Groom Told To 'Get Over It' After His Wife's Wedding Prank Leaves Him 'Humiliated'
Pranks are only fun when everyone is laughing.
Sergii Sobolevskyi | Shutterstock Pranks and practical jokes are delicate business, since what's funny to one person is offensive to another. But one thing is universal, there is a time and a place for pranks, and a wedding is almost always not it.
One man's wedding planner apparently missed this memo, as did his wife, and it resulted in a situation that once again underlines the primary rule when it comes to practical jokes: They're only funny when everyone, including the butt of the joke, is laughing. Otherwise, they're cruel.
A groom was 'humiliated' by his wife's wedding prank.
Usually, of course, it's the bride being humiliated at her own wedding by her groom, usually by having wedding cake violently shoved in her face in a way that makes it very clear the man she just married low-key hates her guts.
This incident flips that on its head. And while it seems to lack the open antipathy that all those cake-smash videos have, it is replete with poor judgment, particularly on the part of their wedding planner, who was the mastermind of the prank in the first place.
The practical joke centered on a part of the wedding that has largely fallen out of favor these days, the garter removal, and suffice to say, it did not go well. "I had an amazing wedding experience that was completely ruined by a prank my wife and friends played during the garter removal," the groom wrote in his Reddit post. And he's struggling to let it go.
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The prank involved blindfolding him and replacing his wife with one of his groomsmen.
Garter removals are pretty weird. Even the least prudish among us often can't help but raise an eyebrow at this weirdly intimate display that is meant to announce that these two are going to be intimate later. It's… bizarre, and already kind of embarrassing in the first place.
This prank took that to a whole new level, however, by blindfolding the groom and replacing his wife with one of his groomsmen, who was wearing a stocking on his leg and the garter over his thigh. His wife was placed behind the groomsman's chair and draped her dress over his lap so that her husband wouldn't suspect anything.
He noticed right away that everyone at the wedding seemed to be acting weirdly. "I should have been suspicious at their grins, but I'd had some drinks, wasn't suspecting anything, put it on, and tried to be a good sport about it," he said.
When he finally got hold of the garter, however, there was an escalation. "I heard my wife saying, 'With your mouth! With your mouth!'" he wrote. "So I leaned forward and grasped the garter belt in my mouth, to the shrieks and applause of the crowd."
When he took the blindfold off and saw what happened, he felt humiliated and violated.
He was already uncomfortable from the seemingly uproarious laughter he was hearing, but when he finally took the blindfold off, it got so much worse. "Everyone burst into even louder laughter. For a moment, the entire energy of everyone at the wedding was focused on nothing besides laughing at me, at me being the sole butt of the joke," he said.
He was immediately "furious," but being that he was in the middle of his wedding, he felt all he could do was clam up. "I sucked it up, slept-walked through the rest of the wedding while doing my best to keep a smile on my face," he said. He also said he felt violated by the fact that he had committed such a physically intimate act with one of his groomsmen without his consent, a thing we'd probably be calling assault if the genders were reversed.
He kept on doing so until several days into their honeymoon, when he'd had a few drinks and it all came out. "I told her it was trashy, that it hurt if not destroyed my trust and sense of intimacy towards her," he wrote. She was apologetic at first, but then got up and left.
Now she says he needs to "get over it," but he can't, likely because his wife doesn't seem to care how much she hurt him. "My wife and I have a lot of strengths in our relationship, but I just can't stop thinking about this and the feeling when I took off that blindfold," he wrote. "I literally cannot stop my mind from replaying it over and over, and I get mad again every time."
Being humiliated by a prank can be very traumatic, and his response is in line with symptoms of PTSD.
It's easy to roll eyes at this story, and many on Reddit did. But psychologists say that pranks can be profoundly traumatic and even cross the line into abuse when they are pranks of precisely this type of variety: Ones where the person being pranked isn't in on the joke and is humiliated for sport.
Pranks of this nature can make it feel impossible to trust the person who pulled it, just like what happened with this man. They can even cause PTSD, because humiliation and its close relative shame have been found to be intricately tied to causing PTSD in the brain. Humiliation itself, in fact, is enough to cause PTSD, even if there isn't violence involved.
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It's worth noting that the groom's response, walking around in a fog for days, is an extremely common response to severe trauma. Perhaps even more important, the research of psychiatrists like Bessel van der Kolk, author of "The Body Keeps the Score," has found that being unable to escape the traumatic event, whether physically or by talking about it, is one of the primary mechanisms that causes PTSD to set into the brain.
His wife surely didn't intend this to happen. She said she thought he would find the prank as funny as she and the wedding planner did. But that doesn't erase the impact, and telling him to "get over it" is not only cruel but counterproductive. It certainly isn't going to do anything to repair the breach of trust that happened here.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
