My Fiancee’s Best Friend Sent Me Screenshots the Night Before Our Wedding and I Still Walked Down the Aisle

So. What actually happened.

My name is Priya. I’m 31. I was engaged to a guy named Derek who is 33 and works in finance. We met at a work event four years ago. He was funny and charming and had this very specific quality where he could make you feel like you were the most interesting person in the room. I found out later this is just how he is with everyone. But that’s getting ahead.

We were engaged for 14 months. I planned most of the wedding. Derek was involved in the sense that he said “yeah that looks good” to most of my decisions and “I’ll handle the rehearsal dinner” which he mostly did handle. 230 guests. Venue deposit, caterer deposit, photographer deposit, florist deposit. My parents came from Chennai. His parents flew in from Ohio. It was a production.

The night before the wedding I was at the hotel where we’d blocked a block of rooms. Derek was technically supposed to stay in a separate room because his mom believes in the tradition. So he’s down the hall and I’m with my maid of honor Kelsey and we’re doing the normal stuff, face masks, talking too much, nervous.

At 11:04pm I got a text from Nadia.

Nadia is Derek’s best friend from college. I always liked her. She was at basically every group hang, she was at our engagement party, she was coming to the wedding the next morning as a guest, we’d talked about seating her near the front.

The text said: “Priya I need you to see something. I’m so sorry. I tried to decide if I should send this for a long time.”

Then a bunch of screenshots.

I’m not going to describe all of them. The short version is Derek had a profile on a dating app. He’d been on it at some point during our engagement. The profile still showed as active and updated something like three weeks before the wedding. There were messages. Seventeen conversations the screenshots showed, though I don’t know if that was all of them. Some of the conversations were recent. Some were from a year ago. The most recent one was from about a month before our wedding date.

Kelsey and I sat in that hotel bathroom for a long time. I don’t know how long. She kept saying “Priya what do you want to do, what do you want to do” and I kept not knowing the answer to that.

Here is what was in my head. My parents were asleep down the hall. His parents were in Ohio, no, they’d already flown in, they were also in the hotel. Two hundred and thirty people were showing up in eleven hours. The photographer had already been paid. The flowers were already at the venue. My grandmother had flown from Chennai and she has a bad knee and does not travel easily.

I don’t fully understand why but at around 4 in the morning I made a decision that I was going to get dressed.

Not in order to do some big revenge power play thing. I want to be really clear about that. I was getting dressed because I couldn’t figure out how to not get dressed at 4 in the morning with every moving part already in motion. I wasn’t thinking clearly and I was not sleeping and that was the decision that came out of it.

Kelsey thought I was insane. She said “Priya you know you can just not do this right?” And I said “I know.” And she said “your parents will understand.” And I said “I know.” And I got dressed anyway.

I texted Derek at 6am. I said: “I know about the app. I need you to be honest with me when I ask you something.” He didn’t respond until 6:47 and then he just said “can we talk.” I said we would. I may have been crying at this point, I don’t totally remember, or maybe I was past crying by then. Hard to say.

The wedding ceremony is mostly a blur. I know that sounds like I’m trying to make it more dramatic. I’m not. It just is. I remember my dad’s face when he walked me down the aisle, he had no idea anything was wrong and he looked so proud and I almost stopped right there. I didn’t. I kept walking.

I got to the altar and Derek looked at me and I looked at him and I could tell he’d been awake all night too. He looked terrible. Whatever was in my face when I looked at him, whatever he saw, he looked like he was going to be sick.

We said our vows. I said mine. He said his. The whole thing took about 25 minutes.

Now. The speech.

The version of the story that goes around online has me doing this big dramatic speech at the reception that humiliates Derek in front of everyone and everyone gasps and his family storms out or something. That’s not accurate.

What actually happened is I gave a pretty short speech at the reception, thanked everyone for coming, said something about love being complicated, and then sat down. That’s it. I didn’t play screenshots on a projector. I didn’t say his name in a bad way. I was seven hours into the worst decision of my life by that point and I didn’t have a speech in me. Kelsey covered the rest of it.

Derek gave his speech and it was, honestly, I couldn’t tell you what he said. I was staring at the centerpiece.

We had the reception. We danced the first dance. It was horrible but we did it. A few of my cousins who I’m close with knew something was wrong because I look like a bad liar when I’m upset. I told them I’d explain later.

That night in the hotel room we talked for three or four hours. Derek cried. He said the app thing was, and I’m quoting him here: “stupid attention seeking that didn’t mean anything.” He said he had anxiety about the wedding and this was a dumb way he handled it. He said he never met anyone from the app in person and I told him I had no way to know if that was true and he said he knew that.

I called my mom the next morning and told her. She was quiet for a long time and then she said “what are you going to do.” I said I didn’t know.

Nadia texted me while I was still at the hotel. She said she was sorry for the timing and she understood if I was angry with her. I wasn’t angry with her. I was angry at the situation but not at her. I texted back that I needed some time.

We are not divorced. We’re not happily married either. We’re in couples therapy and it’s slow and I don’t know where it goes. Someone at his office apparently saw the dating app profile before the wedding and told other people so that’s floating around in his professional world in some form now. I don’t know the details of that and I’ve decided not to find out.

A lot of people from the wedding have asked me what happened. I’ve told most of them something vague. My mom tells people I’ve been going through a hard time. Derek’s mom called me once and it was an awkward conversation and we found a reason to end it quickly.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. If Nadia had sent those screenshots two weeks before the wedding, what would I have done. I genuinely don’t know. The timing is what made the decision. And making a big life decision based on timing and deposits and a grandmother with a bad knee is not a story with a satisfying ending. I know that.

But that’s the story.