A young bride shocked her fiancé by showing up to her wedding shoot in Shenzen, China, with grey hair and elaborate makeup that made her look 70 years old. If he would still love her at 70, she reasoned, he shouldn't mind her taking the pictures that way.

Everyone has a friend—a terrifying, beautiful friend—who wields humor the way ranchers wield cattle prods; who jokes, and teases, and Just kidding!s her underlings ("BFFs!") toward the cliff-edge of nervous breakdown; whose sadism is impossible to fight against because it's just a joke, why can't you take a joke? Sometimes, that friend gets married.

A husband is suing his wife of barely a week for stealing $72,000 worth of wedding gifts, according to the New York Post. She allegedly kept the $24,000 two-carat diamond engagement ring, snatched a pile of cash and checks on her way out, and absconded with two gold necklaces, three diamond necklaces, a gold bracelet, and a gold ring.

This morning a tipster forwarded us an email from a future bride laying out some ground rules for her prospective bridesmaids.

Remember Rachelle Friedman, the aerobics instructor whose bridesmaids pushed her into a swimming pool, resulting in paralysis and an inability to marry, lest her fiance's income push her over the limit for Medicaid? After a year of physical therapy and a series of charitable donations, she is finally getting married. The AP reports:

Here's a fascinating Twitter account: @AforeignBride. "Sending tweets out for men who are looking for a foreign bride…" It just features links to profiles of women from all over the world who have signed up for mail-order bride sites like Loveme.com (specializing in the Phillipines) and Elena's Models (specializing in Russia and Eastern Europe).

Today is the first day that gay New Yorkers can apply for a marriage license. Congrats! Too bad the City Clerk's online form for a marriage license still insists on a "bride" and "groom." Um, how is that supposed to work?

Love is a weird thing: You never quite know when and where cupid's arrow might strike. Take, for example, the recent nuptials of Doug Hutchison, a 51-year-old actor best known for a recurring role on Lost, to (allegedly) 16-year-old Courtney Stodden. Stodden is an aspiring everything from Ocean Shores, Washington, an area of the country one reader colorfully describes for us as "a morbid, destitute shithole of a coastal village masquerading as some kind of 'tourist destination.'" (Stodden was Miss Ocean Shores 2009.)

With the royal wedding just hours away and the resultant media coverage as frenzied as a pack of screeching women at a bachelorette party, we're all thinking a lot about weddings at the moment. I decided that I hate weddings, and here are some of the reasons why.

Rachelle Friedman's bridesmaids pushed her into a pool's shallow end, breaking her neck and leaving her paralyzed from the chest down. Now she can't marry her fiance because their combined income would cause her to lose her Medicaid benefits.

On Bridal Boot Camp, VH1's newest reality venture, barely-overweight brides-to-be compete to lose weight and win the wedding of their dreams. Of course this would involve running a military-style training course in wedding dresses.

I was deeply in love with my girlfriend and couldn't see spending my life with anyone else, so it was time to prove it, by listening for hours about which shade of white our wedding tablecloths should be.

Ah, the preparations for a wedding. For these families, the preparations include shirtless men spitting, throwing punches, and hitting each other with mannequins in wedding gowns. Surely every girl hopes that her own special day will be this memorable!

In your thawing Thursday media column: the PR industry blows a chance to look good, a Nick Kristof documentary, a wedding fight, and NBC declares war on the Lo Lifes.

Sexy wrongful dismissal suit time! Conde Nast fired a Brides employee for making like a Brooklyn high school romance language teacher and showing her sports bra to friends, in her office, while talking about her breast augmentation surgery. [Via Romenesko]

Men in England have a new plan for getting laid. They go to India, marry women, tell them they'll bring them back soon (but that they should have lots of sex first) then fly home, abandon them and stop calling.

A tipster writes: "Where the big Cookie logo used to be (now scraped off) at the 8th floor elevator landing here at 4 Times Sq. is now just a post-it that says 'BRIDES'." Majestic close-up photo below!

We hear Wired had its own round of editorial layoffs today. What's going on at Conde Nast? A very bad Monday. In a very bad month. Let's review:

In your overstuffed Wednesday media column: a PR man cheers Bloomberg's latest purchase, Calvin Trillin says crotchety things, the New Yorker hires(!) somebody, Brides loses advertisers, and the Washington Post poaches from HuffPo, for a change.

One of this week's Conde Nast layoff victims has emailed us with a harrowing inside look at the human cost of magazine death. She seems ready to snap. Her email, in full, below: