Yes, Rachel, your wedding is supposed to be a happy day. Unfortunately, weddings aren't always as happy as they should be...and sometimes it's because of a wedding guest from hell.
Not long ago, u/BewareOfTrips asked r/weddingshaming, "Who was the rudest guest at your wedding?" and — my oh my — some of these guests are really lucky to have walked out of these receptions alive. Here were the absolute worst:
1. "At my friends’ wedding, the bride’s mother spent the whole 10-minute speech listing all of the terrible things that had happened that year (deaths in the family, unfortunate diagnoses and health issues, damage to property due to natural disasters) and then every once in a while would go '…so it’s nice to have had this wedding to look forward to!' before diving right back into it.
"My friends still haven’t shown anyone the wedding video with the speeches because it was filmed from the head table, and you can clearly hear the bride saying, 'Oh my God. I’m going to kill her. Right now. Hand me a knife, I’m gonna do it, she must be stopped,' and her new husband telling her, 'You can’t kill her right now, honey, there’ll be too many witnesses.'"
2. "My uncle kept demanding that God doesn't recognize my marriage because it wasn't done in a Catholic church and that my husband and I will never last because he'll probably cheat on me in a few years when things 'inevitably become stale.' I tried telling him I don't believe in the same things as him and wasn't concerned, so he got louder instead, and I had to just walk away. Definitely gave my surrounding cousins a good laugh though; he does stuff like this a lot."
3. "At my sister's wedding, an aunt brought a piñata in the shape of a woman so the groom could have something to 'pop' that night since my sister wasn’t a virgin (she had a child from her first marriage). My cousin and I took care of it, and it never made its way into the reception, thank goodness."
4. "My officiant was over an hour late, brought her adult daughter, and ate all my bacon wrapped scallops. When we asked for a refund, she wrote a letter telling us we were going to hell. I tried giving her poor reviews, but she changed her business name and kept going."
5. "My husband's cousin complained about the music. It was too 'happy.' He was single at the time, and the wedding was making him feel sad and lonely, so he requested blues to be played. Not one song. Blues only. Because he was sad. At my wedding. He tried to argue with me several times until I told him to go home and listen to his music in the privacy of his own room. I had to explain to him that even though he felt sad, I was in a rather positive mood."
6. "My husband’s childhood best friend showed up with his girlfriend absolutely stoned out of their gourds on some cocktail of pot and a passel of pharmaceuticals (and probably a few things snorted to top it all off).
"Meanwhile, HIS mom stood at the buffet table and ate more than half of the groom's cake. I’ve been told it was absolutely amazing, perhaps the best chocolate cake ever, but we didn’t get any of it."
7. "In lieu of giving a toast at the rehearsal dinner, my mother-in-law got up to announce that she was getting married that next Wednesday. She wore her winter-white micro-mini skirt wedding suit to the ceremony the next day. This was a quiet, Methodist-church wedding in the upper South."
8. "At my sister's wedding, my aunt turned up in jeans, called 'rose gold' (one of the wedding colors) 'tacky,' and criticized her own daughters for turning up in jumpsuits, which she deemed 'classless.' They were beautiful floral jumpsuits, much more appropriate for a wedding than jeans. We later found out she’s a racist, so she’s not invited to mine."
9. "My grandfather, less than 30 minutes into the reception, decided that he was ready to leave. In an effort to 'hurry my gram along,' he went and sat in the car. And she LET HIM. She didn't decide to leave until over three hours later! My gram didn't normally have this shiny of a spine. But I was not only the oldest grandkid, I was also the first to get married, so she wasn't letting him ruin it for her (or me)! My gram is easily one of my favorite people on this planet, so I choose to remember her shiny spine more than my grandfather's dickish one on that day."
10. "I invited my cousin and her husband. She showed up with her husband, her mother-in-law, both of his brothers, and one of their girlfriends. Six people!"
11. "My wife’s aunt ignored our signs and announcements to not take photos during the ceremony and leave it to our paid, professional photographers. That asshole aunt stood in the main aisle taking photos of my wife and her father walking down the aisle, ruining our photographer’s photos of the procession. When I finally got the photos she took six months later, they were low resolution and out of focus. I spent upwards of 10 hours in Photoshop trying to composite one single, decent photo but ended up losing hope. She also got overly drunk and wouldn’t stop harassing my already married uncle. Years later and I still don’t like that lady."
12. "In October 2020, I went with my wife to her younger sister's wedding, which was attended by their vehemently anti-mask grandmother. Leading up to the big day, she'd nearly been kicked out of every hotel from Tennessee to Colorado because whenever she was asked to put a mask on in the lobby, she responded by covering her mouth with her hand and saying, 'How about this?' At the wedding, she was asked to limit physical contact, so she naturally hugged everyone she did — and didn't — know. My wife, who is a doctor, refused her hug, resulting in the grandmother's brother calling her 'not a great doctor.'
"After she found out the woman the maid of honor was picking up from the airport was her wife, she refused to acknowledge it — first referring to her as a 'friend,' 'girlfriend,' and, naturally, 'nobody really cares about titles.' She also told the groom's father that 'immigrants are the worst thing to happen to this country.' The father responded in his thick native Bulgarian accent, 'I'm an immigrant.'"
13. "My brother-in-law got belligerently drunk and kept tossing empty glasses into the little koi pond at the venue. My 7-year-old nephew was in hysterics, worried about the fish."
14. "One of my college friends showed up late and then called my wedding boring during the reception to my face."
15. "One of my bridesmaids was talking to an elderly guest who was sitting down, so she bent over so that she could speak directly to him (he was hard of hearing). Another guest walked up behind her, grabbed the zipper to her dress, and yanked. The bridesmaid’s dress fell completely off/down in one swoop.
"As a side note, the same guest came from out of town with a plus one. Her ex-husband, who was also a guest, lived locally. She ended up hooking up with the ex in her hotel room and left the plus one to fend for himself."
16. "My father-in-law was the best man and carried my ring in his pocket. He went outside to smoke his pipe before the ceremony and was fiddling with the ring when he dropped it into the grass. It was night. The wedding was delayed as everyone got flashlights to help look for it. No one told me what was going on. They couldn't find it, so my mother-in-law let my husband borrow her fancy anniversary band that had diamonds in it. When the time came, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a fancier ring than the one we had chosen. I thought it was a surprise for me. My mother-in-law approached me after the ceremony and told me there was no way I was keeping it. A few minutes later, someone out in the yard actually FOUND MY RING! At the reception, my father-in-law vomited on my dress."
17. "The plus one of my partner’s work buddy offered to blow the groom under the head table while I was on the dance floor. She also offered to have sex with the 17-year-old brother of my partner."
18. "At my sister’s wedding, one of her new in-laws wore pajamas."
"It was a small potluck wedding — my sister and her husband decided to get married a little earlier than they wanted to for insurance reasons, I think. Her husband comes from a very big Southern family, he has eight siblings, and they are admittedly not the classiest people. So while my sister, her husband, and most of the guests put in an effort to wear nice clothes, the wedding just clearly wasn’t a big deal to one of his sisters who showed up in a pajama shirt and fuzzy pajama pants. It hurt my sister’s feelings."
19. "I had someone bring in a Tupperware container of pot brownies to my wedding at a country club. I’m a substance use disorder therapist with several family members in recovery from drugs and alcohol. It’s not like we were having a dry wedding, just felt seriously disrespectful."
20. "My former sister-in-law is a very unhappy and lonely woman who has never been in a relationship, and I would feel bad if she wasn't a horrible person as well. At our wedding, she got very, very drunk and began yelling about how marriage is a false institution and only pathetic people do it, blah blah. My sisters were trying to get her to leave the wedding as nicely as possible when she — pissed and raging away — fell down the front stairs of the venue. She broke her ankle, bruised a bunch of things, and got a concussion. The rest of the night was about her, and everyone feeling sorry for her. I should have known then."
21. "My grandmother walked out halfway through my vows. I still don't actually know why because we haven't spoken since. She just said to my aunt, 'Right, I've had enough,' and off she went to wait in my aunt's car. My uncle had to miss the first half of our reception just driving the old hag home."
22. "My ex-friend at my friend’s wedding requested a vegan meal. She wasn’t vegan. She ate her meal plus a ton of other non-vegan food throughout the reception, then got really drunk and tried to fight the groom. He didn’t engage, so she tried to fight me. Apparently, she was angry about a slight from years prior. I ignored her and ended up calling a cab to go home. She was screaming and carrying on as I left. The venue called the cops on her."
23. "At the reception, my mother went around to all the tables, not to greet anyone, but to ask if she could have their leftovers for her dog. She had a large ziplock bag in her purse that she opened up and asked them to drop the leftovers/bones in the bag. She would hover behind people and ask for specific pieces. My sister ran interference and took me to the other side of the room while our husbands dealt with her. Only by promising that the kitchen staff would save everything for her, did they finally get her to sit down.
"Well, the staff saved nothing, and she was pissed. The next morning, she returned to dig it out of the trash bins. She stood on a cardboard box, it collapsed, and she fell in it. She broke two ribs and couldn't climb out, so 911 was called. She was hospitalized. When I found out about her broken ribs, she refused to tell me how it happened. I kept asking until her sister finally shouted, 'For God's sake, just tell her you went back to get the damn bones.'"
24. "My husband's aunt pregamed before our ceremony started. She was trashed and kept photobombing my family pictures. Then, she went out onto the street in front of the venue and tried to invite several random strangers into our reception. She also got on top of tables during the reception to dance."
25. "My husband’s cousin. She wore a pretty revealing dress and is typically an attention-seeker. We were all dancing when she went to the DJ and asked him to announce she lost a ring. So everyone started looking for it, thinking it must be an important ring if she asked the DJ to announce it. My brother ended up finding it and returned it to her. She told him it was a ring she bought at Target, went to the middle of the dance floor, and loudly announced she found it, making a huge deal of putting it back on and throwing her hand up in the air to show it off. At the time (aka before knowing it wasn’t an important/nice ring), I was just glad she found it. It was really embarrassing, and a few people thought she had gotten engaged by her movement."
Did your wedding — or one you attended — have a wedding guest from hell? Let us know in the comments!
Some entries have been edited for length or clarity.