There’s a thread on Reddit about marriages that ended in divorce, and the red flags for the aforementioned marriages (most of which popped up very early indeed).
A few of the gems:
At the rehearsal dinner, the groom’s mom is in tears, because “he looks miserable” and he was, we all knew it. During the vows they had written for each other, the bride starts with “I know I can be a pretty terrible person, and I don’t know why you’ve stuck around, but that’s all going to change starting today!”
The groom’s vows:
"Dear Bride, we’ve had our ups and downs – mostly downs – "
Groom mashed the cake into the (pregnant) brides face so hard she went down backwards. Groom and his father ended up fist fighting in the bathroom, cops were called, fun times…
I had a coworker tell me about how, before one wedding, the mother of the groom was picking on the bride in the reception area. The MOTG got so pissed she went over to the wedding cake and punched it, causing a lot of damage. The baker tried togo for the MOTG but was held back. When the FOTG was called his first words, about his wife, were “What has she done now?”
That poor bride, I wonder how the groom did. The mother was allowed to attend the wedding, but not the reception.
She was less than five feet tall and morbidly obese. He was well over six feet tall and skinny as a toothpick. He had been born with a hair lip that was never corrected, even though his father was a surgeon. He was also learning disabled. His father did everything he could to prevent them from marrying. Her father had a heart attack during the rehearsal dinner. Coming down the aisle, she became tangled in her gown, nearly ripping it entirely off. At the reception she leaned on a table, which collapsed, bringing down both the bride and the wedding cake. He didn’t help her up.
The marriage was never consummated, because he had no idea what sex was.
The marriage lasted thirty years, until she died of complications of her obesity.
My own experience, I was already having doubts before my wedding. The fact that I was utterly miserable to whole time, forcing myself to smile probably should have been a hint. Then my husband choosing to go out drinking with his friends after the reception rather than coming home with me didn’t really bode well either. We lasted 3 months.
Probably the swankiest and easily the most expensive wedding I ever attended was one of those.
It was a weekend affair on Catalina Island, everyone invited to both the rehearsal dinner and the wedding. All costs borne by the families. The actual wedding was held at the Yacht’s Club.
The bride had to be tranqued in order to drag her, crying, down the aisle after an embarrassingly lengthy delay, during which the guests were invited to enjoy the open bar. Vows were quickly made, we enjoyed a dazzling repast, drank like Irish playwrights and danced the night away.
I was in the wedding for a friend from college. The bride and two of her bridesmaids went out and got drunk the morning of the wedding. Nobody knew where they were and they were over an hour late to the wedding. The two drunk bridesmaids wound up getting dressed in each other’s dresses (you could tell by looking at them that the dresses didn’t fit them right). The father of the bride told my friend just before the wedding finally started, “You know, if you wanted to call it off, I’d understand.” They went through with it, but it was over in a few short years.
My brother-in-law and his wife were unable to agree on a style for their wedding album, so they made two. (One with more formal pictures lined up on each page, and one that was more free-form and scrapbook-y.) They were divorced in less than a year. At least they didn’t have to decide who got to keep the wedding album.
My brother worked for a while as a wedding photographer. He pushed real hard to sell 2 copies of their photto album, offering a real discount. He sold it as “one to lend out to your families, and one for you to keep safe at home”.
But it was really so there were 2 copies when they split up.
He was sick of them coming to him, asking him to dig out the negatives from a few years ago, reprint the pictures from them for me, … oh, and can you cut him/his family out of them? And then being real upset when he charged them for his time in doing all of that.
A girl who went to my high school married her boyfriend when she became pregnant to him. They were 16 or 17 and their families forced them to marry. During the wedding reception the groom and one of the bridesmaids jumped in a car and disappeared interstate. They didn’t surface again for weeks and by then the marriage was over. Mind you this was back in 1970, before mobile data and social media, when disappearing was easy.
In the town I grew up in when I was still in high school “Brian” and “Becky” got engaged. The wedding was set for a year, and then Becky discovered him sleeping with “Carol” and broke it off. They got back together and the wedding went off as planned…until six month pregnant Carol walked into the reception, starting a fistfight between the father of the bride and the groom - which turned into a brawl.
My first wedding had a book on how long it would last. My first husband wasn’t a fan of monogamy. I made the woman’s mistake of thinking that he’d change. He didn’t - eighteen months.
I was with a bunch of guys at a bar, when one of the guys began getting texts from a woman who was out celebrating the night before her wedding. She wanted to meet him to “say goodbye”.
She showed up a short time later and they “said goodbye” for twenty minutes in her car. After, she came in, did a shot, then offered to “say goodbye” to any/all of us (one at a time). One guy took her up on it.
The groom found out from one of the bridesmaids (who was present for the entire thing) the day after the wedding. Despite all this, the wedding lasted a year.
The wedding was a flawless, modest-budget event on the sands of Point Reyes. However, the bride going into full-scale meltdown when asked, at the jeweler’s, if she wanted a completely new wedding ring or a piece that would “lock into” the engagement ring, should have been noted. Marriage lasted just over a year, for some values of “year.”
One of my cousins has terrible taste in women. I don’t remember much about his first wife, which marriage ended when it came out that the kid wasn’t his. His second wife, though, for me the biggest warning sign was when he brought her home to meet the family for the first time, she refused to hug anyone. We’re a very huggy family, and I knew that anyone who didn’t wouldn’t fit in with us.
On the “you never can tell” count, his brother got engaged to a dancer (no, not “exotic”) and married her about six months after they met. Everyone rolled their eyes when they heard about that one… but that was about a decade and a half and two kids ago, and they’re still madly in love with each other
