Married ladies, share your biggest wedding day regrets

My photographer asked us girls to leave the reception for a little while to get some more pics. Then I had to pee which was a whole production. So all in all, I missed over an hour of my own reception and people were asking where the hell I was. I regret that a bit.

I can understand your disappointment SJ, but I'm sure the extra pics turned out great! Thank you for sharing.

Allowing the GM to take DH's truck to "decorate" it. Everything was fine up until they decided to poor 7 full bottles of the smallest glitter you can buy into the vents of his truck and add food coloring into his windshield fluid. He was LIVID and almost fought his GM at the wedding (they made him go out and look at it right after the speeches...such bad timing). This then made him get so shitfaced that I had to babysit him on our wedding night.

Moral of the story, if your man really cares about his vehicle, don't allow the GM to do anything overly destructive to it. And if they do, then don't look at it until the reception is over.

Wow! Mrs R, talk about poor judgement. This is exactly why my FH is not allowed to "decorate" anything, lol. You would think they would know better than to mess with a man and his car. Smh

I hated taking photos so much I missed a couple with my bridesmaids and the groom forgot to get a family shot with just his family.

I wish our dancefloor was better lit for our first dance and father/daughter dance.

Well mrs r, that does it.

we're taking the light rail home from the wedding! lol

no decorating of the vehicles, and then worries about Designated drivers.

I wish i would have met with my florist like two days before the wedding to see what she was going to create, that way I wouldnt have HATED my flowers. (I met with her a few months ago, and told her what wanted, but she failed).

One thing to remember is let the little things go! Our venue messed up a few times, nothing our guests noticed but I did. Instead of getting mad, I just went with it.

Ermagherd. These are scaring the hell out of me.

Overall, I had an amazing time at my wedding. It was SO MUCH FUN. It's true that you really have to let the little things slide.

But here are a few things I'd do differently:

I had loads of lists of who was taking what to where, but no plan for getting everything packed up and returned at the end of the night. We had to do some scrambling the next morning to find the guest book, leftover favors, etc.

I would have asked the venue if they would have a contact person onsite - a couple times the food trays were empty, and we couldn't find someone to refill them.

If a problem comes up late in the game, and you have money to throw at the problem, well - THROW MONEY AT THE PROBLEM. My dad decided last minute to cheap out and stay with friends across town, creating all sorts of transportation headaches. I wish I'd just paid for his hotel room.

I would have taken one of my bridesmaids to pick up my dress with me, instead of my neighbor. When it came time to get ready, nobody really knew how to get me into the dress properly, or do up the tiny buttons (crochet hook, apparently). So I wound up with a bit of backfat because the dress was a shade too low, and it took all five bridesmaids to get me into the dress,

Also, I would have tried to look a bit prettier for this photo:

Thanks so much for all the great insight ladies! At the end of the day you all married your loves, and that's all that matters. Just wanted to help those brides who will come after you. The biggest regrets I've heard from friends are photography/video and Dj. Not capturing the must have photos has been a constant regret I've noticed as well as a Dj that failed to get the party going or playing the wrong song at the wrong time. One bride said she spent months finding the perfect processional song only for the Dj to play "here comes the bride". She was devastated. She said "this was my walk of a lifetime, and it was ruined.....but I just went with it" :-(

1. I would not have let my mother talk me out of paying a little extra to decorate our room the night before. She swore her and my aunts would have it under control, but two of them didn't show up and she was late.

2. I should have went over every detail with every vendor the week of the wedding. Sooo much went wrong.

3. My Grandma couldn't make it to the ceremony. I wish I would have remembered to get a picture with her at the reception.

4. I wish I would have had the money for at least a Day Of coordinator. She would have been able to keep things in line and pay attention to details. I was in a whirl that day and now thinking back, a lot of the let downs could have been handled right then by someone paying attention.

I think I would have made a different menu choice. When we had our tasting, the food.was amazing. The day of the wedding, the chef made the chicken too spicey and most people couldnt eat it. When he tried to fix it, it was.too.bland. i didn't even eat at my reception, not cause I didnt have time but my meal was bad. Hubby did share his steak with me, but I didn't want to eat all his food. Talk about annoying..

The pictures. We had sent over a list of 'must haves' that included group shots of my extended family on my Mom and my Dad's side. We didn't get them. I was so caught up being with my new husband and everything going on around us that I wasn't paying attention to the details I wanted. I'll never be able to recreate those pictures again.

1) Have the ceremony 30 minutes earlier. We were rushing to get pics before the sunset.

2) Hired a real DOC. I had my aunt to it (she had coordinated 4 weddings prior) so I thought she would do alright. Oh my, everything got done, but it wasn't done smoothly and was a bit chaotic. But...I'm an event coordinator for a university and have pretty high standards. PLEASE, for the love of God, if you are debating on hiring a professional DOC, DO IT.

3) I wish my BM hadn't pissed off my officiant. She left without signing the marriage license! We tracked her down the next day and had to smooth everything over.

But, overall, we are marriage just the same, everyone looked fantastic, the food was amazing and we partied until the wee hours.

I really have no regrets. Other than a few small hiccups, everything was wonderful.

But I am a pretty laid back person, so it's possible that some of the things I consider "hiccups" could be more problematic for someone else. For example, our event coordinator gave the wrong cue to the kids (hubby's cousins) who were controlling our ceremony music, and they started playing the processional song when the parents were being seated, instead of when hubby and I were walking down the aisle. It wasn't even the kids' fault, and the coordinator didn't really know any better either since we hadn't told her the parents didn't have their own special music. Hubby was more irritated about this than I was, but in the end, it didn't really matter. Everything else went smoothly for the music, so it's all good.

Also, I had purchased some purple Chinese take-out containers for guests to take home wedding cake and desserts.. Our coordinator said she would set them out on the sweets table later in the evening, but she completely forgot. Fortunately, they only cost me $30, and our guests ate ALL the sweets (pigs! lol!) so there weren't any to take home anyway. No big loss.

I regret not getting certain pictures and not doing a hair trial before the wedding.

So much was happening and going on the day of, it totally slipped my mind to get some certain pictures.

I think there were only two things from mine that I would have changed.

One is that they played the wrong music for the recessional (even though all the discs were labelled) so instead of the upbeat "I'm a believer" by the Monkees, we had the quiet violin music everyone had been seated to earlier.

The other is that we spent too much time with the photographer and not enough with the guests. We kept trying to tell her we wanted to go in and mingle but she kept saying "five more minutes". There were some people I really didn't get to talk to as a result - we should have been more firm.

One other thing I would have changed is that in the run up there were certain people who had RSVP'd that they were coming who I suspected would flake out based on past experience. Of course they did flake out the day of the wedding so we ended up with 5 really obvious empty seats and wasted over £300 on food for them. I should have trusted my instincts and assumed they wouldn't show instead of assuming that they would be more reliable when it came to a wedding.

The only regret I have is that I didn't account for the amount of traffic that would occur when we went to take photos. If I would have budgeted a bit more time we could have made it to our second location instead of skipping it. It wasn't really that big of a deal though because we made an impromptu second stop along the way to the venue that turned out to be a gorgeous spot (see my profile pic).

The biggest regret I have is not sticking to a small guest list. We went from 90 to 169. With most of the added people not showing up anyway. 77 no shows! Like above poster, I should've trusted my instincts about the flakes.

I wish I had the string trio stay for the reception as background music instead of trying to DIY the music from my phone. The venue did not tell us that they only had an adapter for the old iphone and right before the wedding I had just upgraded my phone to the latest iphone so we had no way to play our music that I paid $1 per song for through itunes. The photographer tried to save the day and play pandora on his phone but the commercials sucked.

Other thing is make sure you remember to take price tags off of the rings. I did not realize that my husbands ring still had a price tag on it until we were at the end of the aisle and im up there trying to rip it off so I could put the ring on his finger. Was kind of embarrassing but the officiant helped make it a funny situation.

Everything went by so fast the day of I wish we were able to have a longer reception. We did not have dancing just a sit down dinner, cake cutting and mingling during the reception but the venue kicked us out around 9:30-10:00 pm. Everyone was having such a good time talking to each other that I wish we could have continued that for a few more hours.

If your wedding will be during the summer take into account the sun/heat. (95 degrees on our wedding day) It was very sunny and our reception was outside. As the sun was setting it was shining right in everyone's eyes so the photographer grabbed some extra table cloths and tied them to the umbrellas to shield everyone from the sun.

The only issue I really cared about was the music when looking back on the day. Everything else were just minor issues that were not really noticed by the guests.