Wedding Officiant Surprises Bride & Groom By Reading Their Private Letters To The Entire Wedding Audience
What on Earth would make anyone think this is a good idea?!
SDI Productions | Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro There's a time and place for surprises. Then there are times and places when surprises should be the last thing on your mind, and you should frankly be imprisoned for the rest of your life if you so much as consider the notion.
A wedding is pretty much the top of that list — they're so intricately planned and full of loose cannons and wild cards already (cough relatives cough) that the mere thought of adding an element of surprise feels about as good an idea as throwing firecrackers into an oil tanker. And yet!
A wedding officiant surprised a bride and groom by reading their private letters to the entire wedding audience.
Imagine being at a wedding, all is going normally, and then suddenly the officiant starts reading aloud from the diaries of the bride and groom, sharing all of their most intimate secrets with the entire audience.
Depending on your personality, you're either shrieking in horror or yelling "OK, but what's the tea?!" at your screen. Either way, can we agree this is the absolute most terrible idea any of us has ever heard? OK, cool. And yet it happened to multiple people on Reddit.
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Apparently, the officiant, who had given the couple pre-marital counseling, thought it would be heartwarming to have the bride and groom each go to a private room and write him a letter expressing their deepest and most sincere reasons for marrying each other. He assured them that the letters would be only for them and that he wouldn't read them. But oops, turns out he lied!
The document included harrowing secrets about the groom's family, read aloud in front of them.
"He then proceeded to take the envelopes from his inside jacket pocket and say, 'Well, I meant I wouldn't read them by myself,'" the Redditor recounted. Which is insane behavior and an astonishing lack of… I don't even know what. Couth? Empathy? The most basic common sense? Like, who does this?!
The content of the letters was even worse — I presumed there was going to be something incredibly intimate about their bedroom habits or something, but to be quite honest, I'd prefer that over what actually happened.
"Among the absolute most private thoughts and feelings, the groom had commented that he grew up in a home without love and his childhood had been miserable," the Redditor wrote. "His family was completely dysfunctional, and he had never known any happiness until he met his wife."
And since it was his wedding, the family in question was sitting a few feet away from him. "I was not close with either one of them, and even I wanted to sink into the floor," the Redditor admitted, which is understandable. This isn't just embarrassing; it was probably triggering, walking the guy through his childhood trauma during what is supposed to be the happiest moment of his life.
This is apparently a common wedding tradition that regularly goes wrong.
I was certain this had to be a deeply stupid, incredibly bizarre one-off, but I regret to inform you that it's not. Several Redditors in the comments shared stories of having either been at weddings where similar mishaps occurred, or having had the misfortune of being one of the brides and grooms bamboozled by this fun "surprise."
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One woman's deepest struggles with mental illness were exposed. Another attended a wedding where the officiant had been the groom's counselor both before the wedding and during the break-up of his first marriage, and revealed all kinds of inappropriate details.
One bride's officiant even used their letters to try to talk them out of going through with the marriage, at the altar! Even a couple whose letters were very tame and very sweet wrote of being furious about the "surprise," just because of the betrayal of trust alone.
This is absolutely unhinged behavior, and if you're a wedding officiant, please do not do this! People don't even smash cake in each other's faces anymore; they're so uninterested in tomfoolery at a wedding, let alone stuff like this! (But if you do do it, please send me the video because I love mess.)
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.
