Bride furious at friend who stopped ceremony to propose.
We've heard our fair share of stories about awful wedding guests, but this guy might take the cake. (The wedding cake, that is.) A bride recently wrote into Slate's Dear Prudence column with an insane story about something her husband's best friend did during their wedding ceremony. It's since gone viral, and it has the whole internet seething.
Here's the story:
My husband and I started dating, got pregnant, had a child, moved in together, bought a house, and got a dog in that order. Our friends and family have asked us for years why we weren’t married yet. We always pushed it off to build better lives.
We’ve done really well for ourselves and finally reached a point where we could afford a huge blowout wedding to celebrate our lives with everyone we know and love. My husband’s best friend, “John,” was the best man/officiant. The setting was beautiful, everyone seemed happy, our families were overjoyed. My mom may have used the phrase hallelujah a few dozen times.
Sounds like a pretty typical wedding, right? Pretty typical until you find out what this "John" character did in the middle of the ceremony. Let's read on:
The entire atmosphere felt moving. So moving in fact that John stopped mid-ceremony to propose to his longtime girlfriend, “Jane,” and reveal her pregnancy. I couldn’t even hear the vows my husband wrote or the rest of the ceremony over the noise of Jane’s happy sobs, her very surprised family who were also guests, and people seated nearby congratulating her.
Even the videographer cut to her frequently during the ceremony, and you can’t hear anything over the chatter.
Yup. This guy was officiating his best friend's wedding and stopped the ceremony to propose to his own girlfriend. WHAT?!
When John gave his toast, he apologized for being caught up in the moment, and then proceeded to talk about he and Jane’s future with nary a mention of us. During the reception John and Jane became the primary focus of our guests. John even went out of his way to ask the band for a special dance for just him and Jane on the dance floor.
I’ve never been an attention hog, and I wouldn’t even have minded if he’d proposed after the ceremony, but weeks later I am still seething. I am so shocked and angry that I keep asking myself if this is real life. My husband hasn’t spoken to John since the wedding, and our mutual friends think what he did was rude but that my husband should just get over it.
My husband has joked that he’ll resume his friendship when John and Jane give him a $40,000 check for “their half of the wedding.” Do you think John’s behavior warrants the end of a long-term friendship, or are we angry over nothing?
The bride ended by asking Prudence if she and her husband were overreacting to the situation. Prudence assured her that she was not overreacting, as did the entire internet. Word of the bride's story started spreading on Twitter earlier this week. People were not fans of John and Jane.
It seems the entire internet has taken the bride and groom's side, and Prudence had this advice for the newlyweds:
In between ‘getting over it’ and ‘never speaking to John again’ is the happy medium of ‘having a difficult conversation with a longtime friend who did something selfish and self-absorbed on your wedding day.’…Whatever the outcome, there is definitely at least one step in between ‘seething silently’ and ‘cutting John loose forever,’ especially since the two of them have been best friends for a long time.
We get why they'd want to patch things up with John, but man, that's hard to get over. Look, MAYBE we'd understand if he'd just gotten caught up in the romance of the day and proposed to Jane at the reception or something (though that's still not ideal), but the guy literally interrupted this couple's wedding vows to turn the attention to him. Not cool, dude. NOT COOL.