The problem with online dating is that it doesn’t really make for a great story. I mean, how boring is it to say that you met your husband on Hinge? Yawn. Every once and a while you meet someone who has a really good story about how they met their partner, like mom of four Desiree White, who recently went viral on TikTok after revealing her husband was the best man at her wedding. Now that is a Bridgerton-level scandal right there.
The whole story came tumbling out in a video from March 15.
And boy, was it a doozy.
“At my first wedding to my EX. My husband NOW was the best man,” 32-year-old Desiree wrote in the video’s text overlay. “During his best man speech he professed his love for me in front of everyone at my reception.
“We still make fun of him for it,” she wrote in the caption. The song “Crazy” by Patsy Cline plays along with the footage, making it clear that his grand gesture was the definition of going just a little too big when making the "grand gesture."
Speaking with the New York Post, Desiree recalled how her now-husband Bryant blew away her 200 guests with his impromptu speech.
“He said, ‘I remember the first moment I saw Desiree, I loved her. I fell in love with her. I knew she had to be mine. I thought she was the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen in my life,’” Desiree told the news outlet.
“He said, ‘She’s the best person I’ve ever met. I’ve never met anyone like her. Then I found out she already had a boyfriend and I thought I needed to find out a way to get her, but then I met [White’s now ex-husband] and we became friends,’” she recalled.
Bryant ended his speech with “Love you both — congratulations.”
To say it was awkward was an understatement. The mom said her ears “turned red” and everyone in the room was a little unsure of what they’d just heard.
“Everyone was kind of laughing — and then it got quiet,” she said.
On TikTok, White shared that Bryant was, well, “drunk” when he stood up to make his speech — which makes this story just a little bit more understandable.
Desiree told the Post that she was straight up “confused” by Bryant’s confession.
The two had been platonic friends for years — or so she thought — so for her the confession came out of nowhere.
“Bryant and I met each other in class at high school,” she recalled. “I had a boyfriend at the time and, because of that, I really wasn’t going to talk to other people.”
The mom even recalled showing Bryant a photo of her then-boyfriend while they were in high school. Bryant recognized him as someone he shared a lunch period with, and all three of them became friends.
“Because they were guys, they did a lot together. They did everything together,” Desiree said.
Throughout high school, Desiree had no idea that Bryant was interested. She even set him up on “so many” dates.
“I’ve been on double dates with him and I always tell people I wouldn’t have ever dated the person he was then,” she explained to the Post. “He had a lot of growing up to do. I didn’t really look at him in that way.”
But the two “always just like clicked,” the mom said on TikTok. “There was always this thing about him that was easy for me to connect to.”
Meanwhile, Desiree’s ex had his own secrets.
On TikTok Desiree shared that Bryant and her ex-husband, who has not been named, were both on the party scene and — “Bryant was the one throwing the parties. My ex was the one going to his parties. He was cheating. I had no idea,” she recalled. “I thought everything was peachy really.”
At her wedding, Desiree still had no idea that her ex was cheating.
Bryant quickly realized that Desiree was never going to be his.
“When I got married — in his words — it was like a click because he said that he knew that nothing would ever happen between us, so I guess for him it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is it.' That’s his side of the story,” the mom said on TikTok.
Later that night, Bryant even double-downed on the proclamation while he and the bride shared a dance.
“Why didn’t you ever give me a chance?” Desiree recalled him asking. “I would have always taken care of you.”
Desiree chalked up the whole thing to Bryant being “drunk” and “lonely” — but little did she know that her “friend” was being serious.
Very quickly into her first marriage, Desiree started noticing “red flags,” she said in a another TikTok video.
“One that I could not ignore was when I showed his picture to a girl at work she was like, ‘Oh I know him. My friend dated him,’” she recalled.
But that seemed pretty impossible seeing as how Desiree had been dating him since high school.
“She gave me a lot of information about how her friend has been dating my ex-husband […] and it just opened a whole door of information I needed to find out and do a lot of digging,” she recalled. “Could not stick around for that. A lot of stuff came to the surface.”
The mom decided to divorce her husband, which was “really rough” on her — ”I was really depressed. I was not in a good way mentally,” she recalled.
But guess who was there for her?
“He’d ask me to eat with him or hang out and watch a show,” she said, speaking of Bryant to the Post. “He was trying to be there for me.”
And then one day they kissed.
“It was out of nowhere. When he kissed me, I didn’t stop it, then I kissed him back,” she added. “I was shocked that it was a good kiss. It felt good and natural.”
The two quickly started dating, and within a year she was pregnant with their son Sawyer, now 9.
They married in 2012 and have added three more sons to their brood.
“[Bryant] said, ‘I always wanted to marry you and this isn’t because of the baby, but let’s start this family right,’” she recalled. “We were always friends but when we were together [romantically]. It was like nothing was hard to do anymore knowing we had each other.”
Despite the drama, their story had a happy ending.
“We love being parents. Twenty-year-old Desiree wouldn’t think she could be a mom of four kids,” Desiree told the Post. “She couldn’t imagine this is what my life would be like now.”
