I paid for my wedding, but not the rehearsal dinner. The benefit was that it allowed me to get married in my hometown instead of bumblefuck Kentucky. The downside was the $20K or so I dropped to pay for it.
Back to wedding stories. I was invited to a wedding where I only loosely knew the bride and groom- they were friends of a buddy of mine, I had met them 3-4 times, and for whatever reason they invited me and a couple other friends of my buddy. The wedding was in scenic Rock Hill, SC. with the reception at the local community college. Best part was they, like some others here, bought all the booze. I met the bride's parents like 10 minutes before the reception ended. For whatever reason, they suggested I should be in charged of transporting the remaining booze back to the hotel- and when I say "hotel" I mean "Super 8." So we take about 6-8 handles of booze back to the hotel, continue to get ripped, and I somewhat successfully hook-up with a girl in the back of a Pontiac convertible (Sunbird?).
A bunch of us decide to go across the street to Waffle House at like 3 in the morning, As we are walking out of the hotel, we ran across another guy we knew heading towards the ice machine. He came along. Figured out later that he had been sent to get some ice by his girlfriend, had walked across the road in his socks, and still had the ice bucket with him. Came back and found another wedding attendee peeing in the hallway.
1st Class wedding all the way.