Best man was trashed before it started. Grooms family sat in one corner and didn’t say anything the entire time. Baby daughter of the new couple had thrush or some other contagious disease. Was held at a VFW, where they had the attached bar still open.

Groom went partying that night and didn’t go home to his new wife.

Divorced within 2 years.

Best: None. Weddings are pretty boring. I had fun at mine I guess but I got chewed out afterwards because people kept coming to me and asking me to do things and apparently I was supposed to be glued to my new wifes side the whole time.

Worst: Went to a friends wedding, somehow got mistaken as the groom by the priest, which I cleared up, but then during the ceremony the priest said, “I believe that with the power of Jesus any marriage can work, even between people of different races” while looking directly at me, the only non-white (Lakota) person in the entire room.

My little brother’s was both the best and the worst wedding I’ve ever been to in many ways. The mother of the bride stood up to make a speech and it was just insane. She opened with “eeee would have been giving this speech” (pointing at the bride’s stepfather), “but he’s just had a gastric band fitted”. She finished by saying how she didn’t feel she was losing a daughter, but she was gaining a friend … in (daughter’s name).

The bride’s family didn’t speak to any of us for most of the reception, there was an invisible line across the room with the two families on each side. The bride’s little brother with learning difficulties destroyed the cake by punching it repeatedly before anyone could get a piece. My family all got drunk and had a food fight during the reception. My little brother slept with someone else the night before the wedding and they separated the week after the wedding.

This was nearly 20 years ago, but we still laugh about it. God I wish someone had filmed that speech from the bride’s lunatic mother, it was amazing.

Easiest: My brother in a field in front of his trailer with beers in hand. Hardest: Destination wedding on an island. I disliked it.

Best: Indian friend invited me to his wedding in India, 5 days straight of eating delicious food, rituals and ceremonies. As a European, this was entirely exotic to me. Also it was my first time in India and I did a little bit a tourist on the side of the events. Main wedding day had over 2000 people invited, traditional food service for lunch, ice cream booth. The ceremony was in an amphitheatre with the a temple built on stage entirely covered in flowers, it smelled very nice.

Worst: my wedding 😅. Married during COVID in a foreign country, my family were not allowed to travel, country on lockdown. It was my wife and I, ceremony was 3 minutes top-chrono. Witnesses provided by the municipality. It was still a great time, we had the photoshoot after and spend the week exploring Copenhagen without tourists. We had a celebration with family and friends 2 years later, it was very humble but everyone was so happy to meet after all the isolation and it was a great time too.

Best: my cousint got married in Montreal and that was a wonderful time. Beautiful city and just a rare time when my mother didn’t act like an asshole. I was 13 and I looked SO nice.

Worst: my high school friend got pregnant at 18 by some Italian asshole, his mother was an immigrant Italian and hated her, and it was a rush wedding. I was a bridesmaid. The bridesmaids thought we’d take a silly photo of us with our dresses hiked up one leg in a quasi modeling pose, just for fun, and her new husband told her it looked slutty and not to do it. They’re still together, antivaxxers, convoy supporters, and her teeth are so rotten it’s unbelievable and sad. I know she cheated on him too. She at least got involved in a church and made some friends and took a trip to Asia, but yeah they just run a shitty pizza joint and live in the tiniest falling apart house in the world.

Best is one of two

First was a couple who are more like friends-of-friends. I like them, they’re cool people, but I’ve never really hung out with them except when we’re part of a group of mutual friends, so I was actually a little surprised to get an invite to their wedding.

But anyway, I booked a hotel room with a couple of those mutual friends. Did a little light pre gaming, and hopped on the shuttle bus to the venue. The ceremony was nice and short and it was a nice venue.

Then we head into the area to have dinner, and find our assigned seats, and we’re a little shocked when the bride and groom joined us at the table instead of being off at their own private table somewhere. They said they wanted to sit with their friends, so they did, they were of course off talking to various friends and relatives a lot, but they definitely carved out a nice chunk of the night to eat and sit down and eat and enjoy their wedding. I’ve heard a lot of stories from people getting married where they say they never even had time during their reception to actually eat, that’s always sounded terrible to me and I think they felt the same way. Food was amazing as well, I had just about the biggest slab of prime rib I’ve ever seen and it was cooked to absolute perfection. They even came around offering seconds if anyone wanted them.

A big part of how I knew them was because we were all part of a large group that regularly went to a music festival together, and as you do at a festival, we all tended to get belligerently drunk. Apparently part of the reason I got an invite was because of that, in their words they paid for an open bar and wanted to make sure they got their money’s worth, and they knew the whole music festival crew would be up to the task.

We were all on our best behavior, but we were all definitely pretty hammered when we boarded the bus back to the hotel to continue our party at the hotel bar.

We slept in way too late to grab breakfast at the hotel, so most of us made our way to a nearby diner to grab breakfast.

All in all just a really fun day with good friends, good food, plenty of booze, and a nice casual wedding.

The second contender for best wedding is actually one I officiated. Years ago I got ordained online from the universal life church, and never really did anything with that. I’m not religious, it’s just a fun little thing to be able to say that I’m a minister.

My buddy apparently remembered that. We were in scouts together, he was a couple years younger than me and sort of looked up to me as a mentor and we’ve stayed good friends. So time comes for him to get married and he immediately says he wants me to do the ceremony, and I of course agreed.

This dude has a way of finding really cool stuff, and somewhere in his adventures he finds a cave. It’s open for tourism by appointment and the entrance is through the owners’ basement. He gets to talking to the owner, and apparently it had always been her grandmother’s (who originally owned the house/cave) to have a wedding there, but no one had ever approached them about that. Since he was looking for a wedding venue he jumped at the opportunity. They also charged a ridiculously low price for it (I think they initially said like $50, he gave them like $500 and even that is fucking peanuts to pay for a wedding venue)

The wedding ceremony itself was pretty small, there’s only so many people you can cram into a cave at once, but more people were invited for the reception. I came up with what everyone seems to think was a really good script for the ceremony, even if it was a little hard to read in the dim light of a cave.

The reception was at a brewery, and the food was mostly a buffet of fancy pizzas, all really good, excellent party food. Again, everything was really chill and low-key.

The worst was my brother in laws wedding. He’s a good dude, but if I hadn’t married his sister I don’t think we’d have anything in common with each other.

His (now) wife’s family is fairly well-off and have a really nice vacation house on a lake in upstate New York where they go a lot. So they had the wedding up there.

Even before the wedding, it rubbed me kind of the wrong way that neither my wife nor I were ever asked to be in the wedding party. Not that I had any particular burning desire to be in it, but that just kind of seems like a normal courtesy thing. Until that point I know that I had figured he’d be one of my groomsmen when my wife and I actually have a wedding (COVID threw a monkey wrench into our plans and we ended up doing the courthouse thing, so I think we’re planning to do a big 10 year anniversary in a couple years)

The place is about a 6 hour drive from where most of their friends and family live, and for the rest of them it’s even longer. It’s not convenient to any sort of a major city where you could easily take a flight or a train or something to save yourself some of the driving, and let’s be honest, no one really wants to take time off for a wedding so most people were driving up 6 hours on a Friday, doing wedding shit Saturday, then driving 6 hours home on Sunday. They didn’t seem to understand why some of their further-flung relatives RSVP’d that they weren’t coming.

The hotel they reserved a block of rooms at is what some people might call “charming” or “rustic,” but personally I’m more inclined to call it “a crappy old house where everything creeks, none of the doors seem to close quite right, and the bathroom fixtures haven’t been updated in about 50 years.”

It was also August, and it was an outdoor wedding. Fuck that shit, it’s too damn hot to be outside for a wedding.

And I’m pretty sure the reason we weren’t in the wedding party was because they needed someone to babysit his/my wife’s grandmother. She’s got a pretty bad case of dementia, and was just really lost and confused the whole time she was there. She lives with his/my wife’s mom, but if course she was going to be busy with wedding stuff all day.

My wife drove us up, so I didn’t have my own car there. The entirety of the town we were in was about 3 block long, and mostly touristy shops selling stupid knickknacks I had no interest in. We were in a nice wooded area, and I’m an outdoorsy dude, and I pretty much spent all day looking at the mountains surrounding us thinking how much I’d rather be hiking than wandering around this crappy town.

I also normally work night shift and had turned my schedule upside down for this. I think my wife assumed I was going to sleep in, so when I woke up at a pretty reasonable hour (9-ish) figuring we’d at least be able to grab breakfast together before we got stuck babysitting her grandmother, she was nowhere to be found. She’d gone off to get breakfast with her dad (who was really pretty much the only other person there I knew, and he’s a really cool dude, I was looking forward to spending some time with him, we don’t get to see him very often)

So that left me by myself with no way to really go anywhere, and no one around I wanted to hang out with. A pretty crappy start to my day which put me in kind of a bad mood.

No really good food options in that town either- a crappy pizza place, a bar that’s just like every other mediocre bar in a touristy town, and a little breakfast and sandwich shop that was trying really hard to be cool but had nothing particularly exciting on the menu. Your best option was to drive about 15 minutes to the next town and eat somewhere there.

And of course we still got roped into all of the wedding picture bullshit.

The wedding and reception were nice enough, aside from it being too damn hot, food was ok but forgettable (my brother in law and his wife have just about the most bland palates imaginable, no surprises there) if it had been somewhere closer where I could have just attended the wedding and went home that night I probably would have left with an overall fine impression of the wedding except for feeling a little snubbed about the wedding party.

But it was absolutely not worth 12 hours in the car, the cost of a hotel room, and spending most of the day either by myself or babysitting a senile old lady who had no idea what was going on.

But at least now I don’t have to feel obligated to have him in my wedding party and I can free up that spot for someone I actually like.

I’ve not been to many, but have had people repeatedly tell me our wedding was the best they’d ever been to, so I guess ours was the best by some measure. I have an enormous family, husband and I got together as adults so both had kids too, some grown, we ended up with 50 people only inviting immediate family (brothers, sisters, their partners and kids, our parents, our kids) the weather cooperated, we had open bar and only one person got too drunk, DJ not great but not bad, so much dancing, it was nothing super fancy nor bare bones, I would say nice enough so everyone could feel comfortable and not more.

If anyone is wondering, the things I think made it good - open bar, kids running around, good music, enough structure but not too much (a cocktail hour then ceremony then reception with music & a first dance, then food, then more partying, food left out for people to get more if they want, no assigned seating, tables pushed to edges so big dance floor and again I think open bar is a non negotiable, make sure there are plenty of non alcoholic options at the bar too)

I’ve been to two. For one I was the designated driver.

All of them are the worst. God, I hate going to weddings.