Thank you wedding industry for sapping the joy out of getting married

It’s breaking my heart, and my bank balance. The wedding of my dreams is out of reach. When my boyfriend proposed this summer, I knew exactly how I wanted us to pledge our troth: a trip to the registry office, and then a drink in the pub with all of our favourite people. There would be dancing. There would be chips. How hard could it be?
Well, so far it’s cost me £500 – not a large sum, post-Clooney and Alamuddin, but a month’s rent all the same – and I have yet to procure any food, booze, rings, clothes, entertainment or celebrants. I just put down a deposit on a fairly modest venue, because the going-to-the-pub plan turned out, in practice, to be as easy as procuring diamond confetti, or making and serving 9,000 lobster vol-au-vents, or attempting to ride down the aisle on a giant mongoose. If we want to have everyone we love in the same room, toasting us and dancing to Toto’s Africa, we either wait for the pub that will accommodate us all to be built, or we have a “Big Wedding”.
So I was a little irritated to hear that the more you spend on your marriage, the more likely it is that divorce is around the corner. According to a study by economics professors at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, women whose weddings cost more than $20,000 (£12,444) are 3.5 times more likely to divorce than those who spend between $5,000 and $10,000 (£3,111-£6,222).
Pre-engagement, I would have responded to this with a smug “duh!”. No party should cost more than £70 – enough for five bottles of white wine, some Pringles and a prawn ring. But as soon as you start feeling your obligations as a host – it’s the sort of party people will come a long way for, and you want to make sure they have something to eat, somewhere to drink and somewhere warm and dry to sit – you enter the grim, pinched world of people who look you up and down and say that if you’d like them to cover up the electrical wiring protruding from the wall it will be another £4,000.
Planners fall over themselves to tell you that your “special day” must be an expression of your personalities and relationship, but it’s best if you express yourself with an entree of boiled chicken wrapped in cold, greasy bacon at £90 a head. People who look forward to their own engagement instigate dreamy discussions about flowers and frocks; meanwhile, people who are recently married or about to be share gloomy stories about how they thought it would be easier to buy in their own booze until the venue rang up three days before the wedding to announce they were introducing a new and punishing fee for corkage.
Rebecca Mead, author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding pointed the finger at our princess complexes. Plenty of women hear the message that we are our weddings – when the world conspires to make us feel fat, frumpy and inadequate, we can have 24 hours of pretending, while wearing a tiara, that we’re special. But it’s in the interest of the salon owner, the dress designer and the make-up artist to tell us we’re “worth” their fees. When you’re organising a party for more than 100 people and you’re too tired to say no, it can feel like it’s easier to just keep handing your credit card over.

Ultimately, I’m not too worried about what my wedding will cost. I suspect the trick is to think of it as the most complicated party you will ever throw, and not the best day of your life. I want my wedding to be the first day of a union, not like the last days of Versailles. As long as we can make sure everyone has a lovely time without going into debt, that’s all I can really hope for. But if you know of anywhere that specialises in mongoose hire, please do get in touch.