13 Horror Stories From Lebanese Wedding Planners

As part of my endless curiosity in the extravaganzas that are Lebanese weddings, I reached out to a few wedding planners in search of the most bizarre and intense requests they’ve gotten from clients. Now, while most of the people I reached out to wouldn’t speak to me, I managed to get a few stories by using that famed Lebanese wasta…and the chat was quite hilarious.

All of the following wedding planners and companies chose to remain anonymous.

1. The bride and groom had no shame. They would fight with each other in front my team and I, saying the most passive aggressive (“maybe your mom can decide that too”) and cringe-worthy (“iza heik mbalsheen”) things to each other. It made us so uncomfortable that in the end I had to attend the meetings alone because I didn’t my whole team going through 2 hours of hell.

2. We were approached to plan a local bloggers wedding, she seemed like a nice enough person on social media, but was an absolute nightmare in real life. She would make unrealistic demands, like wanting chocolate and catering companies to not only sponsor her wedding, but all her future events for life.

3. The groom kept eyeing and flirting with my personal assistant like a disgusting pig. His bride is the most wonderful person, but it wasn’t our place to say anything.

4. Two days before the wedding, the groom reached out to me asking if we could add 50 chairs, then getting upset when I said it would be a huge hassle and would cost more.

5. I’m openly gay, and I’m totally okay with it. The bride and groom, on the other hand, were not. They weren’t abusive in any way, they were just trying to “help” me. We’d be talking about the wedding and work, and the groom would suddenly say things like, “khaleene 3arfak 3a wehde, betghayerlak hayetak.” It was their life’s mission to have me sleep with a woman. Spoiler alert: it did not work.

6. The bride and I were working together on all the details, and every time she would pick something I would get a call from her fiancé later asking me to tell her that the option she chose was no longer available and to offer her a cheaper alternative. He also asked me to tell her that the song she wanted for their first dance (Mariah Carey’s My All) was not allowed to be played because of copyright!

7. We planned the most elaborate and extravagant of weddings, only to have my team call all the guest two days prior to the event to tell them the wedding is cancelled.

8. Imagine being strung out between two hard-headed Lebanese mothers-in-law who want nothing but to counter-argue the other’s opinion about everything in this world. Hell on earth, I tell you.

9. The worst type of clients you can have are the ones who don’t care about anything. I had a couple who literally had no say in anything, I would ask them about anything, and they would be like “eh metel ma badik, ente bta3erfe aktar“. I ended planning my dream wedding.

10. The bride spent her whole wedding in a photoshoot. Everything she did, she would scream my name in the middle of the event, “waynouwe el photographer?” Even when she and her husband were having their first dance, that was supposed to be a spontaneous, organic moment, she would summon me to take a picture of every single thing. Absolute nightmare.

11. Briefly: the bride would cry every time the groom didn’t jump up and down when she showed him things like centerpieces…awkward.

12. There’s always the couple that wants the million dollar wedding on a $7,000 budget. I had two clients ask me to re-create Winter Wonderland for them but didn’t want to dish out on any lights, decoration, or props.

13. The bride only recruited me because she wanted a wedding identical to an other one I had planned a couple of months back. I tried to explain to her that we can’t have an exact replica, and told her several times that she can’t have the same dress because it was custom-made for the other bride, and that’s when I got fired.