16 almost-married people reveal the reason they called off their wedding.

While runaway brides, 'speak now or forever hold your peace' moments, or getting stood up at the altar are usually only reserved for romantic comedies and 'Love is Blind,' calling off a wedding after the invitations are sent does happen...

So, when a Reddit user asked, 'People who have called off their wedding, why?' jilted formerly engaged-to-be-married people everywhere were ready to share the details.

1.

We called off our wedding because I had a meltdown over centerpieces. We realized that our priorities were totally in the wrong place and it was becoming more about a wedding than a marriage. We cancelled the wedding and eloped the next week. No regrets. - jadebear

2.

She decided she was still in love with her ex. I had her call my mom and my grandma to tell them she was calling off the wedding. She did it and then proceeded to drive 3hrs to see her ex, who then told her he didn't want to be with her.

At least I got back the ring I gave her...I proposed with the same ring my grandfather proposed to my grandma before leaving for WWII. - [deleted]

3.

Was going to get married in March 2012, and called it off in January of that year. Basically it just came down to a disagreement on what we wanted out of life. I was 23 at the time (would've been 24 at the wedding), she was 27. She wanted kids. Like almost immediately.

I told her that we needed to wait on that (I'm still in college, I wanted to get a job and a home and whatnot first), but she was completely unwilling to compromise on it. She demanded that we have kids before she was 30, so within a year or two of the wedding, and there's no way that I would be ready for kids by 25/26, especially as I'm still working on college.

This was causing more and more of a divide between us, and I knew that if we had gotten married that either I would've gotten what I wanted and we would've waited for kids and she would've resented me, or she would've gotten what she wanted and we would've had kids, and both I would resent her AND we would have a kid or kids that we were unprepared to take care of.- yakovgolyadkin

4.

Emotional affair. We were together for seven years, and were getting married in a few months. We'd already bought a house, and started tying our lives together. She was emotionally distant for some time, but I ignored it like a fool in love.

Eventually, I noticed she was spending significant time chatting with a guy she met on World of Warcraft. She was also taking phone calls 'from a friend' in private. I called her on it, and our wedding was off the next day.

We bought our house during the mortgage bubble, and now I'm stuck with an under-water mortgage on a house that's lost 50% of its value. I also still have the ring - it's been almost five years, and I'm still not sure what to do with it.- SoundsReasonable

5.

My fiance called it off when she found out I wasn't rich. Apparently there's a guy with the same name as me who is heir to this huge fortune, whereas I'm just some idiot from a lower middle class family.

She came into my life like a dream and I was so taken with her I thought that it was like a fantasy come true. When she met my family and found out who they were, she literally ran from the house.

I had to track her down and found out after the fact that she was trying to get with someone she thought was an heir. I did a lot of growing up that year, fortunately for me, she didn't get what she wanted either. The guy she was after turned out to be gay and she now makes a living waiting tables. - [deleted]

6.

I had to call mine off because the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with (or so I thought) decided to sit me down the night before and tell me all about the trysts and flings he had been having throughout our relationship together.

He said if he doesn't come clean now, he would not be able to live with himself. After the list was done, I was crying my eyes out. He said something along the lines of, 'Well, I didn't think you would take it THIS hard.' Seriously.

We were going to have a huge wedding, even though I really didn't want a huge one (weird I guess, but I never envisioned my wedding growing up like other little girls), so I had to call tons and tons of people and tell them it was off; listen to them try to console me over the phone, and crying every time I hung it up. He told me he didn't want to call anyone because he was so upset with me calling it off. He didn't want to see me ever again.

That worked, because I found someone who actually loves me, and we have been married for 3.5 years with a beautiful 2.5 year old son. And he has never cheated on me. I never thought I could trust again, but I am still slowly getting over that fear after all these years (It was 12 years ago). - flipflop979

7.

Friend of mine was engaged to a girl. He was your typical SAP, he'd been on literally dozens of first dates from OKcupid and had had no luck with the ladies. Really nice guy, but completely socially lacking.

She turned out to be a pathological liar. She was an army vet, she practiced underwater knife fighting, she came from old money but her part of the money had been spent on an incredibly lavish wedding ceremony,she had a daughter or maybe she didn't or maybe the girl was her niece or her friend's kid, she was military police.

The lies got so bad that she decided to move across country in the middle of the night with my friend to avoid a warrant out for her arrest. (fraud and impersonating a police officer) She told him that there were jobs for both of them waiting there with her family business.

He had been working on a Ph.D. but had dropped out at her suggestion so he wasn't working at all and they were broke. So, they moved in with her mom and there weren't jobs for either of them. I think to distract him from that fact, she told him she was pregnant (a miracle!). He proposed.

The ultrasound photo she showed him showed up on the first page of google image results for 'ultrasound.' He finally broke it off, he called his dad to get some money to fly home. - AfterTowns

8.

My best friend called her wedding off 9 days before the big day. She discovered the he had emptied their joint wedding account playing online poker after he emptied his own personal account.

She explained that the feeling of losing a down payment on a house, as well as the catering money wasn't anything compared to how she felt when he asked her for her inheritance from her mother (she had passed a year previously) to pay off more gambling debts.

No apologies, no mea culpas, just more money. She walked, and 8 years later she's happily married to another guy with 1 boy and a bun in the oven! - cherbearblue

9.

An old friend of mine called off his wedding because he found out she was with some dude at her Bachelorette party the weekend before. He waited until the day of the wedding to call it off, because he wanted her to have to explain it to her family.. most of whom flew into town for the wedding.

I was one of his groomsmen, so instead of saying his vows, we all took him out onto the town while in the tuxes. It was still a pretty depressing night out. And he was pretty tore up about it for months.- zakos

10.

I called off my wedding. I called it off because I realized we weren't ready to make a marriage work. There are a number of skills that a couple needs to have before they can really succeed in a relationship that's meant to last a lifetime. These skills are pretty obvious; compromise, forgiveness, sacrifice, and an acceptance of the things you don't like but can never change.

Shortly before the wedding I realized that we didn't have those skills. That made me extremely uncomfortable with the prospect of going through with it. And ultimately, I couldn't bring myself to start something that I knew couldn't last forever.

The mistake we made was getting engaged before we knew we had those skills, before we were ready. We gave ourselves a long engagement with the idea that we'd have time to figure out those skills before the big day finally came.

But we didn't realize that it put a timer on our relationship which essentially turned it into a time bomb. When the day came, we were either going to be ready or we were going to have a very bad time. - throwaway823746

11.

My wife's cousin had been dating this guy off and on in some capacity for almost a decade. We were all kind of surprised it took them so long to finally decide to get married.

They had planned a destination wedding and a bunch of the family had bought their non-refundable tickets. (We hadn't; not enough cash.) Now, my wife's cousin has always wanted to have kids. I guess her fiancé didn't know that or they hadn't talked about it too much. And a few months before the wedding, he told her something along the lines of, 'If you want kids, don't marry me.' So she didn't.

Since it was so close to the date, all the people in the family that had booked tickets and taken time off work still used the plane tickets and hotel rooms and tried to make the best of it, but I imagine that the time down there was a little tainted by what the trip was supposed to be. - otrojake

12.

After a day of trying on wedding dresses, just me and my maid of honor, we met my family and hubby-to-be at my brother's house for dinner. While showing a picture of myself in a dress to my mother, which was on my bff's phone, she gets a text message from my fiance.

This is odd because I can see him in the next room and I can see my friend in the kitchen. I read it of course and its a huge confession from him to her, addressing how they had fooled around a few weeks ago and he was really regretting he hadn't taken things further with her. He had NO idea I had her phone in my hand. I simply stood up and walked the 10 feet to him, held up her phone and looked him in the eye.

The look on his face was priceless, and when I could speak I and ny entire family let them both have it verbally (we're black, so you can imagine that was quite the showdown). Needless to say, I don't speak to either of them anymore. - UnicornPrime

13.

I realized that she was more in love with getting married than she was with me. I was her Avenue to marriage, she felt that is be a loyal husband and good father. But she didn't care about me more than a friend. - blitzbom

14.

I called off my wedding four days before the big day. Two of my bridesmaids (my best friend since high school and my cousin) got into a huge fight because they found out that he was sleeping with both of them. It was cheating within cheating and was easily the most surreal and heart-breakingly awful experience of my entire life. - throw_away_it

15.

She was pregnant. We were working on a limited income. We decided it was better to just go to city hall and save the money for the baby. - MeddlingMike

16.

Getting engaged put so much external pressure on our relationship that we both cracked. It took planning a wedding to realize how much I really didn't want to marry that person. - smilernoel