Photo: @yayakampen / TikTok
Pro tip if you want to know what guests though of your wedding!
By Megan Quinn — Written on Feb 13, 2023
There is so much going on on your wedding day, it is hard to catch every detail and every exchange between guests.
How will you know what people thought of your wedding and if any drama ensued between guests? Luckily for one bride, she has most of the conversations that took place during her reception recorded.
The best part is she never even meant to capture them all!
A bride caught guests gossiping about her wedding on video.
The bride shares that had an audio guest book at her wedding where guests could leave recorded messages for the newlyweds.
In a TikTok video that has been viewed over 2 million times, Yaya Kampen reveals the tip she accidentally stumbled upon “to see what your wedding guests actually think about your wedding.”
She explains that for her reception, she and her wife wanted to have an audio guest book, where their guests could record messages for the couple via a telephone receiver.
After the wedding, they planned on having the recordings transferred to a company that would be able to save all of the messages and convert them into a playback system such as a vinyl record.
The only issue was hiring a company that would do just that went way beyond Yaya’s budget, so she decided to put together her own recording system herself.
She decorated a vintage telephone and bought a small audio recorder from Amazon and placed it in the receiver of the phone so that guests could leave their messages.
The recorder was marketed as “sound sensitive” and would only pick up voices that were close by.
“I figured that once the wedding was over, I’d be able to look at the file and it would have individual audio files for each guest that left a message,” Yaya says.
However, the recorder proved to be more sound-sensitive than she originally believed.
It had recorded the entire reception and most of the guests' interactions, even if they were not speaking on the phone.
She claims that the device even picked up her closing her car door when she was parked far away from the venue.
The task of listening to conversations that took place throughout the entire reception and having to individually remove the messages that guests left seemed so daunting for Yaya, that she did not revisit the recordings until a year after her wedding.
It was then she discovered that the recorder picked up more than just kind well-wishes.
While Yaya shares that she was not expecting drama to unfold at their wedding and all of their guests were kind, there were issues that arose before the wedding that had people talking.
“We did realize after our ceremony that our wedding had caused a lot of drama in our small little town and in our extended family,” she explains.
“And that is because we uninvited people who were clearly not supportive of gay marriage.”
The decision had become a popular topic of gossip among guests, and the recorder proved that.
While Yaya did not share deep specifics of what each guest had to say, she did reveal a few snippets of conversations in a follow-up video.
During a conversation with some of Yaya’s relatives, her aunt called her decision of uninviting some of her guests “tacky” and “disrespectful.”
It was revealed that another guest was “crushed” that his homophobic family member was not in attendance.
Most of the nasty comments came from Yaya’s Aunt Cindy, who she hilariously gave a shoutout. “Thanks for coming to the wedding Cindy, it was good to have you!” she says.
She also shared some valuable advice for those planning on getting married soon, and it was not to wiretap your wedding.
“We all know the real pro tip is to elope,” she shares.
Megan Quinn is a writer at YourTango who covers entertainment and news, self, love, and relationships.