From maids of honor failing to live up to either part of their title to the unrequited love of the childhood best friend, everyone has seen someone try to ruin a wedding. We asked our readers for their stories of the worst wedding guests they ever saw, and the response was so overwhelming, we couldn't fit them all in our first post. In fact, some stories are still coming in, so see the bottom of the post if you'd like to contribute to the third volume tomorrow. Thanks to all our amazing readers who participated for showing us the inspiring diversity out there among horrible trainwreck people.
1. Guests trying to be the center of attention are normal, but Brandee from Colorado had a guest who wanted to be the center of the marriage bed.
At our wedding, we had invited a couple we barely knew at that time. Well, the woman in that relationship got a little bit too drunk. After the ceremony, I am walking around greeting guests and she pulled me aside to the side of the venue and tried to make out with me.
After I ever so gracefully just swatted her off and went about my way and as the night is wrapping up, me and my husband are heading to our hotel. There she was just waiting to ask both of us in front of her boyfriend "Wheres your hotel?! I want to join!"
We just gave her some random hotel and room number and her boyfriend mouthed "I'm so sorry" as we left.
2. Em brings up a hard lesson many of our readers have learned—inviting someone out of a sense of duty is noble, but dangerous. Also, as we pointed out last time, brothers' girlfriends are always the riskiest people in the room.
At my wedding, it was a tie between my mother and my brother's girlfriend.
My mother, who I was estranged with due to her alcohol and drug problems and only invited out of a sense of obligation, showed up trashed. She could barely make it down the aisle for the ceremony, then when it was time for pictures she was missing and my man of honor went to find her. She was in the parking lot sneaking more booze before the reception. When told she had to come inside, she tried to fight him in the parking lot.
Then, at the reception, she kept insulting my dad's girlfriend and demanding to know why she was even invited even though my dad's girlfriend was and is a much bigger part of my life. Finally, her ride made her leave.
Meanwhile, during the reception, my brother's girlfriend got sloppy drunk and kept getting louder in her demands to know when he was going to propose to her. Then she started dancing very inappropriately on anyone she could trap. One of my female cousins had to help her to the bathroom where she then kissed her and tried groping her.
When she got rejected she then tried to take her dress off and run back into the reception. My brother caught her and then tried to make her leave. She ended up getting away from him and running half naked through the parking lot before he caught her again and got her in the car. She ended up in the hospital for alcohol poisoning that night. They are no longer together.
3. One anonymous reader revealed why newlyweds have gift registries.
The guest was my husband's high school football teammate. I married young, not a lot of money so we got married in my parent's backyard. It was still pretty nice, groom and best man in tuxes and I wore a wedding dress.
We had already delayed the wedding an hour due to weather so this guest (and his plus one) were late. They came busting through the back gate like the Kool-Aid man during the start of the wedding march. I ask for us to start again so they can grab a seat.
Wedding goes off fine despite the fact they both looked like they hadn't slept or showered. Smelled like ass and alcohol. I play nice and make no comments. My bridesmaid and other guests come up to me asking who the "whore in the cheap Rave dress" is. I have no clue.
I was ok until my husband's friend asks him (with me in earshot) where he was the night before, he couldn't find him, etc. Then he proceeds to introduce his plus one as my husband's wedding present. She was a stripper. Not a classy or pretty one. A cheap, nasty, probably cooks meth in her trailer stripper. I was done and asked my husband to show them out.
4. Surprisingly, the guest suffering from unrequited love hasn't shown up in these stories...until now, thanks to this anonymous reader.
We had a small (75 people) destination wedding. The worst guest, by far, was my husband's best friend (now former best friend). She had quite a candle burning for him. It was bad.
She tried to photobomb every candid photo of my husband and me. I'm really upset that she ruined our guest mat- one of my family members, a WWII POW, had signed it, and passed away a few months later, and we can't hang it in our home because she wrote to my husband "me love you long time" on it.
She acted as though I was invisible the entire weekend. She literally only spoke two words to me, "oh, yeah," when I asked her if she'd gotten her flights worked out, because if not, we could talk to the hotel about charging the block rate for one more night. And that was after [she was] snarked at by the best man how I existed, so she needed to acknowledge me some time.
FWIW, she was one of my bridesmaids until she decided that my "get your dress anywhere you want, in your budget, that you'd wear again. It has to be black, have straps, cannot be super short or low cut, and not a halter" was bridezilla. She also grinded against my husband at our reception, and got wasted.
My husband has only spoken to her twice since the wedding. She added a bunch of friends to Facebook who had also been at the wedding...just not my husband. I wonder if she knows that we have a kid and have moved to a different state...?
5. Sometimes, it takes decades for someone to become the worst wedding guest ever. (Also, um, sorry.)
At my wedding, a “friend” of my husband’s family informed me that if her daughter was older, my husband would have married her. 26 years later, I recently found a sent text to that daughter on my husband’s cell phone that read “I miss you, too. I will try to call you later today.” I still haven’t decided what to do. ☹
6. On one level, perhaps, you have to respect Sarah's ex-mother-in-law's very straightforward approach to ruining everything.
I knew my marriage was doomed before the wedding was even over. My mother-in-law cried when we told her about our engagement. She refused to talk about any and all wedding plans through the entire engagement. On the day of our wedding, she showed up dressed all in black as if she were attending a funeral, and proceeded to sit in the front row and sob uncontrollably throughout the entire ceremony. The marriage didn't last. We've been divorced for two years now.
7. "Karma is a B" and so was Jennie's "maid of honor-zilla."
You've heard of bridezillas, well I had a "maid of honor-zilla."
She planned this really nice bridal shower for me which was great, but she was so controlling with the itinerary for everything and at the end of the shower, she actually told my guests that it was over and that they could leave now. I had family who drove a couple of hours for this, so they felt awkward when they were basically kicked out.
I learned later that she only made such a big deal about my bridal shower because she expected me to do the same thing for her when it was time for her to get married. Not because she was being nice.
When I was dress shopping with my MOH, I had told her my idea for the bridesmaid dresses. I had picked out a different style in the same color for each girl, and picked my favorite style for her. She told me she didn't like it, so I ended up changing my entire bridesmaid dress plan around her all because she didn't like my choice for her. And I was the bride.
On my wedding day before the ceremony, we were taking pictures. It was time for pictures with the entire bridal party and the photographer had asked my maid of honor to please carry the train of my dress while we moved locations. She rolled her eyes and responded with a sarcastic "gosh, I have to do EVERYTHING today." Instead of making a remark about how she's the maid of honor and how that's a typical thing a MOH would help with, I took the high road and just told her that I appreciated her help.
The ceremony was just about to start when my MOH looked out at our guests in the church pews and she said to me' "wow it doesn't look that full out there." REALLY?! I almost lost it.
Several other dramatic events took place after the wedding, and needless to say, we are no longer friends. I learned a couple years later that she had gotten engaged to her boyfriend, then two weeks before they were supposed to get married, he dumped her. Karma's a B!
8. On a lighter note, Courtney was a terrible guest on purpose, but in the service of improving tolerance among family members.
I feel like I should nominate myself as one of the worst wedding guests ever, but want to point out that it was for a good cause!
My best friend is gay and comes from a very, very religious family, like as a child he was pretty much in a cult kind of religious. Needless to say his coming out process with them has been pretty awful.
Because his mom sees pictures of us together, she was convinced that if I just left my husband, he and I would be very happy together.
When he brought me to his sister's wedding, I got ALL the drunk, danced scandalously (for a super religious wedding), convinced the bartender to let me mix everyone's drinks, and licked my friend on the side of the face in front of everyone during the "kiss the way you want the bride and groom to kiss" game.
His sister the bride also thought his parents were being assholes about his gay-ness so she thought it was awesome.
My goal was to be SO awful that his parents would never want him to bring another girl home ever again. Last month, they invited his boyfriend over for dinner for the first time. Win!
9. If you're an aunt, and you know that "the weird, pushy aunt" is already a wedding cliché, how do you let yourself act like this? Thanks for the story, Jaclyn.
We like to plan parties in my family, so when my sister was getting married, my mom and I handled most of the details ourselves. We made the favors and centerpieces, decorated the venue- pretty much everything that goes into decor was personally made by us. Day of the wedding, my brother-in-law's aunt shows up insisting she wants to come with us to decorate that morning.
We start loading stuff into our cars and she tells us not to- she's going to rent a truck because she insists that we will not be able to get everything there in our 3 separate SUVs. So we waited almost 2 hours on an already tight timeline for her to show up with this truck and were scrambling till the very last minute to get things done before we had to leave to go get dressed.
We try to take the aunt with us but she tells us she doesn't have time to go home and change because she lives 2 hours away and didn't bring a change of clothes with her. She's dressed in a sweatshirt and yoga pants. When we come back she's made some very minor changes to the decor- things that went against what my sister wanted, but whatever, we aren't going to fight with her about it.
She attends the wedding in her sweats, and when it's time for speeches, she unexpectedly gets up and takes the mic. She thanks everyone for coming to HER event and proceeds to tell everyone how hard she worked on it (she had not done a single thing until that day, and even then she did next to nothing) and goes on to promote her "party planning business".
She literally got up there and told everyone that if they liked what they saw, they could contact her for event planning services. My mom and I were furious, as was my sister, who got up and took the mic and went on to thank HER family who had worked nonstop for months to put this together.
My sister and brother-in-law had provided all the alcohol for the event and the venue provided just the bartender, so the intention was obviously to pack up what was left over and bring it back to them.
After the reception while we were helping clean/pack up some things, we found the aunt at the bar, telling the bartender to give her a few cases of beer to bring home since "I didn't even drink. I NEVER drink when I'm hosting an event". We noped her right the hell out of there after that, and she's no longer invited to anything, ever.
10. Kristine is clearly a remarkably open and communicative person, a trait she apparently got (but in way more moderation) from her dad.
my family found out that I was pregnant at my wedding. and my father, while very happy about this news, got very drunk and decided to lament to everyone about my abortion the year before. I'm not ashamed of my abortion but it's also my story to tell to who I want and it was so selfish of him to go and tell everyone about how it made him feel and how disappointed he was in me for doing that while completely disregarding all the reasons I would have done it. it was a tiny wedding with guests that consisted of mostly my close family who knew about it but he pretty much made it all about him and I was so upset that my new husband and I didn't even consummate our marriage because on top of everything else, my dad who traveled for his work, stayed with us whenever he was in town and drove home with us at the end of the night.
11. Probably the most offensive thing this anonymous reader's guests did was being atrocious in cliché ways straight out of a "bad wedding" montage.
1) My husband’s uncle.
He got very intoxicated. He decided to remove his shirt during dinner to show the rest of the people seated at his table his tattoos. After dinner he fell into the table holding the wedding cake and knocked it to the floor.
2) The photographer my husband hired was a friend of his sister.
She also drank heavily and none of the pictures at the reception turned out.
This may have been an omen of things to come. We are no longer married.
12. Sometimes you think you've heard it all, and then E.L. comes along to remind you that none of these other guests have pretended to be Nazis.
My husband and I got married at a beautiful German restaurant owned by a German family. My father in law drank too much (as usual) and smashed a glass that cut the bartenders hand open. The owner asked him to settle down and he decided to do the goose-step and Hitler salute in the middle of our reception for all our guests to see, including the owners. It safe to say our wedding wrapped up pretty fast after that and we never returned to the restaurant again. I'm still mortified at the thought of it.
13. It's been thousands of years since someone came up with marriage, and still some people can't get past making immature jokes about the happy couple's happy coupling.
We got married a couple months ago on my husband's family farm.
My dad lives close by, so he let us borrow his camper to stay in and he just went home when the reception was over.
During supper, we had ‘open mic’ for guests to have stories about us. My dad's friend, who was quite intoxicated at the time, gets up for 3rd time and all 300+ guests are dreading what he about to say..
So he starts telling everyone how much money this camper cost my Dad, about how it's only a couple years old, and how we are going to bend the jacks on it tonight and my husband is going to have to tell my dad, and my dad will probably beat the shit out of him. I wanted to crawl under the head table in that moment.
14. Much like the people who cleaned up after this anonymous reader's reception, we don't even know what to say to this one.
After my sisters wedding at a rural campground, the next day cleaning up we found a red solo cup that someone had taken a dump in. There were lots of bathrooms, so really no need for such a thing. It was a great reception, no outbursts or anything, but . . . WTF???
So now when someone talks about a crazy party anyone who was there says "was it shit in a solo cup crazy?"
P.S. This was several years ago and we aren't heathens, it was a great wedding for 2 people very much in love. It's just one of those things if you don't laugh it off you'll cry.
15. Alright, well… technically this person did attend the wedding for a few minutes.
I was attending my friend's wedding and as we're waiting for the ceremony to begin we were all noticing golfers walking down the path a few feet behind the alter. We commented that we hoped they'd put a stop to that once the ceremony started.
Fast forward to the vows when an uninvited guest arrived -- a morbidly obese little person in a golf cart stopped dead center behind the couple! He stood up in the cart taking selfies from the passenger seat (he presumably couldn't fit in the drivers seat)! The wedding guests began to whisper, the bridal party began to panic, and the bride tried to choke back a laugh while the officiant shot her a dirty look thinking she was laughing at the vows. After what seemed like an eternity the golfer moved on, but not before he photo bombed the vows in every single picture.
ICYMI: fat tyrion lannister crashed my friends wedding vows
16. While not as bad as the friend's daughter who started an affair decades later, Julie's sister shows how to ruin a wedding for literally weeks at a time.
On our wedding day it started with my own sister murmuring some snotty comments during service. So far so good. At least no hysterical drunk vomiting in the middle of the dance floor.
Later on she, her husband and their two kids got up while we all had cake and put on their coats getting ready to leave. Being asked where they were going my sister answered, that since she had to travel to the city in which we got married she at least wanted to visit the museum this city was famous for. Uhm...ok?
Everybody was quite startled as it really was a nice and very relaxed wedding for everybody.
A few days after the wedding I asked her on the phone how she liked it and she literally gave our wedding a rating of a C--. Yes, she came up with a school grade.
Not only that, a few more days later even a letter from her arrived that she had sent before we talked on the phone. In this letter, she explained how exhausting the wedding weekend was with all the traveling they had to go through (5 hours one-way sitting on a train), how bad the hotel was (which they by the way chose themselves and they simply are really, really cheap people), that they went through the sacrifice of paying my mom's hotel room, too (which they had offered her to do so, and my sister and her husband really make good money) and that they had to cancel a garden party (!) and a pre school summer fest (!!) just to attend our wedding (just a reminder: she's my sister).
Read yourself between her lines...I didn't talk to her for 5 years.
17. There have obviously been worse people on this list, but it's never more irritating than when the guy who is literally in charge for a few minutes goes off the deep end.
At my best friend's wedding, the worst guest was the officiating minister. First, he stopped the ceremony right in the middle because the 3 year old flower girl was, understandably, a bit fidgety. He announced that "Someone needs to get that child under control." Not only that, when the ceremony was (we thought) over, the mother of the groom stood to clap. Apparently, Reverend Sourpuss had more to say, because he shook his finger at her and told her, in front of everyone, "Ma'am, I am NOT finished. You need to sit down."
I will never forgive that man for ruining what should have been the most perfect day of my best friend's life.
18. Joie Tartaglia wrote us an email at the very last second, but got added in because this story is nuts.
I was the guest book attendant when I was 13 at my cousin's wedding.
First, the groom showed up drunk and fainted, dripping with sweat, just as things started. Once he came to, they got through the ceremony and headed to the reception.
The booze was flowing and the entire bridal party got tossed, specifically the groom and groomsmen. Eventually a fight broke out, and the groom, my cousin (the bride) and some miscellaneous bride's maids and groomsmen are in a brawl on the dance floor.
My cousin's wedding dress was covered in blood as were other bridal party members. Also, someone put liquor in the kids punch bowl and we all ended up pretty sick. They divorced months later.
19. Allen wrote us this story that should remind you not to compare yourself to others, lest you become an unhealthy Nebraska pothead who will never have children. At least, we think that's the message?
My husband and I were married in a small ceremony in December of 2015 so we could legally adopt our son. We held a much larger, planned ceremony in June of 2016. We were surrounded by 300 of our closest family and friends.
I invited my long time best friend from high school. We have known each other since 10th grade, 25 years. We were tied at the hip, always together. We worked together, went to concerts together, you name it.
We got older, jobs took us in different directions, I moved to the east coast and she moved to the west coast. We kept in touch by email, text and the occasional phone call. She and her partner ended up moving back about 2 years prior to our wedding.
Although we were extremely close, I did not ask her to be in my wedding. After struggling with knowing that I might have offended her by not asking her to be part of our day, I finally asked her to be our personal attendant. She never replied to my texts, phone calls, etc. She would only respond to my messages on Facebook Messenger. Her response was over the top and seemed as if she was excited and said yes. However, she never showed up to shopping events, planning events, nothing.
Two weeks before the wedding I texted her to remind her to mail in her RSVP. She replied and thanked me for the reminder. A week out, I texted her saying, I never received the RSVP and that I assume they are not coming. No response. Our big day came, and I totally forgot to change the floral order to cut out her flowers.
Two minutes before our ceremony, she showed up with her mother and her partner. Her partner, is something else. She is intimidated by me. Why, well lets just say I can spot a Bullshitter a mile away and tend to call people out on their BS. This girl is a hot mess.
They show up, and the girlfriend is anxious. She is on edge the entire time. I never saw them at all. It wasn’t until after the wedding that I was told that she showed up. Apparently she showed up, and when she received her flowers to wear she had a look of disgust on her face.
They sat in front of some friends of mine, who told me that they mocked our ceremony the entire time. They made fun of everything. Our Vows were dedicated to each other and our son. We baptized our son with everyone present. Apparently, this sent them over the edge and the girl friend started laughing, so hard to the point where they had to leave. Haven’t heard from her since.
I have been told that they are jealous that my husband and I were able to adopt a child. See, it was their plan to move back home to be closer to family so they too could have children. But they both smoke a ton of pot, are in poor health, and could never carry a child.
Their plan was to move back home, foster children, and since weed is not legal in Nebraska they were going to grow their own pot at the cost of taxpayer's money from the foster system. Once they found out we were having a baby, they went off the deep end with jealousy. Sad but true.
Best part is. I know they smoke a ton of drugs. I am taking a new job with a new company and will end up being my former best friends boss. I am a fan of random drug testing of employees. Funny how that works.
See also: Volume One.
Thanks again to our amazing and hilarious fans for sending these in. You have truly expanded our understanding of how bad guests can be. If you have a story you'd like to share, send us an email at submissions@someecards.com with the subject line "Worst Wedding Guest." Let us know how you would like to be credited (first name, anonymous, full name + link)—we will use first names only as a default. Please do not include identifying information for the people in your stories.