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The Times – Weddings: fashion’s control-freak evil sister<br/> The bridal industry is a bloated £5bn business. No wonder fewer people are choosing to get married, by Janice Turner

The key word of the modern wedding is unique. It is the bride’s right, even her duty, to create a day that is a manifestation of every element of her essential self. As the editor’s letter in You & Your Wedding proclaims: “Use your personalities to inspire your transport… and cake – so everyone nods and smiles and says: ‘That’s just so you!’” But pity the bride and groom raking through their psyches. Are we vintage Roller or Asian-style cab people? Does an artful stack of cupcakes bespeak “us” more than a three-tier chocolate sacher torte with violet-flavoured ganache?

Not that the groom has much to do with it. Last year an American woman called Chidi Ogbuta served guests a lifesized butterscotch-flavour effigy of herself. She claimed the bakery didn’t have enough time – or butterscotch – to construct her future husband too, but who believes her, since weddings are less than ever a union of souls and more a festival of female narcissism.

Yeah, yeah!

The wedding industry is the control-freak bitch sister of fashion. While fashion’s purpose is to convince us that only if we constantly reinvent ourselves through new clothing do we avoid being stale, unloveable and old, the wedding industry promotes the belief that the perfection of this one day is instrumental to the happiness of all that follows. The wedding industry plays to women’s picky, list-making, over-thinking, matchy-matchy side, creating imaginary worries that require expensive solutions. Decorate the soles of your shoes, trills Brides magazine, so they won’t look too plain when you kneel at the altar.

No wonder the proportion of people marrying is at a 144-year low. Or that the average engagement is 17 months, since if you want a June slot at a premier stately home you can forget it until 2010. Maybe single women should stick down a deposit now, then work on the easier task of acquiring a groom.

Yeah, yeah! And if you want to get married in six months, everyone looks at you like you’re crazy, starts to assume you’re pregnant, then thinks a moment, realizes that can’t be it either, then decides you’re just being difficult.

Peter and I are jetting off (at ridiculous cost at this time in our lives, btw, but oh well, it’s been a rough year for the family) to Edmonton next weekend for my cousin’s wedding. It’s going to be a low-key, intimate, back-yard thing (the fact that she is, actually, enceinte, probably actually has nothing to do with it, just the speed at which it is being done). One hears she’s wearing a bathrobe. One might extrapolate all sorts of things from that (given the circumstances), but actually her mother got married in a swimsuit cover-up (ah, the 70s, when “cover-ups” still covered-up sufficiently enough that they could double as an inexpensive, prettily billowy wedding dress).

Ordinarily I might be in danger of feeling like this is making my own wedding look like an over-blown Posh ‘n Becks style silk organza ball of ridiculousness, but actually everything I’m spending any money on is stuff that I don’t want to have to do myself. I don’t want to worry about baking a cake, so I have no problem paying someone else to do it for me. The reception venue was chosen because I didn’t feel like having to worry about decorations, food, booze, parking, and cleaning up, and the place even comes with an events coordinator. I’m wearing a big poofy Vera Wang because damnit I wanna wear a nice dress (and it was such a deal!). I So basically it’s just a huge elaborate dinner party with me in an unusually nice outfit. There will be no brides maids, no dancing, no “signature cocktails” (champagne is my “signature cocktail”. It is a wedding. You drink champagne. You don’t try to press a cranberry razztini into your grandmother’s hand and go get sloshed with your high school friends and then end up ill the next day (because nothing goes together like a hangover and a 12-hour flight)), and no limo (yet, this aspect of personalization is making it difficult for me to figure out how to get around without making Peter be the designated driver at his own wedding). For all the talk of “personalizing” your big day, if you actually do try to personalize it, everyone reacts like you’re just being iconoclastic for the hell of it.

The wedding industry this month declared that the average celebration now costs more than £20K. Figures like these are self-fulfilling, designed to make a couple budgeting only £15K – which might still secure a deposit on a house – feel shoddy. (Just as the baby industry periodically declares that the average newborn costs a preposterous sum in its first year, thus stimulating the purchase of £500 prams.)

One more: Yeah, yeah!