dad told me to look at the bottom of my shoes. My best man had used white shoe polish to write "HE" on my left sole, and "LP" on the right one. :laugh:

But, that is not the best. I photographed a friend's wedding once. It was a second marriage for both of them, so it was small and informal. This friend came from a family of very funny people. When the minister asked for the wedding ring for the bride, the best man opened his tux coat toward the guests, and he had all kinds of watches and jewelry sewn into the lining, like one of those pickpockets selling stolen jewelry on a street corner, and pulled out a wedding ring. . Like this...

Screen Shot 2021-12-31 at 1.59.36 PM.jpg


CD
 
Last one:

Wedding over, and onto the reception, which was a sit-down meal and an open bar.

Because we had a morning wedding, our reception was an afternoon affair, and we had to be out of the hall by 8PM, so it could be used for another event, but it wasn't a problem, because the average age of our guests seem to skew to around 89.

Lee and Trish were planning to leave early next morning, to continue their sexcation across Lake Champlain and on into Vermont. To that end, he asked my best friend Will, another groomsman, if he would take both their tuxes back to the rental place, so Lee wouldn't have to wait around until them to open, which would have been fairly late on a Sunday.

"Sure, no problem." Will was a good guy.

MrsT and I had booked a luxury hotel a few hours downstate, enroute to our final honeymoon location, so after saying thanks and goodbye to everyone, we had a bit of a drive ahead of us.

Just as we'd turned the keys over to venue manager, just as we were climbing in our car to leave, up came Lee and Trish, frantically shouting at us:

"Tasty! Tasty! Have you seen Will?! He's got my tux!"

"Yeah, uh, he and Christie left a little while ago."

"My keys and my wallet...EVERYTHING!...is in my tux!"

🤦‍♂️

So, instead of driving down to our fancy hotel and and engaging in a little wedding night bow-chicka-wow-wow, we spent the next several hours of our honeymoon driving around town, randomly checking places where Will and Christie might have gone, finally finding them at a friend's house in another town.

To this day, 31 years later, he still makes no apologies, and truly can't grasp why any of that would make anyone angry: "You don't understand, bro! She promised to 🤬 my brains out! We 🤬 under a waterfall, bro! A waterfall!"

He has five siblings, and all of us have multiple stories where his pursuit of pleasure has intervened or otherwise disrupted our lives, and always with no apology, just a comment that, "Well, when the 🤬 calls, you gotta answer!"

One other thing, and this does make me laugh, but more at our own cleverness: the boys in the family, we're always giving each other nicknames. Everyone has a somewhat permanent nickname, but we also can be given temporary nicknames for something temporary in our lives.

Because of the age of Trish (18yo), especially in comparison with his age (33yo), we all started calling him "Bill" for a couple of years.

Why Bill? Well, we pride ourselves in putting some thought into our nicknames, and Bill is how the initials "BL" sounds when spoken like a word, and the BL was an abbreviation for the first form of his nickname - "Barely Legal," which reflected the age of his current girlfriend.

Barely Legal=BL=Bill.

People who knew him would hear us talking and one of us would refer to him as Bill, and they'd ask, "Why do they call you Bill, is that your middle or something?"

"Yeah, tell him why they call you Bill, Bill. Go on, tell him."

"Yeah, uh, it's because I, um, sort of look like our uncle Bill, so they just call me Bill, like a joke."

"Ok, sure, go with that...Bill. Say, is Trish around today, or is she still at school?"

:laugh:
 
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