Why do weddings have to be so elaborate?

BY LUCY Mangan

DIEHARD romantic that she is, my mother can't actually remember her wedding day. But the handful of monochrome snapshots that have somehow survived her thrice-monthly purges of what some might term "treasured mementoes" but that she calls "clutter" reveal it to be a relatively austere affair, in keeping with the time and place.

The serviceable dress made by the local crippled seamstress in burlap and borrowed tulle. The jaunty pillbox hat carved out of the village onion. The charming bouquet of dandelion and burdock. The groom, barely able to focus on the rictus grin of his beautiful bride through the haze of a horse-killingly bad hangover.

So I will concede that these formative images may be partly responsible for my distrust of the current fashion for weddings trimmed with all manner of frills.

An exercise merely in conspicuous consumption, they seem to me. As my friends trip gaily down the aisle clad in 57 layers of satin, organdie and net and dripping with bridesmaids, pearls and diamonds, it is all I can do not to spring to my feet and cry, "You could have put all that in a savings account, for God's sake!"

But beneath that primarily fiscal concern lie darker suspicions that such ostentatious stylings conceal a dubious substance within. Take Jennifer Wilbanks as an example. She's the woman who decided that 14 bridesmaids, 14 groomsmen and 600 guests were insufficient inducement to get married and, on the eve of the ceremony, lit out for New Mexico instead.

Three days later, a slightly shamefaced Jennifer returned home from her brief sojourn in Albuquerque to the special blend of relief, fury, laughter and curiosity that tends to greet runaway brides who fake their own kidnapping, spark a $100,000 FBI manhunt and international media storm and lose the deposit on the buffet. She may even face charges if the FBI leans more towards the furious side of the equation than the laughter.

The jilted groom, John Mason, however, says he still intends to marry Jennifer. "My commitment before God to her was the day I bought that ring and put it on her finger, and I'm not backing down from that," he said on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes show. Hmm.

Am I alone in thinking that in that resolute announcement we might find a seed of Jennifer's discontent? Perhaps she was not looking for a man of quite such unbending will? Perhaps she was looking for a man with a slightly clearer understanding of quite when the sacrament of marriage begins? Who knows?

It seems to me that what we have here is a fatally inequitable distribution of self-confidence to which partnerships, despite decades of feminism and new-mannishness, are still overly prone. O

n the one hand, you have Jennifer, so discombobulated by the prospect of marriage that she takes a 1,600km trip into the desert and pretends to have been abducted, unable to stand up to fianc‚ or family and say, "Er, sorry guys, but it's suddenly occurred to me that marriage might be uncomfortably similar to a living death and I'd rather give it a miss, OK?" On the other, you have John, who appears unfazed by events and able to dismiss his girlfriend's cross-country flight as a minor crimp in his plans.

Women who want to fill their big day with romantic trappings should be required to complete a questionnaire to ascertain their motivations, starting with, "Will $5,000 worth of flowers a) make the church pretty; b) give me something nicer to look at than my husband; or c) mask the stench of decay from the rotting carcass of my girlish hopes and dreams?" and ending with "Will a 15-metre train and retinue of bridesmaids a) provide the touch of regal pomp and circumstance I have always deserved but which is impractical to maintain in the office; b) provide enough limelight for a cousin from every family faction and avoid sparking any blood feuds; or c) provide the necessary insurmountable obstacle to counter my impending urge to run the other way?"

Only if the answer is a to everything do they get the wedding of their dreams. Everyone else gets a one-way ticket to Albuquerque and a condo in the sunny state of singledom.

(Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004)