20 People Who Called Off the Wedding and Don’t Regret It for a Second

Sometimes, realizing you shouldn’t get married only takes a second, a single phrase, or one text message. Get ready for plot twists that even the writers of Santa Barbara would envy.

• My mom was engaged to a guy from college. They had been dating for 2 years. Then a friend begged her to go on a double date because the other girl bailed. Mom reluctantly agreed.
  By the end of the evening, she realized she wasn’t going to marry her fiancé. The very next day, she called off the wedding, and 6 weeks later, she married my dad. © Adorable_Dust3799 / Reddit
• When I visited my boyfriend, his mom was always in the kitchen. I asked him why she wouldn’t come out. In response, the guy said something that made me run for the hills, “Where else should she be? A woman’s place is in the kitchen.” © lissa_makeup.by / Instagram

• Late evening. I needed to take my sister to the emergency room urgently. I called my boyfriend, but he was like, “I’m tired.” So I called a taxi, and we headed there ourselves, spent half the night there.
  I called my boyfriend again and asked if we could stay overnight at his place and go home in the morning. But he refused. So I thought: if you don’t help me solve my problems and I can’t rely on you, what do I need you for anyway? © lesya_artist_design / Instagram
• My friend had been asking her fiancé for 3 months to help her build a gaming PC for her brother. A week left until the birthday, and she gave up and went to the store. She met a wonderful consultant there. Within a week, they had almost everything ready.
  And then her fiancé started making a scene, asking who this guy was, claiming he could have done everything in a day, and saying she should have left the money for their wedding. Well, one argument after another — and she said, “Let’s not get married.” © myth_4e / Threads

• I was tired after work, and my boyfriend called me twice. My phone was on silent mode, so I didn’t answer. Then he just added me to the blacklist. Although I was just sleeping!
  He texted that he refused to marry me because of the missed calls. © alkenov_ad / Instagram
• Literally like something out of a movie. Wasn’t gonna be a big wedding by any means, we were just gonna elope overnight, pretty much.
  The day we were supposed to get married, he slipped on the ice, hit his head, and had amnesia. He didn’t even remember who I was, thought it was 2025 (this was back in 2022), and got stuck in a loop. We ended up completely breaking up afterwards.
  I’ll never forget the shock of it all, though. Probably for the best in the long haul, we were barely together before we planned to marry, but it stung no less at the time. © ugh_this_world_s*** / Reddit
• A story about neighbors. A neighbor went to a friend’s wedding. The groom saw her and canceled the wedding. Some time later, they got married. They’ve been living together for 20 years now. © amaliya_secret / Threads

• We dated for 4 years. I had health problems at the time — I often fainted — and he would call an ambulance saying, “There’s a person who’s unwell here.”
  Once, after I was discharged from the hospital, I took a bus home, and when I got in, he was just sitting at the computer. He didn’t even say anything. The house was a mess, with a pile of dirty dishes. I went to the store for some food, tidied up, and started looking for another apartment. © da_shutka_25s / Instagram
• I dated a guy for several years, and he proposed. We started to prepare for the wedding, and I said I wouldn’t change my last name.
  Firstly, his isn’t very nice-sounding. Secondly, I would have to change all my documents, bank cards, and I didn’t want to do that. I said that if we have children, they could take his last name, but I wouldn’t.
  He got upset, arguing that a family should have one last name for everyone. “Okay,” I said, “Then take mine.” He refused, saying it was against tradition. “Then,” I said, “Maybe my parents should give you a dowry for marrying me?” He replied, “Wouldn’t refuse.”
  So I answered, “Then take me to live in a nice big house of yours, why are we planning to live in my place? And you and your parents should pay for the whole wedding, like it used to be, since there’s a dowry from me and my parents.”
  Long story short, it led to more back-and-forth, and we called off the wedding. © Overheard / Ideer

• We were planning a wedding. But 2 weeks before the wedding, he started acting strange: silent all the time, lost in thought. Then I saw him talking on the phone in the car late at night.
  I couldn’t take it and grabbed his phone, and there was a message, “I’ll tell her everything. Soon.” He insisted it was an old story and that it would soon end, claiming he loved me. I said, “I love you too.”
  Then, the next morning, I just didn’t go to the registry office. © Not everyone will understand / VK
• He called me at 3 a.m. and told me that he only asked me to marry him because he didn’t think he could do better. Denied it happened the next day, despite there being a call... © FuerGrissa0stDrauka / Reddit
• We had a client a few years ago who always came with his wife. He recently told me that this was his second wife, but she could have been his first back in 1983.
  Turns out, they were planning to get married, and while filling out the paperwork at the registry office, he asked his fiancée if she would take his last name. She refused. So he said to her, “Goodbye.”
  Then he met someone else, they built a family, had children. Many, many years later, he became a widower and somehow accidentally met his would-be spouse. And they got married after all. “But she still didn’t take my last name,” he told me. © karmen_saule / Threads

• My sister was madly in love with her fiancé, as he was probably with her. She discovered that he had a second girlfriend shortly before the wedding and gave him a chance to break it off with this other girl. The fiancé refused — the engagement was called off. Strangely enough, they remained friends. © anononous / Reddit
• I felt pressure from my mother to marry. I was in my early thirties at the time. Took 12 months to organize this wedding and then the invitations went out.
  At this point, anxiety set in, and I had weeks of sleepless nights. I didn’t want to marry. He was a great man, who was I to take away his opportunity for a real love just so I could appease my mother?
  So I cancelled it all in one fell swoop! Boy was I hated by all. I lived happily ever after! © Left_Signal_1370 / Reddit
• Just talked to my aunt. I’m in shock. Yesterday, she was at a wedding. The wedding was canceled, guests are stunned, the family is in mourning, and the gossipers are in euphoria.
  The reason: the bride ran off with the groom’s uncle just 2 hours before the wedding. © _elnare_a_ / Threads

• I broke off an engagement on my birthday last year, but the circumstances were such that I really don’t know that I was engaged to begin with.
  A huge fight on Thanksgiving of 2019 resulted in an “engagement” ring that Christmas without the actual proposal. We were together 6 years at that point so it seemed like a forward momentum. We moved in together in 2020, and it was the beginning of the end for our bond.
  We had the least in common when we spent time together in one household, and it made us both miserable. But he is still my best friend, and I kept the ring. © DizzyZygote / Reddit
• I felt like I was his mom, asking him to help out around the house, making sure he wasn’t sleeping through his alarm for work, setting up a “chore chart” so I wasn’t the only one keeping up with household tasks, apologizing to my friends and family for him skipping out on events because he was sleeping through them, asking him not to stay up until 3 a.m. playing video games because we had something important going on the following morning... © butterednoodles24 / Reddit

• Two of my coworkers got engaged (made a big, big deal out of it), started fighting about every detail of everything and broke it off. 5 years later, they quietly got engaged again and had a small wedding. Happily married 10 years later. © well_uh_yeah / Reddit
• Got engaged to my pregnant girlfriend. 4 months before the wedding, she calls it off, saying she doesn’t feel the love anymore. A week after that, I came home early from my second job to surprise her and see if we can work things out, and found her in bed with the guy who would have been my best man.
  Turns out they’ve been having an affair for 6 months, and she planned to leave me for him as soon as he broke things off with his wife (who was to be her maid of honor). I decided to speed up the process by telling his wife what I found and instead of leaving her, the guy ditches my fiancée to try to salvage his marriage. © Toofpasties / Reddit
• The day before her wedding, my friend’s brother gave her a Sphynx cat. She brought it home, after which her fiancé said, “Choose — either me or the cat.” And the wedding was the next day.
  My friend never really fell for manipulation, to her credit. So, she canceled the wedding. She moved back in with her parents and with the cat, mourned a bit, and then married someone else.
  They have been together for many years now and are raising a son. That would-be husband kept asking her out. At some point, she got so fed up that she finally blocked him. © natgoncharova_therapy / Threads

And here are wedding stories that are both hilarious and a bit tragic.