Marriage stories (good and bad)

[Fudgethatkay]

Four weddings coming up within a year's time.
I'm involved as the bridal party in two of them.

Tell me random stories of how you, a relative, friend, coworker, etc., got married, or how they met their spouse, or some general good things or drama-llama things that went on. I like good stories and I like hearing of people's different experiences. :3

I'll start with my oldest brother. He wasn't in a clean state of mind after leaving prison at age 30, and met a woman in a similar situation. Within days of knowing each other, they eloped to Vegas. Mom's side of the family all swore up and down it wouldn't last, buttttt at 10 years and ongoing they outdid both of our mother's marriages...lol I like my oldest SIL, for the most part too. It was a trial until they improved their lives but they went through it all together. :3 (My brother adopted her children and now they are grandparents )

Your turn!

[bhskittykatt]

I had a friend who went to school in another state. He was in the same class as this other guy who stole my email off of friend's computer. So I got this random email from some weird guy one day out of the blue, and I was bored and replied. For a while I actually thought it was my friend pranking me until the weird guy called me and we talked on the phone.

Met the weird guy in person about a year later, and a few years after that I married him. We've been married for five years now.

[Gizmo]

Bad story: A friends partner was whining that the council wouldn't put him on the flat lease until they were married. After much hounding he said "go check out prices and let me know.

She came back and said "its X and you ARE free on this date...."

Hmm....

[Ellain]

I was involved in choir during college. So was he, but we didn't really interact. I went to a wedding with my best friend; both he and she were in the wedding party. I caught the bouquet, he caught the garter. We posed for pictures, and went our separate ways. I was dating another guy, who was super excited about that bouquet!

Fast forward a few months- I asked my best friend to teach me how to flirt. She gave me some pointers, then took me to where her brother and his friends were playing D&D. I tried out my new moves, apparently with some success. He asked me out as soon as I split up with my first boyfriend, we started dating soon after, and were married a bit over a year later!

We had our 8th anniversary in May, and found out that I'm pregnant with out second child last week!

[strawbabies]

I met my husband right here on CS. I was only about 18 or 19 years old at the time. He was in his early 20s and married to somebody else. I had a huge crush on him (still do, actually). I memorized his IM info from his profile page on here. I also found his blog and sort of cyber-stalked him for a while. (He says I'm lucky I'm cute, otherwise it would've been really creepy.) Finally, right before I turned 23, we were both single, and I decided to try making direct contact with him via IM. We hit it off and have been together for 9 years, married almost 3.

I like to think we were just meant to be, and that I wasn't an obsessed nut job.

[kmariem]

From a certain point of view, my mom stalked my dad in high school. They had mutual friends, and mom would know where he would be, and would show up ("Fancy meeting you here!"). Dad got the hint and asked her out. The dated thru their senior year, and got married after dating for 4 years. At their wedding, their friends were taking bets as to how long the marriage would last (they are almost polar opposites). Almost 35 years later, they are not only still married, but they're the only ones among said friends that are still together!

My husband and I did the "court house special" almost 9 years ago. When we were getting ready to sign the marriage certificate, I noticed something that ended up halting the proceedings for a few minutes: our license number is 12345! Many Spaceballs jokes were made, and we annoyed our judge (whoops! ).

[AnaKhouri]

Together 15 years, married 9.

My husband wanted to propose in the local Arboretum where we liked to walk. There was a large fallen tree I liked to sit on in a wooded area, and he planned to do it there. But...when we walked over, some guys were chainsawing the tree into pieces.

He just led me to a fountain and did it there. But he said there was a moment of panic involved.

[Bardmaiden]

I went to a meet-up for a website where my sister and her partner were getting handfasted. On the first night we went out for a meal and some of the people arrived late and I noticed one of them mostly because of his hight. The next day we hung out together with a few other people and did touristy stuff at Blackpool where we were staying.

That night after the hand fasting there was much drinking and the B&B staff just left us to it and we ended up in a small room with about 7 or 8 of us, which as the night/early morning wore on became less and less, at 6.30 me and my new friend decided it was bed time, but he was staying with 5 other people and would have had to wake everyone up to get to his bed. So I invited him back to my room. My sister came to fetch me for breakfast and found me and him kissing. We swapped numbers and parted later that day.

It will be 12 years since that day in October and he proposed to me 2 years ago, first time in his sleep, as he was worrying so much about it We will get married one of these days but we don't rush into things

[Argabarga]

A coworker and I got mistaken for a married couple when I went with her to an auto parts store to help her find a pair of wiper blades for her minivan and a couple other simple odds and ends she needed and wanted me to teach her how to install.

We both thought that was kinda funny, but that's as far as it ever went.

[EricKei]

I don't have anything specific, so how about a couple of more general ones:

- I grew up in New Orleans, which meant two things: Solemn marriage ceremonies, followed immediately by receptions where 100+ people would show up, with food and booze for all...and the final dance of the night was always, ALWAYS "Strokin'," by Clarence Carter -- complete with this "dance" for it that every body just knew.

- New Orleans, again - my dad and his sisters told me of a now-dead tradition from when *they* were kids, circa the 1950's...If you showed up at the wedding at random and behaved yourself, you were allowed to stay, and to attend the reception (yes, even if you didn't know the bride/groom nor were related to them in any way) -- the only condition beyond that being, you were expected to participate in the Money Dance. Do so, and you were welcome to dance and eat and have a good time, just as if you were an invited guest.

[Seshat]

Toth and I - an old married couple of almost a decade at the time, and four years apart in age. Shopping for whitegoods.

Toth got bored looking at washing machines, and went over to poke at the TVs. I'd found the one I wanted, but wanted to get Toth's okay. Started to say something of that order to the salesman...

"Sure, we'll just wait for your father to get back."

.... mental gritting of teeth.

[Marmalady]

Um, yes. This one involves my ex's nephew.

Nephew had been living with a woman and her three children for a couple of years, when they announced they were getting married. Ex was a little uneasy about this, as Nephew had announced the same news about a couple of others in the past only to then get cold feet and run away. But Nephew assured him that this was the real thing, and would Ex please be his best man?

Right through the run up to the wedding, Ex (we were still together then) kept saying to me 'I don't know, I still feel something's wrong' though I put that down to his general 'woe is the world' outlook. But then came the stag night. Ex got home in the wee hours with a face like thunder but wouldn't say why. Anyway, the wedding day arrived, and they were married.

Within two weeks they had parted company.

Ex (who had been asking Nephew all the morning of the wedding 'Are you sure? Is this really what you want?' and had been told yes, yes he was sure, yes he wanted to marry her) then told me that Nephew had disappeared for a couple of hours during the stag night - it later transpired he'd been with another woman. And two nights before the wedding, they'd had a fight so bad that the police had been called (and during which, he had smashed all her collection of glassware she'd built up over years and years)

Ex said if he'd known, he'd have refused to stand there as best man. Why on earth did they go through with it?

[BPFH]

Together 17 years, married 15.

We met over the Internet (before that was terribly common) when we were both playing in a play-by-email RPG (Champions/HERO System). Got married one week shy of two years after meeting face-to-face for the first time. It was the last six months before the wedding that were interesting...

My wife's Canadian. I'm from the US. For her to live in the US with me meant that we had to deal with...

• the Immigration and Naturalization Service. They approved fiancée visas at the time, you see. (BCIS does it now.) I filled out a form, sent it in, and they sent both of us a metric assload of even more forms (biographic information, financial information, police check, etc.). Speaking of which, the police check meant she had to go to...
• the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, given that they're Canada's national police authority. This is where things got interesting. When my wife tried to find out what she had to do to get the police check, she got a different answer every time she asked. So she mailed it to RCMP headquarters. It turns out that because she's got a clean record, she could simply have gotten the fingerprints done and taken the form to any local RCMP post to get the records check done--you only had to mail the form to RCMP headquarters if you'd committed a crime for which you'd received a pardon. The results of the record check got back to us one week before the wedding. At that point, we had to deal with...
• the US Department of State--more specifically, the US consulate in Montréal, which is apparently the only consulate in all of Canada that handles immigration matters, unless you can show significant financial hardship. We called the consulate to schedule an appointment, and oddly enough, they didn't seem to be terribly surprised by what had happened... anyway, they managed to squeeze us in. So on the Wednesday before the wedding, we're hauling ass up Highway 401 and Autoroute 20 to the consulate.

We actually thought we'd dealt with the stress fairly well, until we realized that we'd gone through two of the 180-count containers of Tums in the month before the wedding...

[BearLeeBadenaugh]

Hmm, memorable wedding day events.....

Well, had a pretty good ceremony, reception, photos, etc.

Didn't get much of a honeymoon, went to six flaggs.

Oh yeah, can't forget my uncle, lol. Went to the trouble of coming to WI from FL for my wedding then spent the weekend in the hospital with kidney stones.



Only negative point was at the end of the reception, the manager came up to me and asked where my mother in law was.

Asked my wife, then my father in law, "Oh, Cruella left already, they wanted to get a head start on the drive."

It would have been nice if she had actually paid for the reception before she left. It was supposed to be their wedding gift to us, and we'd even come in under the specified budget.

[sms001]

my father in law, "Oh, Cruella left already, ...."
... nice if she had actually paid for the reception before she left.... their wedding gift to us,

Did FiL cough up or did you get stuck for it?