That Time A Bride-To-Be Propositioned Me For Sex
It was a week before her wedding, and I was the wedding photographer
I worked for a period as a wedding photographer, which has given me a unique insight into weddings, for example, every speech given at a wedding sounds pretty much the same, and that’s because clearly everybody Google’s wedding speech and then uses whatever Google puts up at the top as the outline for their speech, all the jokes Google gives included.
Also, in the run-up to the wedding, it is likely that you will get a request of some sort along the lines of My mother hates having her picture taken, and is going to tell you that you are not to take pictures of her. She will tell you that doing so will spoil her day. Don’t listen, take pictures of her.
But every now and then in the run-up to the wedding, you get an unexpected request, like for example that time a guy told me that he wanted me to try to make his family look as bad as possible: They are all bastards, he told me, I want you to make them look as such.
Then there was the time that a bride told me that I was to delete any pictures in which her teeth were visible, then there was the bride who told me that she wanted me to make her look “super” hot and that I shouldn’t be afraid to take some good cleavage and ass shots. Then there was the groom who asked if, after the party, I would join them in their hotel room and take some “sexy” photos of them.
None of these top the list for the most out of the park request, that award goes to the bride who propositioned me for sex, but it was not the propositioning that makes this story the most unique, it was the sheer bizarre nature of the whole experience.
Before I get to the nuts and bolts of it I just wish to provide a little bit of background, it will make sense why at the end.
Back in 2016, I photographed four weddings, and just for fun I always like to try to guess whether the marriages will last or not. I don’t know if all wedding photographers do this, but all the ones I know do.
Anyhow, of those four weddings, I was certain that one was not going to last the year, another I was certain would last a lifetime, the other two due to the fact that they were very small jobs meaning I never really had any interaction with them outside of the phone call and me turning up on the day I had no real opinions on. But I was absolutely certain that one was doomed, and I want to tell you the story of why I believed this.
A couple reached out to me through Facebook and requested my services as a wedding photographer, for the purposes of this post I will say their names are Freddie and Paula.
Freddie and Paula had been together for ten years and had finally decided to tie the knot. They were both in their 40s, the guy a few years the elder, both had solid middle to upper-class level careers, and though neither of them had any kids themselves, they did both have decent sized families, even still they made it clear that they didn’t want anything special, just some basic shots of people arriving for the ceremony, the ceremony itself and the speeches after the ceremony.
Basically, it was an easy job, the sort that you wished you could get more of. And the best thing about it was that they both seemed very easy-going.
With everything sorted, a week before the wedding Paula asks if I could meet her for a coffee just to talk about the day. The request felt a bit odd mainly because I had already met both her and her soon-to-be husband the previous week during which we had discussed everything, so the need for yet another in-person meeting felt a little bit out of the blue, in fact, it felt a little bit liberty taking in truth.
Time is money after all and I wasn’t getting paid to take out more time to meet her, but not wanting to cause problems — I’d only been a wedding photographer for a year at this point so keeping the clients as happy as could be was very important to me i.e. I didn’t want to risk losing a five-star review — so not wanting to cause any problems I agreed to meet her the next evening.
The meeting took place in a nice bar on the quayside which she had selected, and I note immediately that she is a little tipsy, because of this I decide it best to get straight down to business, and so I ask her what it is she wants to discuss.
She goes on to tell me that she is worried that her mother might play up because she doesn’t like pictures taken of her and that she wanted me to try to overcome this on the day by sneakily taking pictures of her — yep, that request which is surprisingly common. However, I couldn’t help but wonder why she couldn’t have just relayed this fact to me over the phone.
I don’t say that of course, but with that sorted and with it clear that there is nothing else, I say that I will have to be leaving soon. She in reply insists on buying me a drink before I go, I agree then while we are finishing our drinks she tells me that she had her hen do (bachelorette party) the other night and that it was a total let down, she then adds the fact that there was a male stripper there and tells me that he was rubbish, but she sucked him off anyhow.
I am not joking, she actually said that. And it was as out of the blue as that. No build-up, no hint to the fact such a statement was coming. Just I had a hen do, there was a male stripper, he was rubbish, but I sucked him off anyway.
I wish to be clear at this point I am not one to judge and at this point for all I knew she and her partner may have had an open relationship. Except they didn’t, or at least it didn’t appear that they did.
To explain she goes on to tell me that the stripper had a rubbish body, which she tells me that in her view was not right because strippers were supposed to have bodies like mine — before I was injured I used to be, to say the least, a bit of a gym buff, it seemed that she had become aware of this. I offer no comments on that fact, or of the body shaming of the stripper.
Anyhow, you can probably by now see where this is going and so can guess why I concluded that their marriage was doomed, so to cut a not so long story short, she ends up propositioning me to come back to her hotel room with her for sex. Tells me not to worry about her husband-to-be, he’s been out there getting it on with other women, she tells me that he hadn’t hired a stripper for his stag do, he had hired an (in her words) hooker. So an escort.
She goes on to tell me that he believed that she didn’t know but that she does, she knows everything, she always has, and she goes on to explain to me that the way she sees it is if he can do it then why shouldn’t she.
Fair play to her on that point, but for all the obvious reasons and more, I kindly passed telling her that I had a girlfriend — at the time I did not but thankfully she did not know this. I then finished my drink and get on my way.
(I wish to add at this point I don’t wish to discuss the rights or wrongs of her making this pass at me, truth be told, arranging to meet me in a professional capacity on the premise of discussing the wedding when clearly she had other intentions … I would imagine that if a guy tried to do this to her, she would call him a certain thing. But it is what it is, and I don’t wish to make this post about this aspect of the story. In truth I wasn’t offended by it, perhaps I should have been, but that’s for another post.)
Getting back on track, the whole week I felt certain that the wedding was going to be called off, but it was not. The day before the wedding I message just to confirm everything was good and to my surprise, a reply came back telling me that it was. I then shoot the wedding and, because she pretty much pretended as nothing had even happened, it went on to be as I had expected one of the easiest weddings I’ve ever worked. No awkwardness at all.
At this point, I wish to remind you of my earlier beliefs about, how of the four marriages that I worked during 2016, it was the marriage of Freddie and Paula that I believed was destined to end in the divorce courts.
This brings me to the present day — and you have probably guessed by now that I was wrong — of the four marriages I shot that year, three have ended in divorce — yep, a bad year. Anyhow, the one surviving marriage, not the one that had appeared so strong and in which there had seemed so much love, but you guessed it, the marriage of Freddie and Paula. Freddie and Paula are still going strong, I know this because I bumped into Paula a couple of weeks back.
And yes, she yet again propositioned me for sex, and yet again I kindly declined. Paula and I then got to talking and she was definitely enjoying telling me about all her extramarital activities, about how her life was great, and how Freddie and she were really happy.
Clearly realizing how contradictory that statement sounded, she then added the following:
“Don’t worry, Freddie is just as much a cheating bastard as I am. That’s why we get along so well, always has been.”
I was a bit puzzled by this and asked if they were in an open relationship. No, she tells me, definitely not. If I caught him cheating, I’d kill him.
Yep, that was her response. If she caught him cheating, she would kill him. If you are scratching your head after that statement, trying to make sense of all this, you are not alone, but thankfully she did elaborate, she tells me that they are kind of have your cake and eat it types.
To cut the then ensuing long explanatory monologue she delivered short, basically, I deduced that she was saying that they like to pretend they are in a monogamous relationship, but both know that they are not they just don’t want proof of that fact.
I have to be honest at this point part of me wondered whether she was lying and that Freddie was in fact not a cheat and she was just trying to justify her actions by pretending to me that he was.
I was wrong, I told this story to a friend of mine, a fellow wedding photographer with forty years’ experience behind him, and he told me that he knew Freddie and that he was a frequent visitor at massage parlors, and not the innocent kind.
All in all, I don’t know what to think of this story, and in truth I found the whole thing thoroughly bizarre.
Of course, there is the chance that Paula was lying to me, and I have to be honest a large part of me does suspect that they may in fact actually be in an open relationship it is just that Paula did not want to admit that fact for some reason.
If that is the case and she is more willing to have me believe that she and her husband cheat than admit that they are in an open relationship, well I really don’t know what to think about that if that is the case, perhaps that it says more about society than them, that she would believe people seeing her as a cheat would lead to less judgment than an admission of being in an open relationship.
Like I said I really don’t know what to think or whether there’s anything to learn from this, but I thought it was an interesting story which is why I have shared it. And it has taught me three things:
- I am perhaps far too forgiving of unwanted sexual advances from women (maybe all of us guys are).
- Perhaps there are people out there who truly believe they will suffer less judgment from society for cheating than being in an open relationship (surely they have to be in an open relationship?).
- Relationships truly are so unbelievably complex that trying to judge whether one will succeed or not is nothing short of a fool’s game.
That’s all from me, thanks for reading!
If you found the story interesting, you may also enjoy the following:
My Date Said I Had Walked into a Situation — This Is What She Meant
The Three Worst Types of People Photographers Have To Deal with
That Time My Friend Asked Me To Photograph Her Feet
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