This thread is giving me serious deja vu, right down to the exact phrases and wording being used.
Yeah, but you’d probably still be in that church if you had kept quiet.
I was saying the girl in the story should get hit by a car, but my brother’s ex-wife (they did get married and she did leave him while he was deployed).
Still though, the girl in the story left him while he was deployed, she just “didn’t want to tell him.” Horrible person.
That’s pretty much it. I tried calling her at home, but there was no answer since she was off somewhere else getting married. I left a message, and went back to my mom’s place (where I always stay when visiting out west). I flew home a couple days later, and when I landed there was a very apologetic message from her on my answering machine.
Her marriage did not last, but our friendship has.
Yeah, it came up in another thread a while ago. It’s the closest I’ve got to a left-at-the-altar story.
And did he ever become an Episcopal minister?
Hmm. You know in the over 20 years since that happened, I’ve never thought about that. That whole thing was instrumental in my exit from the church for good. I’d probably have married someone else and been a church wife shudder.
I can’t believe this was the counselor’s advice: “You know, you could have it both ways by just becoming a clergyman in an entirely different faith (She is okay with your becoming a clergyman in a different faith from her own, isn’t she? She doesn’t mind being a clergyman’s wife?), and then you could marry Daddy’s Little Princess who doesn’t know how anything works and who has a silly, materialistic family who hates you. Win-win!”
I am of the opinion that you should never marry very young and that you should never marry anyone whose family hates you (unless your fiance/e hates them too, in which case you should still be careful because s/he might be rebelling and might turn out to be more like her/his family one day anyway).
See, I would take this in an entirely different way. I’d assume either the friend is a brainless twit, or she really didn’t want me in her life any more.
A girl I used to know got engaged three separate times, and each time broke off the wedding two weeks beforehand. Then she wound up marrying her high-school boyfriend, who was driving pizza to support them. Then it turned out that she believed that sex was only for conceiving children, so they shouldn’t have any unless they were trying for a baby (not typical in my church, have always wondered where she picked that up, her parents were fairly sane but maybe they only looked that way). So she wound up divorced, with a baby. Eventually she remarried and they have some kids–I sure hope she changed her mind about that sex thing.
People in my hometown are crazy. Maybe it’s the water. But I’ve never lived anywhere with more soap opera antics going on–this kind of bizarro drama happened all the time.
One of the advantages of being clueless is I don’t have to face choices like that.
A gal pal of mine came to work one Monday and related the events of what had been the most astonishing ceremony ever. A some point in the process, right in front of the entire crowd in the church the Bride halted everything and in so many words said the wedding was off becuse the Groom had f*$8ed the Maid of Honor the night before. I think everyone then went straight to the bar.
A friend of mine was at a wedding a few years back where he knew the groom but not that well (if I recall correctly, they were work buddies and he had been a bit surprised at getting an invitation). During the reception, the best man stood up to give a speech. He began by greeting the newlywed couple, then congratulated their parents, and then moved on to inform the entire wedding party that he and the bride had been having sex for the past two or so years, the most recent time being two days before the wedding. In my friend’s words “At this point the atmosphere in the restaurant was a bit awkward” and he left at the earliest possible opportunity. Apparently the marriage didn’t last too long.
My husband has a similar story - but not in such a community. He dated a girl who put a lot of pressure on him to marry her. So he got engaged with a long engagement - two years - figuring either something would happen or he’d be ready then. About three months before the wedding he said “oh shit” realizing he had no more desire to marry her than he did when he proposed. The wedding train was going full speed down the tracks when he derailed it, but it was before actual invitations went out.
In many ways it was really cruel of him to be engaged to a woman for two years that he didn’t want to marry - especially since marriage was so important to her. But since he wasn’t ready to break up with her either, and she’d given the ultimatum, I’m not sure he bears all of the blame. And it was better to break it off than divorce.
Is this the story where you didn’t RSVP one way or the other, so she had no idea that you were actually attending?
I have two.
The first one is boring. Soon after we graduated from college, two acquaintences of mine were getting married. I can’t remember if I was invited directly or not, but I knew the Maid of Honor well and she asked me to be her date. I was a poor young man and had to go out and buy a new pair of dress shoes and nice belt the day before the wedding. Very late that night, my friend the MoH called me in tears to say that the couple had had a fight and the bride had called off the wedding. They put a sign up on the door of the church to let people know when they showed up the next day. Then the couple eloped about two weeks later and I lost touch with them.
Story #2:
My wedding! But not exactly a cancellation story.
My wife is from Canada, but we live in the South. So when we got married she invited some friends from Canada but didn’t expect any of them to come such a distance. But one guy who she knew came all the way down – she was impressed because they weren’t really that close.
I remember during the ceremony that when the priest got to the part about “If anyone knows any reason why these two should not marry…” he didn’t pause after the question. He barrelled on through - I thought it was kind of funny, but didn’t understand why at the time.
After we got back from our honeymoon, my wife’s uncle (from Canada) called. He told us that this friend who had come down from Canada was convinced that I was a con man and criminal who had brainwashed my wife to steal her away from her family. He had hired a private investigator to do a background check on me and had found a ex-convict with my name in Illinois where I used to live. He had tried to convice my uncle to drive down to Nashville with him to stop the wedding and abduct my wife and take her back to Canada. My uncle had refused but he wasn’t sure of the truth until he actually met me at the wedding. He said the friend had also talked to our priest.
My wife was freaked out so she called our priest. He said that yes, the man had spoken to him the night before the wedding; but our priest knew me fairly well by that point and basically told him he was crazy (which he was). But the priest was afraid he would disrupt the ceremony, which is why he had rushed through the part for objections.
My wife never talked to that guy again, so either he thinks I got away with some massive con or (hopefully) he got over whatever mental illness had possessed him at that time.
Oh! I forgot the part where at the rehearsal, the priest asked me to confirm my full name and birthdate for the church records. In reality he was comparing this against the P.I. report that this crazy guy had. They didn’t match.
Well, what did you expect him to do when he found out his friend was marrying a Skammer? 
That’s the one.
Not a wedding cancellation story - but in the same vein as Robot Arm’s:
My dad left my mom for another woman. My mom asked him to work on their marriage, and he agreed, going so far as to go to counseling with my mom for a year to either resolve their issues or get divorced. The year ended, he left with hopes that mom would grant the divorce, and she still fought it tooth and nail, trying to make the judge put “adultery” on the divorce decree. She was very, very bitter.
Dad and my stepmum move forward and decide to get married. But my mom is so bitter, she calls up the pastor of the church 4 weeks before the wedding and starts quoting chapter and verse about how if the marriage is fixable, divorce is not an option and that she’s willing to reconcile even though my dad isn’t. The pastor gets quite concerned and tells my dad he doesn’t feel comfortable holding the wedding at the church.
Long story short, less than 4 weeks before the wedding, my dad and stepmum had to find another church that would let them get married there on their very limited budget, plus replacing some of the musicians and such that had originally agreed to perform until the venue was changed. The wedding went from being a joyous occasion celebrated by the entire church to a scandalous affair that everyone whispered about.
It was awful, and I just wanted to shake my mom.
So, covered in oil?
d&r
What an asshole. The bride, too, of course–but come on, tell everyone at the reception? WTF was he trying to accomplish with that? If you’re going to tell, before the wedding is the right time. Jezus.