Husband Divorces Wife On Wedding Night: Is This The Shortest Wedding Ever?

A Bridegroom in Saudia Arabia didn’t even wait to consummate his marriage before divorcing his bride.

What triggered this unusual reaction was a series of photos of his wife — in what were described as “intimate circumstances” — sent to him by her ex-lover.

The Mirror reports that the lover was unhappy that the woman had chosen someone else, and decided that he would try to stop the wedding. For that purpose, he went hi-tech and placed a memory stick with the compromising pics in a bouquet of flowers. He attached a note to he groom suggesting he look inside the flowers and open the memory stick.

A Muslim cleric, named Sheikh Ghazi Bin Abdul Aziz al-Shammari, told Kuwaiti television news that the groom made an immediate decision not to consummate the hours-old marriage and to seek an immediate divorce, according to the website Sabq.

The cleric said, “The groom came to see me the next day and he was under strong emotional trauma. It was truly the shock of his life and he could not bear the scandal.” He added that the bride’s former lover had tried to blackmail her into staying with him, and threatened to tell her prospective husband if she refused.

Apparently, she told him to “go away” — but not exactly in those words — and said that she would go through with the marriage because she wanted to have children.

Unfortunately, we only have the word of the Saudi cleric, Sheikh al-Shammari, that these events occurred as he reported since he would not give any names, nationalities of the parties, nor the country in which this non-event took place.

However, since the marriage lasted a few hours, it does not qualify as the shortest marriage ever recorded.

Many Hollywood marriages didn’t last much longer, one of the most famous being the first wedding of silent film heartthrob Rudolph Valentino to actress Jean Acker. She locked him out of the bedroom and the marriage was never consummated, but the final divorce took 2 years.

More recently, Britney Spears‘ marriage to Jason Alexander lasted 55 hours, Carmen Electra to Dennis Rodman, 9 days, and Eddie Murphy to Tracey Edmonds, 14 days.

However, according to a report on the website Emirates 247 in 2012, the record for the shortest marriage ever goes to a bridegroom in Dubai who divorced his bride literally seconds after the ceremony.

Just after he stepped out of court where he got married, he stepped into another court next door and divorced her. He explained that it was a misunderstanding with the bride’s family about her wanting to continue to work after they were married.