by Julie A. Wein

Created on: November 02, 2010   Last Updated: November 05, 2010

Crashing anyone's wedding is not acceptable for a few reasons. A wedding is supposed to be one of the happiest days of a man and woman's life. In a perfect world, a wedding day is a once in a lifetime event and there is no reason that anyone should be allowed to interrupt it. Aside from everything else, it is extremely rude to crash someone's wedding, no matter what the reason.

A lot of time, money and care go into planning a wedding and while no wedding ever goes off without a hitch, no one deserves to have their wedding crashed either. Whether the crasher(s) is a friend who doesn’t approve of the marriage or an ex lover that wants either the bride or the groom back, they have no right to crash the happy couple’s wedding. Even a friend, colleague or acquaintance that wasn’t invited to the wedding but thinks they should have been has no right to crash the wedding.

Movies and TV glamorize the idea of crashing a friend’s wedding and often try to turn it into a comedic situation. On the contrary there is nothing funny about interrupting, and possibly ruining, anyone’s wedding day. The movie Wedding Crashers, with Owen Wilson, makes it seem funny to crash a wedding. In the movie, Wilson’s character and his buddy crashed weddings as a way to meet single women. As entertaining as it may be, it does not translate into an acceptable action in real life. 

Countless soap operas have featured storylines in which a character crashes the wedding of another character. In this case, the effects of crashing a wedding are more realistically portrayed, as most soap operas offer up constant drama and not much comedy. Either way, it does not make it acceptable to crash a wedding in real life.

Books have been written about characters having their wedding crashed, with mixed results. However, the ends do not justify the means and whatever happens as a result of someone crashing a wedding never justifies why the person crashed the wedding in the first place. 

Some people will say that there are legitimate reasons to crash a wedding. Legitimate or not, ethically speaking, crashing someone’s wedding is a very unfair thing to do. A wedding is a personal choice of the bride and the groom and no one should be able to interfere with that.  Anyone that would consider crashing a wedding needs to ask himself or herself how they would feel if someone crashed theirs.

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