In the Western world, bridesmaids are also known as maids of honor, but in China, they are more like maids of dishonor. From drinking large quantities of alcohol on behalf of the bride to putting up with groping and other forms of harassment, bridesmaids often take part in traditional customs that most people would consider extremely vulgar. And as fewer women are willing to serve as bridesmaids for their friends and relatives, professional bridesmaid rental services are a booming business.

In medieval times, Chinese bridesmaids would dress up as the bride to act as decoys for rival clans and hooligans looking to kidnap her. As centuries past and legal protections for marriages were established, this particular role was no longer required, but maids of honor still retained their protective functions, and their ‘job’ remained as dangerous as ever. Even today, women who take on this responsibility are humiliated, physically or sexually harassed and some end up losing their lives in their attempt to best fulfill their tasks at a wedding. It sounds absurd that an honorary position at what is supposed to be a joyous celebration involve such risks, but in China, it is a harsh reality.

For example, it is customary for Chinese newlyweds to toast bottoms up to every wedding guest, and at big weddings that adds up to a lot of alcohol. In order to protect the honor of the bride, it falls on the bridesmaids to fend off drinking requests and in most cases drink on the bride’s behalf. This often results in alcohol poisoning, and in extreme cases, death. Just last month, it was reported that a 28-year-old maid of honor in Wenchang, Hainan province, lost her life after getting pressured into consuming a large amount of alcohol.

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A Seattle startup is in the news for investing in divorce – its business model is based on the fact that nearly 40 to 50 percent of married couples in the US end up parting ways. SwanLuv offers to pay couples for their dream wedding, but the money will have to be returned with interest if they ever get divorced.

So if you’re about to get married and you apply to Swanluv, they’ll run your profile through an algorithm, study your relationship, and select you if you meet their criteria. Then, they’ll offer you a loan of up to $10,000. You don’t have to return the money, ever, as long as you stay together. But the moment you decide to get a divorce you’ve got to cough up the original amount, plus interest. And stronger relationships are assigned higher interest rates, so the longer couples stay together, the more they’ll stand to lose if they split.

When you think about it, that’s kind of like the opposite of how insurance works. You’re supposed to get paid when things go wrong, but with SwanLuv, it’s the other way round. 

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An unidentified Chinese man’s wedding pictures recently went viral because of his unusual bride – a life-size plastic love doll!

The ‘bride’ was apparently treated to a make-up artist, a hair stylist, and even given a selection of dresses to pose in, to make her look like a real girl. She’s seen in a splendid white mermaid gown in the wedding portraits, and a beautiful lilac dress with sequins and precious stones in other photographs. Each picture is surprisingly tender, as though they’re a couple deeply in love.

With the identity of the man kept a secret, no one knew the real reason behind the bizarre wedding. The photographer said that she didn’t really agree with the man’s choice to marry a plastic doll, but added that he still deserved to be respected since we all have the freedom to choose what we like.

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When 27-year-old Quinn Duane’s finance dumped her just a week before their wedding, the young woman decided to make the best of the situation. Instead of cancelling the wedding venue and catering, she invited the city’s homeless to partake in the elaborate feast.

Quinn herself was too devastated to attend what should have been her own wedding reception, but her family stood in for her to welcome the guests at Sacramento’s Citizen Hotel. “When I found out Monday that the wedding would not be taking place, it just seemed like, of course, this would be something that we would do to give back, Quinn’s mother Kari told local media. “I feel a lot of heartache and heartbreak for her, but I will take away something good from this.”

The meal, prepared by the hotel’s four-star restaurant ‘Grange’, consisted of salad, appetizers, gnocchi, salmon, and steak. It was originally intended to feed 120 guests, after the $35,000 ceremony at the hotel. The wedding, sadly, was not meant to be, but Quinn and her family decided to go ahead with the meal, only with an entirely different guest list.

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Here comes the bride, all dressed in white and laying in… a coffin? Yes, that’s exactly how 58-year-old Jenny Buckleff arrived at her off-the-wall wedding – in a closed coffin, pulled by a motorcycle!

Jenny, who used to work as an embalmer at a funeral parlor, said that she wanted do “something different” at her wedding. “Instead of turning up in a horse-drawn cart, I thought I’m going to turn up in a coffin,” she said. So she decided to conceal herself in her brother Roger’s black coffin, while her sister-in-law Hayley pulled her all the way to the Llangefni registry office behind a VW Trike.

Interestingly, Jenny revealed that she isn’t actually into any bizarre or goth stuff. “I don’t normally dress like this and I’m not goth at all,” she told the media. “I work for Bet365, so you have to be well presented and I’m normally very smart. But my brother is different. He’s covered in tattoos so for once he looked the part. My brother and I are very close so it was nice to be able to do something to honour him and do something a bit different. He loved it and said it made his day.” Read More »

The traditional bouquet toss at a wedding is mostly a symbolic gesture, but to 37-year-old Utah resident Jamie Jackson, it’s a sport.  She has caught 46 bouquets since 1996, earning herself the nickname ‘The Bouquet Slayer’. Ironically, she’s still single, but that doesn’t seem to bother her.

It all started out when Jamie attended her cousin’s wedding in Layton, Utah, in 1996. “I’m kind of competitive by nature, so when his new bride tossed her bouquet, I went for it,” she said. “Some single girls might shy away from it, but not me. After that wedding, I just knew that I could do it again.”

“I’ve pretty much crushed that ‘next-to-be-married’ myth,” Jamie told People magazine. “I’ve had boyfriends, sure. But I’m liking the single life. Besides, if I were married, I’d have to give up my favorite sport.”

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After dating for several years and failing to find the man of her dreams, a 40-year-old woman from Houston, Texas, decided to marry herself in an elaborate ceremony that involved friends and family.

Yasmin Eleby’s wedding was quite similar to a traditional one, except the bride wore purple, there was no groom, and it was the bride’s mother, not her father who walked her down the aisle.  Since self-weddings aren’t legally recognized in the U.S., the ceremony – conducted by three ministers – was described as a spiritual one. Yasmin made heartfelt vows to forgive, honor, and love… herself!

“I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and support that was shown to me during my celebration of love and life,” Yasmin wrote on Facebook, after the ceremony. She also added that she “couldn’t imagine the ceremony being any more poignant and meaningful.”

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A young couple from Orlando, Florida, have found the perfect way to organise their dream wedding without spending a penny. Courtney McKenzie and her fiancé Jamil Newell are opting for a corporate-sponsored ‘social’ wedding and honeymoon, which means their special moments will feature all sorts of product endorsements and ads.

Courtney, who works in social media and runs a marketing company, is the brains behind the idea. “I thought, why not couple my two loves: my soon to be husband Jamil and my love for marketing?” she said. Jamil isn’t complaining either – after all, who wouldn’t want an all-expense paid wedding and honeymoon?

The couple, who love traveling, will be getting married this winter at their dream wedding destination – Thailand. The wedding ceremony itself will take place on December 14, and they plan to spend the next 11 days traveling in South East Asia, doing exciting things like elephant trekking, scuba diving, and bamboo river rafting.

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When 26-year-old New Yorker Jen Glantz got to be the bridesmaid at four of her closest friends’ weddings this year, she realized that she had a real flair for the job. Her story is incredibly similar to Katherine Heigl’s character in the movie 27 Dresses, where she’s always the bridesmaid but never the bride. But Jen has decided to make the most of her situation by turning pro – she posted an ad on Craigslist offering her services to brides all over the world. She’s even written a book about her experiences as a professional bridesmaid called All My Friends are Engaged.

“This year alone, I’ve been a bridesmaid four times,” she wrote in the ad. “That’s four different chiffon dresses, four different hen parties filled with tequila shots and guys in thongs twerking way too close to my face; four different pre-wedding pep talks to the bride about how this is the happiest day of her life and marriage, probably, is just like riding a bike: a little shaky at first but then she’ll get the hang of it. So let me be there for you if you don’t have any other girlfriends.”

The ad also mentions the bridesmaid stuff that Jen is exceptionally good at: “Holding up the 18 layers of your dress so that you can pee with ease on your wedding day,” “Catching the bouquet and then following that moment up with my best Miss America-like ‘Omg, I can’t believe this,’ speech,” “Doing the electric and the cha cha slide,” and “Responding in a timely manner to pre-wedding email chains created by other bridesmaids and the Maid of Honor.”

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Nine-year-old Saneie Masilela has managed to accomplish something that probably no other kid his age has ever done – he’s been married twice! And as if that wasn’t shocking enough, his bride is old enough to be his grandmother.

Saneie has married 62-year-old Helen Shabangu twice in the span of one year. The second wedding ceremony was recently held at the bride’s home in Ximhungwe, in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. As the highly unusual couple exchanged vows for the second time, 100 wide-eyed guests watched on in utter bewilderment.

Saneie, the youngest of four children, belongs to the nearby town of Tshwane. His first wedding to Helen took place last year at his parents’ home, after he claimed that his dead ancestors had ordered him to marry her. While most parents would brush away such claims from a little boy, Saneie’s parents actually took him seriously. They hurriedly contacted the bride, paid her $800 as dowry and spent over $1,500 on the arrangements.

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Aparecido Castaldo, a retired stone cutter from Jundiai, Brazil has decided to marry his beloved Carmella, a goat. Because no Christian minister would agree to perform the marriage ceremony, the two will be wed by a known satanic leader, in the Church of the Devil.

People have married their pets in the past, although in most cases the marriage ceremony was just a symbolic one performed by family or friends. However, 74-year old Aparecido Castaldo, a widower and father-of-seven, apparently wanted to be united with his goat Carmela in a church, by an evangelical minister. Unfortunately, none of the churches he contacted with his unusual request wanted to perform the ceremony, so Aparecido eventually contacted Toninho do Diabo (Tom the Devil), an old friend who just happens to be one of the most famous satanists in Brazil. The wedding is scheduled to take place at midnight, on October 13, at the Devil’s Church, in Sao Paolo. “Only our church accepted this love between man and animal because we have no prejudice,” Toninho said.

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For the last 10 years Australian artist Jodi Rose has traveled the world recording the vibrations in bridge cables with contact microphones and using them to create experimental music. You could say she has an almost intimate relationship with bridges, and recently she decided to make it official by marrying a mysterious bridge in the south of France.

Le Pont du Diable (Devil’s Bridge) is a 600-year-old stone bridge built over a steep-sided gorge in Céret‎, but for Jodi Rose it’s simply “The One”. After visiting dozens of bridges all over the world, for her Singing Bridges musical project, she decided this was the one she wanted to celebrate her love for bridges with. Although he is made of stone, the resonance of his being is very present, and I feel at peace in his strong embrace,”Jodi said.  “He makes me feel connected to the earth and draws me to rest from my endless nomadic wanderings. He is fixed, stable, rooted to the ground, while I am nomadic, transient, ever on the road. He gives me a safe haven, brings me back to ground myself, and then lets me go again to follow my own path, without trying to keep me tied down or in thrall to his needs or desires. I am devoted to him. The perfect husband… strong and silent!”

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Christians make up only 1.4% of Japan’s 127 million population, but Western “white weddings” now account for around three quarters of all bridal ceremonies, which means Christian priests are in high demand. To meet their clients’ expectations bridal companies have given up on trying to find ordained ministers and have kept requirements to a minimal – men looking foreign-enough to pass as Christians who can speak a little Japanese and perform the ceremony in 20 minutes.

Japan’s love affair with Christian wedding is believed to have started in the 1980s with the televised weddings of Prince Charles and Lady Diana and was fueled by the nuptials of Japanese pop star Momoe Yamaguchi. People, women especially, were attracted by the idea of celebrating their marriage through a ritual that revolved around love and that elevates the bride to the status of princess even for a short while. Traditional Shinto weddings, on the other hand, encase women in a wig and kimono, and are focused more on the merger of two families. The Japanese simply  fell in love with the sharp dress code, the kiss and the overall image of Western weddings over their centuries-old traditions. But in order to have a genuine-looking ceremony, they wanted Christian priests, which were pretty hard to find. That started the now famous “foreign fake pastors” trend that saw companies and hotels hiring average foreign gentlemen with minimal knowledge of the Japanese language to perform Christian weddings.

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Talk about pushing your luck, right? As if having his future wife put up with a virtual girlfriend wasn’t enough, a Japanese geek actually had the nerve to invite his video-game lady and two of her friends to their wedding and even reserved seats for them. But the bride had some plans of her own…

For obvious reasons, the real names of the protagonists in this story were not revealed, but photos from their wedding were posted online by guests surprised to see three Nintendo DS handheld video-game consoles seated as guests. Their screens showed three different anime-like girls, one of which was revealed to be the groom’s girlfriend. Nene Anegasaki, Manaka Takane and Rinko Kobayakawa are characters from the hugely popular Konami video game, Love Plus. The addictive open-ended dating simulator has reportedly sold in over 250,000 copies in Japan, and stories of men caught by their girlfriends and wives while tending to their virtual partner’s needs began surfacing online a while ago. In 2010, we posted photos of gamers celebrating Nene’s birthday with cakes and candles and presents, just to show how popular the Love Plus character was. But this is probably the first time Nene attended a real-life wedding, as a guest.

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Throughout history, various cultures have had strange requirements of their women. But none perhaps as strange as the custom of crying before marriage, as followed in Southwest China’s Sichuan Province. According to the custom, it is mandatory for a bride to cry at her own wedding, whether she likes it or not.

The crying marriage ritual was at its peak during the early 17^th century and remained so until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911. It is said to have originated during the Warring States Period (475 to 221 BC), when historical records reveal that the princess of the Zhao State was to be married into the Yan State. At the moment of the princess’ departure, her mother is said to have cried at her feet, asking her to return home as soon as possible. This is said to be the first crying marriage ever. Although the custom is not as popular now as it used to be, there are still a large number of families that practice it with gusto. In fact, it is a necessary procedure for marriage among the Tujia people, in China’s Sichuan Province. The ritual itself is pretty simple – the bride has got to shed tears. If she doesn’t or is unable to, her neighbors will look down upon her as one of poor breeding. Worse still, she could even become the laughing stock of her village. In one extreme case, the bride was beaten by her mother for not crying at the wedding. Perhaps the girl was too happy to be free from her mother?

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