PREVIOUS ARTICLE
Couples are expected to have wild sex on their wedding night, but I’ve always been curious about how many people these days actually do. After such a big day, you’re just too exhausted! And that’s what the honeymoon is for, right? (In our case, Alex and I ate a giant burger on the hotel bed while I took bobby pins out of my hair for like an hour.) But maybe I’m TOTALLY wrong and everyone’s out there having sexy sexytimes? To test it out, I asked nine friends to share their funny wedding-night stories…
“We got into our New York hotel around 3am, and I sent Michael down to the deli across the street to get me a cream cheese and smoked salmon bagel because I was STARVING. He found about twenty of our friends in the hotel lobby and brought them all up to our room for a party. As he opened the door I called out ‘You better be alone!’ (because I KNOW THAT MAN) and he called back ‘Of course!’ I later heard there was a lot of frantic ‘abort mission! abort mission!’ hand gestures and miming as everyone ran for the elevators…” —Stacey
“I was sober and looking forward to drinking Champagne, chatting and maybe having sex. Then I turned ’round and in the last five minutes of the party my husband was so smashed he couldn’t walk! So when I suggested Champagne, he suggested coffee, walked into the bedpost and passed out snoring, and I took out bobby pins in a fury!” —Anne
“We didn’t plan on having sex (we’d heard horror stories of wedding night sex gone wrong). We even talked about how tired we were going to be, etc etc etc, and that we weren’t putting any pressure on the night (since we’d been living with each other and having sex for years). But, as it turned out, we ended up having epic, hot, mad-for-each-other sex. Maybe because it was the first time we’d been together in days, maybe because we hadn’t put any pressure on each other, who knows! I remember Ryan taking off my dress which had all these little buttons in the back and both of us going crazy having to wait. I remember feeling and thinking that sex as married people was going to be awesome. And, you know, it really has been. Afterwards, I took all the pins and flowers out of my hair (I couldn’t sleep with them LOL), and I sat down while Ryan slept and made a whole list of my memories from that day, a list I still have in a box someplace.” —Amy
“A savvy friend tipped me off, and we actually stayed in a hotel the night before our wedding so we could, um, pre-party. It’s a calculated move, which some might see as unromantic, but it was nice to have a stolen interlude to ourselves. And also nice for both of us to be freed up just to collapse happily into bed together after the biggest party of our lives.” —Olivia
“We were determined to do the deed on our wedding night. But as social butterflies we also didn’t want to miss the after party with all our friends. By the time we were finally in bed it was 5am. I managed to slip into a negligee, but I honestly can barely remember the actual moment. We were in a complete daze! That morning we left for Italy and I’ve never been so tired. We forgot to check our flight time and we ended up barely making it to the airport. My husband told the flight crew we were newlyweds and they had the whole plane give us a round of applause…little did they know, we really deserved it!” —Beth
“The first piece is that I did not want to take off my wedding dress. As in, DID NOT. But I bribed myself with some badass black lingerie. However, watching me work through my emotional dress-removal process required my new husband’s last piece of semi-conscious energy and so by the time I’d taken the leap, he was gone. As in passed out. On top of the covers. In his tux. At this point I thought, meh, and happily dove head-first into the mini-bar snacks.” —Melissa
“Our wedding after party involved In-N-Out burgers and booze until 4am, so sex was the last thing on my mind. But I was determined to do it, just so we could say we had! We cleared the rose petals off the bed and ate wedding cake on top of the covers…and then, with eyes practically closed and much less verve than a normal Sunday make-out session, we actually made it happen! Although the sex was mediocre, I’m still really happy that I can say we consummated the marriage on the actual wedding night. I’ve bragged about it many times, and I always give brides the advice that “you gotta do it, no matter how little you feel like it in the moment.” (My other piece of bridal advice is to reapply lipstick much more often than you think during the reception.)” —Louisa
“When we got up to our hotel suite, our only problem was that we couldn’t get my dress off. It had 50 tiny buttons down the back and my husband couldn’t unloop them all with his tired hands. Thankfully one of the gifts we’d opened was a set of knives, and we used them to literally cut my dress off.” —Ginny
“We got married at my husband’s family’s house, but the night before the wedding, I stayed at a nearby hotel so I could get ready there and show up all bride-y and stunning—I figured my soon-to-be husband didn’t need to see me blow-drying my hair and curling my eyelashes. We had a great wedding and people had a wonderful time and the party went on well into the night. And it wasn’t until I stumbled into our bedroom exhausted that I realized I had forgotten to pack an overnight bag, so I had nothing to sleep in, all my nice beauty products were back at the hotel and I had to wash my wedding makeup off with Dial hand soap. There was a brunch for guests the next morning, so I made my new husband go to the hotel and get my clothes early the next day—otherwise I’d have been wearing my wedding dress again. It was hilarious—the whole wedding day had gone off without a hitch, but I spent my first night as a wife sleeping in his old high school T-shirt with Vaseline Intensive Care on my face.” —Lauren
What about you? Please share your stories below, I would LOVE to hear… :)
P.S. 15 wedding dos and don’ts.
