An Indian groom returned home with a different wife that the one he had originally intended to marry, after his bride-to-be refused to go ahead with the wedding upon seeing that he was balding.

Dr. Ravi Kumar’s family had arranged his weeding to a girl in Sugauli village, Bihar, more than a year ago, and all there was left wad for the couple to finally meet and get married in a traditional wedding ceremony. As the set date of February 18, approached, Kumar, a neurosurgeon, traveled with his family from New Delhi to Bihar, but he never actually met his bride-to-be until his wedding day, which turned out to be a big mistake. After all the rituals were completed and all there was left for the betrothed couple was to enter the wedding pavilion to be married, disaster struck. Kumar removed his traditional headgear and his bride-to-be noticed that he was balding.

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A 30-year-old woman in Egypt recently filed for divorce from her 32-year-old husband after only 40 days of marriage on grounds that he is so stingy that he refused to buy her a shawarma sandwich on their first and only outing as a married couple.

Speaking before the Family Court in Zananiri, the young woman, known only as Sameeha, said that the shawarma incident was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She had married Ahmed, a teacher, after only knowing him for two months, which apparently wasn’t long enough for her to realize how incredibly stingy he was. However, his frugal nature became very obvious right after their traditional wedding. On their first day of marriage, Ahmed allegedly told his wife that he hated going out because he viewed it as a waste of money. She didn’t pay much attention to his words then, but things got worse with each passing day.

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Krishna Sen, a woman from India’s Uttar Pradesh state who posed as a man for over 4 years, was recently arrested for marrying two women and harassing them for dowry.

Krishna had always been a bit of a tomboy, but in 2013 she went a step further, adopting a male persona on social media and approaching women online in hopes of starting a romantic relationship with them. She started wearing men’s clothes, cutting her hair short and even changed her name to Sweety Sen. Over the course of three years, the disguised woman managed to convince two women to marry her, and then started pressuring them and their families for dowry.

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Two male Irish friends, neither of which is gay, have decided to get married in order to avoid paying a hefty inheritance tax. It sounds like the plot of a Hollywood comedy, only in real life.

Michael O’Sullivan, from Stoneybatter, north Dublin, has been friends with Matt (surname not disclosed for privacy reasons) for almost 30 years. Both are in their 80s, and O’Sullivan is now Matt’s caretaker and stands to inherit his home and other possessions. Unfortunately, because of Ireland’s Capital Acquisitions Tax (Cat), which applies to gifts and inheritances over specified amounts, Matt would have to pay 33% to the government. However, the tax does not apply to gifts or inheritance given to a spouse or civil partner, so the two men decided that the best way would be to get married.

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When it comes to getting money, some people will do just about anything, even marry their relatives. Take 25-year-old Mauricio Ossola, from Argentina, who last year married his 91-year-old great-aunt, so he could collect a widower’s pension after she died.

Mauricio moved in with his great aunt Yolanda, in the city of Salta, north-west Argentina, eight years ago, after his parents split up. He, his mother, her brother and his grandmother shared a home with the elderly woman in the neighborhood of Tres Cerritos, and apparently got along very well. So well, in fact, that two years ago Yolanda agreed to marry Mauricio so that he could collect a widower’s pension after she was gone. The then 23-year-old had told the woman that he planned to quit his law studies due to financial constraints , and she assured him that she would do everything she can to make sure he graduates. The young man recently admitted to reporters that he was the one who proposed they get married, and that she accepted. They tied the knot in February of 2015, in what he describes as a “discreet civil ceremony”.

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A 62-year-old man from Birmingham, England, recently made news headlines after revealing that he had lived in the forest for five years before moving into a homeless shelter, just to get away from his nagging, controlling wife.

Malcolm Applegate worked as a gardener for most of his life, and enjoyed tending to people’s gardens. It wasn’t until he got married, about thirteen years ago, that his life took a turn for the worse. He claims that in the beginning, he and his wife got on pretty well, but as he became increasingly busy with work, she became more controlling, to the point where he had to cut his hours just to please her. At one point, all the arguments and his wife’s nagging got too much for Malcolm, so he just packed up his things and left her. But instead of moving to a friend’s house and filing for divorce, he just disappeared.

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Claire and David Burke have been together for 16 years, happily married for 7 years, and even have a son together, but they’ve never moved into the same house. They spend their free time as a family, but when it’s time for bed, they say their goodbyes and head to their separate homes. It may not be the most conventional marriage arrangement, but they say it actually it helps make their relationship stronger.

Claire, 49, says that they never seriously considered moving in together, and after spending their wedding night in the same bed feeling tired and miserable, she and David, 43, decided that giving each other space was the best thing they could do for their marriage. They realized that they both liked the way things were at the time, and that moving in together wasn’t worth ruining their relationship. Claire and David have been living in separate homes, about 4 miles from each other, ever since, and things between them couldn’t be better.

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Couples looking for a unique and unforgettable wedding day experience can now add walking barefoot on broken glass on their list of options. A Spanish company recently introduced the service as a metaphor for marriage.

Some people wouldn’t dare walk barefoot on pieces of broken glass even if somebody paid them to do it, but a Spanish company believes that couples will actually pay them for the opportunity to do exactly that on the day of their wedding. Wedding Glass is the first company in Spain, and probably the world, to offer walking on broken glass as a wedding ritual, but they believe that it will soon become a trend in the business, as couples these days are no longer happy with just the classic church ceremony and subsequent party.

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The photo below may not seem very interesting at first glance, but the story behind it definitely is. That little round gadget is apparently a card scanner installed by a Chinese wife to make sure that her husband doesn’t come home later than 9 pm.

When their husbands don’t come straight home after work, some women start calling them every 10 minutes asking where they are, others text them insistently until they’ve had enough and come home, or tease them with a photo of a delicious dinner. But one Chinese wife decided to think outside the box and came up with a very practical solution – installing a card reader at the entrance of her home, which her husband must use every time he walks through the door.

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Zheng Jiajia, a 31-year-old artificial intelligence expert from Hangzhou, China, recently made headlines after marrying 1-year-old Yingying, a “female” robot that he built himself.

Zheng graduated from Zhejiang University in 2011 with a master’s degree in artificial intelligence, and spent 3 years working for Chinese tech giant Huawei, before joining Hangzhou’s Dream Town, a base for internet and tech startups, to work on artificial intelligence. Last year, he started working on a smart humanoid robot that would end up becoming his wife.

Named Yingying, the female robot can allegedly say a few simple words, and is capable of recognizing Chinese characters and images. She weighs about 30 kilograms and is modeled according to the young engineer preferences in women.

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The shortage of women caused by China’s one-child policy, combined with the country’s economic boom over the last two decades have made marriage a grim prospect for poor men in rural regions. These two factors have bumped up the “bride price” to hundreds of thousands of yuan, sometimes even millions, obscene amounts that most men can’t hope of raising without taking a bank loan.

The bride price is a a centuries-old Chinese tradition that survived and even thrived in the Communist era. It’s similar to the Western tradition of dowry, only it requires a prospective groom to pay the family of the bride for permission to marry her. In the 60’s and 70’s, the bride price was paid in modest gifts ranging from a simple thermos to bedding. During the 80’s television sets and refrigerators were popular gifts offered as bride prices, but since the economy started to grow in the 1990’s, the payment switched to hard cash and the sums demanded by the family of the bride have been rising ever since.

But perhaps the best explanation for the ever-increasing bride price is the gender inequality in China. During the days of the one-child policy, the preference for males strong enough to work and later look after their elderly parents led to a huge increase in sex-selective abortion and even infanticide of female babies. As a result, Harvard researchers claim that today there are 118 men for every 100 women in China, and the proportion is actually worse in poor rural regions.

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Despite living under the same roof and raising their three children together, a Japanese husband hasn’t spoken a single word to his wife in the last 20 years.

No marriage is perfect, and spouses sometimes give each other the silent treatment when they’re upset. But either they go their separate ways or try to patch things up and move on. But not Okou Katayama. For the past two decades he has only answered his wife Yumi’s attempts at making conversation with occasional nods and grunts. Their unusual relationship was revealed by their 18-year-old son Yoshiki, who appealed to a Japanese TV show to help him fix things, as he had never heard his parents talk to each other.

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After failing to deliver on the contract he had signed with Russian online gift store Pich Shop, a 21-year-old entrepreneur agreed to be auctioned off to the highest bidder and marry a complete stranger for at least one year, in order to avoid being sued.

A week ago, a strange listing showed up on PichShop.ru – a young man named Aleksandr Kramarenko available for marriage, with a 1 year warranty. The “product” was listed as “in stock” and featured a detailed description – including age, height, weight, zodiac sign and interests – and photos (both dressed and topless). The listing mentioned that Aleksandr was going to be auctioned off to be married to the highest bidder, and invited women no older than 35 to bid for the chance to become his wife for at least one year. The minimum bid was set at 10,000 rubles.

This all sounds a bit too corny to be true, and, to be fair, such pranks are not exactly uncommon around the holidays. Some of them are actually pretty elaborate and end up attracting a lot of media attention, which translates into free publicity for companies, but this particular story seems legit.

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It sounds like one of those funny news articles you read on sites like The Onion, but this one is sadly true. A man from the United Arab Emirates divorced his young wife just days after their wedding, after seeing her makeup free for the first time.

The bizarre news was reported by psychologist Dr Abdul Aziz Asaf, who claims that the 28-year-old woman contacted his clinic to help her overcome the psychological suffering caused by the swift and unexpected divorce. Asaf did not reveal the woman’s identity for reasons of confidentiality, but told Gulf News that she had been engaged to a 34-year-old man for six months, before marrying him. Apparently, he had never seen her without makeup during all that time, because the first time he did, he hardly recognized her. The man accused Asaf’s patient of deceiving him by wearing so many cosmetics, including fake eyelashes, and not looking as pretty as before the wedding.

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A thoughtful husband in Singapore recently ended up fighting to save his marriage after buying three Pokemon plush toys as a surprise for his wife, a big Pokemon Go fan.

The poor guy, known only by his handle – featherlit – on online marketplace Carousell, posted an ad on October 12, pleading with people to get three Snorlax plushies off his hands and help him save his marriage. In the item description section, he wrote how he decided to buy the adorable plush toys for his wife, as she was always talking about how “cute and dumb” the Pokemon character looked. So without giving the much thought, he went online and ordered three plush Snorlax figures.

Featherlit was expecting to receive miniature versions of the Pokemon that they could set on the living-room coffee table as decorations, but to his great surprise, the three Snorlaxes tuned out to be life-sized, with each one measuring around 1.5 meters tall. But that was nothing compared to the shock he got when his wife flew into a rage, after seeing most of their living space taken up by the huge plush toys. He was forced to put them up for sale, after the spouse threatened “to move back to her mom’s home” if he didn’t get rid of them.

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