The Truth About Weddings

2011 will surely go down as the year of the wedding. Kate Moss spent the equivalent of Greek debt on her nuptial version of Glastonbury. Lily Allen announces she is pregnant at hers (fast work). Prince Albert managed to persuade Charlene Wittenstock that a title and a tiara could make up for a colourful private life (well if she will marry a man named after a genital piecing what does she expect?) at his. Oh and some helicopter pilot married a...girl.

As with so much in life, I blame the internet. Wedding blogs are like crack for a certain kind of girl.

After all this wedding fever, surely nuptial fatigue is bound to set in sooner or later? But it seems our fascination with fascinators is going nowhere. Anyone would think that this is the land of happy-ever-afters.

So thank God for potential MIL from hell, Carolyn Bourne, who sent her son’s future bride a damming email on the finer points of etiquette, for showing what weddings are really all about. Judgement, sniping, competitive and an overwhelming interest in ritualised arcana. It is what this country does best after all.

Yes, weddings bring out the worst in people. And I say this as someone who has firmly jumped on the bandwagon and decided to plight my troth this summer.

Caroyln Bourne's scathing emailTake bridesmaids for instance. Now there is a political tangle even David Cameron would shy away from. Scratch that, this is perfect Dave material – minds are changed as pressure from old school chums is relentlessly exerted with all the subtlety of the Birdie Song.

Then there are the parents. The mum who bursts into tears for no discernible reason. The dad who cracks jokes about how much the whole thing is costing to hide the ill-concealed panic in his eyes about how much the whole thing is costing. This is even worse if you are paying for the whole thing yourself.

Which takes us to our resident sage Carolyn’s ideas on wedding etiquette. She charmingly tells her daughter-in-law to be “I understand your parents are unable to contribute very much towards the cost of your wedding...if this is the case, it would be most ladylike and gracious to lower your sights and have a modest wedding as befits both your incomes...No one gets married in a castle unless they own it.”

This to me encapsulates the whole dilemma of weddings. They have to be special, but also, so you. Well I can tell you there are many elements of me that are not special at all. If I was going to be as me as possible on my wedding day I would probably turn up in a pair of tracksuit bottoms, hide in a corner and see how many packets of hobnobs I could eat before I was sick. It certainly wouldn’t involve underwear with more specialised functions than an IBM chess computer and standing up in front of people to declare my undying love. Weddings have to be weird and puzzling and difficult, or how would you know it was the happiest day of your life?

On the other hand, I can see that getting married in a castle really is quite deeply inauthentic. Weddings seem to have been largely shaped by BBC period dramas, and if there isn’t going to be a woodland park with folly or, at the very least, an ornamental trout pond in the near vicinity, then you might as well just carry on living in sin.

As with so much in life, I blame the internet. Wedding blogs are like crack for a certain kind of girl. Even a woman who hasn’t hankered after yards of lace hand tatted by blind Belgian nuns (and they weren’t blind when they started) can fall heavily for their vintage, twee charms.

The trouble is, you start to feel a bit anxious you won’t be able to pull off the ‘featured in a wedding magazine’ aesthetic. God forbid you go so far as to be stressed, tired or get all red faced because you are so pissed, on this perfect day.

What makes me sad about this is the good old city-centre wedding has taken a bit of a bashing. If you look at your parents’ wedding photos, they very possibly did not feel the need to get married in a castle, or circus tent, or a London bus, or a hayloft. There may have been a colour theme (if it was the seventies, then brown and orange seem a good bet) but it wasn’t relentlessly echoed in the bridesmaid’s dresses, the flowers, the chair bows, the table jewels, the bunting, and the bride’s knickers. Maybe they got married, had a few drinks, possibly if they were pushing the boat out, the nans had a dance off (I’ll show that Vera how to really foxtrot!’). But they woke up with heads only reasonably sore and pockets only reasonably lighter. The need to turn a happy occasion into a fantasy for others’ consumption just wasn’t there.

So in the end this is what I had to do. I swore off the wedding crack, went colder than a not properly defrosted turkey canapé.  I decided to turn the whole thing around in a couple of months. Basically, I could choose to be obsessed by it for a year or for two months. I have things to do with my brain other than debate the various merits of peonies and lily of the valley. But then again, this stuff is meant to be fun. If I could give myself whole-heartedly to it for a short time, without feeling guilty, then I might be able to actually enjoy the process.

And in case you were wondering, my future MIL is an absolute angel who doesn’t even know my email address.