As 2023 winds down and Americans look forward to new beginnings in the year of 2024, here is a look at some of the wildest and most unusual wedding-related stories that emerged on social media and elsewhere over the past year.
Plenty of brides, grooms wedding party members and others have shared their personal stories — and etiquette experts and others weighed in with their professional opinions and advice as well.
There were plenty to pick from — but these five made their mark.
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Diving right in to the five that stand out from the rest.
Weddings can be stressful for both the couple and their many guests — but one story, shared on Reddit, got notice for the dress-code debacle that resulted.
Reddit user "LifeTraining3452" took to the subreddit known as "Am I the A--hole" in August to ask others if he was in the wrong for calling his new wife insecure and selfish on their wedding day.
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The writer revealed that he and his new wife were no longer even speaking after their blowup.
He told her she was overreacting to her six-year-old nephew's wearing of a white bow tie and white jeans to their wedding — which had a "no white clothing" dress code instruction to all invited guests.
"The reception was going well, until I noticed my wife walking over to the bathroom with her face held in her hands," the user wrote about what happened.
He said when he went to check on her, he found her sitting on the floor with mascara running down her cheeks.
"I asked what was wrong, and she told me that one of our nephews was wearing white jeans and a white bow tie," he recalled.
He tried to console her — but she held fast to her feelings. She even asked the six-year-old to change his clothes — or leave the reception.
Florida-based etiquette expert Jacqueline Whitmore told Fox News Digital at the time that while the bride's dress-code request was reasonable, the young nephew in question did nothing wrong.
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"Perhaps his mother thought the ‘no white’ rule applied to women only. Who knows?" said Whitmore.
The etiquette expert also said the bride should have let the situation go, assuming the child "was appropriately dressed and was not creating chaos."
A newlywed bride asked for support and advice on Reddit after she left her own wedding once her husband smashed their wedding cake in her face — despite her earlier requests that he not do that at their reception.
The bride wrote in September that she knew her husband found "cake-smashing videos" to be funny — but that she told him she was not fond of the tradition.
"I told him if he ever did something like that to me, I'd leave him," the bride wrote regarding her husband.
"He started laughing, but I was being for real."
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Despite this threat, the groom scooped "a huge chunk" of wedding cake at their reception — and smashed it right onto her face.
The bride then immediately left the reception venue — and later went on Reddit to pour out her story and seek advice from others.
While some people said she should have just laughed it off, others took her side.
"I think stunts like that are annulment-worthy, but that's just me," one Reddit user wrote.
"This isn't just a cake or a prank, this is flat-out disrespect," another user wrote.
"He had one job and it was ‘don’t smash a cake in his fiancée’s face,’" another commenter said.
A couple's unorthodox wedding venue choice had a very touching story behind it.
Jamie West, 41, and Drew Schmitt, 58, of Arizona, married on May 5, 2023, at a castle — a White Castle, that is.
West and Schmitt fed their 150 guests some of the chain's staples, including sliders and onion rings.
They chose this particular wedding venue, they said, because West herself was shown incredible kindness by White Castle as a teenager.
"I was in the foster care system at four years old," West told Fox News Digital in June. "Between the age of four and 13, I was in 94 foster homes, six shelters and eight group homes."
She continued, "By the time I was 13, I decided that I could do it better myself and I had better survival chances, so I took off on my own, and then I just started traveling the country."
At some point, she wandered into a White Castle.
There, while she was still a homeless runaway, an employee gave her free bags of sliders.
"I walked into White Castle and a lady looked at me and said, ‘Oh, sugar, get in here, go in the bathroom, clean yourself up,’" West recalled.
"When I came out, she had a couple [of] sacks for me. I mean, they really cleaned the whole grill. She said that they do it every hour, and that they were just going to throw it away anyway, so I should pay it no mind and I should just take all of them."
Said West, "I was able to feed a lot of kids for a few days after that. Whenever I found a White Castle after that first one I went into, I would run there."
A Reddit user named "trashgirlfriend" shared in July that she'd been demoted from bridesmaid to "assistant flower girl" for her brother's upcoming wedding after the bride decided she would rather have another woman in the bridal party instead of her.
"Sarah recently got close with her brother's wife Becky (30f)," wrote the user.
"Last week she dropped the ball on me that she no longer wants me to be a bridesmaid and she would prefer if Becky would take my place."
While trashgirlfriend said it broke her heart to be removed from the wedding, she added that "it's her wedding, and it's not my place to tell her how to run it, so I said it was fine."
But when she attempted to return the expensive bridesmaid dress, she discovered that the bride, Sarah, had already planned for her to give the dress to the new bridesmaid.
Trashgirlfriend said she was finally able to return the dress for a full refund — then told her brother and his wife-to-be that she would not be attending their wedding, as they had been "extremely disrespectful" to her.
Instead, she planned on going on vacation to Miami.
Donato Frattaroli and Magda Mazri of South Boston had planned a picture-perfect wedding on Lake Garda in northern Italy on August 31.
However, their dog, a young golden retriever named Chickie, had other plans.
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Chickie ate Frattaroli's passport just days before he and his wife-to-be were set to leave the country — putting their entire wedding at risk.
Frattaroli told Fox News Digital at the time that the dog discovered its new favorite chew toy while he and Mazri were having a celebratory dinner after filing for a marriage license earlier that day.
This story, however, wound up with a happy ending.
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After Frattaroli's plight went viral, he was able to receive an expedited passport — and the wedding went on as scheduled.
Chickie was let off the hook, too — and all was forgiven.
"She’s too cute to stay mad at," Frattaroli told Fox News Digital.
He also said, "I can’t be mad at Chickie because I’m the idiot who left the passport out where she could get it."
Kerry Byrne and Brittany Kasko of Fox News Digital, along with Cortney Moore, contributed reporting.
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