Expectations for the wedding night are high. The goal is to have the best sex of your life in the swankiest hotel room you’ve ever stayed in — all while managing to keep your eyes open after an exceedingly exhausting day.
But that’s not always how things pan out. Below are 21 first-person accounts of how newlyweds actually spent their very first night as husband and wife, according toRedditors and HuffPost readers.
1. “Having not eaten all day due to stress and nerves, we realized we were STARVING, and ordered Chinese food from the only place open at 4 a.m. We had more sex while waiting for food, then gorged ourselves on delicious Chinese food and fell asleep watching ‘Wayne’s World.’ It was actually awesome.”
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2. “She sat on the floor in front of me. We watched TV while I took the 6,000 hairpins out of her hair. It was a horrible game of pick-up sticks as they were all intertwined. After that we crashed.”
3. “We slept in separate beds! #HotelBookingError!”
4. “We were married at the courthouse by the justice of the peace. We went and had lunch afterwards, a beer, then picked up our 2-year-old and went home. No fancy wedding, dress, or trip, but I married my best friend and that alone made it the best day of my life.”
5. “It was chaste. My in-laws got us a hotel room for the night in a cutesy inn. The room was directly above theirs.”
6. “We slept then woke up and ate cake naked in bed.”
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7. “We got back to the hotel, I carried her across the threshold, and we began to consummate our vows. Moments after we started, there’s a knock at the door. It’s my mom. She then said we should both come down and visit with the family. Not preferred.”
8. “It was nearly 50 years ago, but it was one of the best days of my life. We got married in the morning and after a short reception, we drove to a hotel about halfway to where we were stopping for the honeymoon. We were both sexually inexperienced so it was great fun finding out together.”
9. “Our room had this awesome giant shower with at least 15 different heads and sprayers. We talked about how cool it was for like five minutes then went to bed. My clothes didn’t make it to our hotel room so I had to walk-of-shame in my tux the next morning.”
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10. “Sleeping in my husband’s room at his parents’ house after Chick-fil-A for dinner!”
11. “My wife was literally crying because I was taking too long to undo the 800 buttons on the back of her dress that was now hurting her shoulders too much to wear. Then she cried as I pulled out the 8,000 hairpins. A few strands of hair and 30 minutes later we attempted sex, both decided we were tired, said ‘f**k it,’ and went to bed cuddling. Love that woman.”
12. “We had been drinking for hours. We ran into our room, had a decent quickie, ran out into the hallway where I declared in a loud, drunken whisper, ‘I don’t have panties on,’ while following our friends to an after-party in another hotel room. Turns out my mom was behind me and howled with laughter, hugged me and told me I was the perfect daughter. Then she handed me a bottle of whiskey and sent me off with my husband to brew a wicked hangover.”
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13. “We eloped without telling anyone and got married in the basement of the courthouse in Harrison, Arkansas. Went home, wife went to her overnight job while I laid on the couch and watched TV.”
14. “We had our hotel room the day before the wedding. Got to the church, did our thing, had a blast at the reception. We leave the reception, my bride tells me her period started at the church. We walked around our favorite store and bought a new board game. We played Monopoly and watched TV on the most comfortable bed we had ever slept on.”
15. “We were exhausted and got to our hotel pretty late. My wife dressed up in some sexy lingerie she got as a gift and we proceeded to crawl into bed. We ate wedding food leftovers packed up for us and had a bottle of champagne and chocolate strawberries while our dog snuggled with us and begged for scraps. It was perfect.”
16. “No sex. Only sleep. Sweet, sweet sleep.”
17. “I was eight-months pregnant when we got married. I fell asleep around 10 p.m. and my husband stayed up watching TV. I expected him to come in after a few hours so we could consummate our marriage. Nope. I woke up around 2:30 a.m. and he was still watching TV. I couldn’t fall back asleep and so I leaned over to grab my iPad to read and that’s when my water broke. Seven hours later we had our son.”
18. “You know how the back of a shampoo bottle says ‘lather, rinse, repeat’? Well it was the adult version of that in our awesome hotel room with a late checkout to catch up on the sleeping part.”
19. “My husband and I were both exhausted, so we crawled into our fancy hotel room bed. About an hour after going to bed, I woke up vomiting and with horrible diarrhea. Something I ate hadn’t settled well. My husband held my hair back as I vomited, only reinforcing the reasons I married him in the first place.”
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20. “We had a snow-themed wedding, complete with the guests throwing fake snow at us when we left the reception. It was EVERYWHERE. I couldn’t get it out of my crevices, including ‘down there,’ and I had to take three showers to get it off of me. We also had to call housekeeping to bring us another set of sheets, because it was like sleeping on sand.
21. “We had to stop at the drugstore to buy condoms. I was still in my wedding dress.”
*Some responses have been edited and condensed.
