This morning Wayne Rooney and his new wife Coleen McLoughlin will be reflecting on their lavish wedding yesterday in the Italian Riviera resort of Portofino. The couple are thought to have blown £5m on a ceremony and reception for 64 guests, who were whisked out there in private jets, lavished with champagne breakfasts every morning and “entertained” by Westlife. Yes, a white wedding is a fairy-tale romance all right… scripted by the Brothers Grimm. You and your groom watch all your friends get drunk on cheap champagne, then make contrived, innuendo-laden speeches about wedding tackle while your relatives dance badly to cover versions of The Clash and wolf down wedding-reception food, which could be either prawn cocktails or tent tarpaulin, as ex-boyfriends throw up on your shoes… Is this really love’s greatest possible manifestation?
The average cost of a wedding in Britain is now just over £20,000. Psychologists reckon wedding planning to be as stressful as moving house and bereavement; a traditional marriage ceremony seems like a very expensive way to have a nervous breakdown in front of everyone you know. There are so many things that can go wrong. Starting with families. There is no such thing as a functional family. But formal weddings sure put the “fun” into dysfunction. Even the Golden Couple have apparently been at loggerheads over the guest list. Wayne’s cousin Natalie has been banned because she flashed her breasts at Coleen’s 21st birthday party last year and threatened to perform a full strip at their wedding. Others who’ve been sent to social Siberia include Natalie’s dad, John, and brother Stephen, who is a gay transvestite.
Just because you adore each other certainly does not mean your families are going to get on. The last white wedding I attended, familial hostilities were akin to those of two Balkan republics. The groom’s family was from Essex. His mother had the sort of face you usually associate with crime- and accident-reconstruction programmes, his father sported the kind of haircut which needs a number under it and his brothers looked underdressed without their ski masks. The bride’s family were from Gloucestershire, with cut-glass elocution and facial expressions by taxidermy. The chinless wonder perched on the church pew to my left told me she was an heiress. The woman on my right gave a hiss loud enough to be heard in the outer Hebrides. “Heiress? More like airhead…”. By the time we made it to the reception, the bride and groom’s families were making the Montagues and Capulets look compatible.
These factions were only momentarily brought together by their mutual antipathy to the friends of the newlyweds. There was a generation gap of Grand Canyon proportions. This became embarrassingly clear during the ritual humiliatingly indiscreet speech by the groom’s soon-to-be-ex-best friend – did he truly think we wanted to know the couple’s nicknames for their genitals? And so it went on.
The virginal white dress, the father “giving away” the bride and other such antiquated traditions remind us that marriage is basically an institution invented to protect the property rights of patriarchs over land and cattle. (And you thought that human sacrifice was a horror of the past.) Still, an ideal marriage represents solidarity within and equality without. The wedding ceremony, at its best, can be a public declaration of a private passion, the wedding kiss signifying the union of souls, exchanging the breath of life.
But you wouldn’t be blamed for remaining in unwedded bliss; just think of the money you would save. Wayne and Coleen have struck a £2.5m deal with a glossy magazine for the world rights to their wedding. But for those of us who aren’t football royalty, it’s a cash haemorrhage. The wedding industry, from the florists and chauffeurs to the caterers and horse-drawn carriages, is adept at convincing nervous couples that their big day requires them to spend big too. The average cost of a wedding has been rising by eight per cent a year since 2003. (With the credit crunch hitting hip pockets, couples may soon find it more cost-effective to marry in the real estate office: “To have and to sharehold. To honour and repay…”)
A cheaper option is to knot your nuptials in a registry office, with joss sticks and Mozart, in a ceremony for which you’ve written your own vows about not hindering each other on your personal journeys. The most riotous, joyful events I’ve ever attended have been gay commitment ceremonies with male bridesmaids and best women, and an understanding that it’s not considered a serious breach of etiquette to snog, and possibly have sex with, the celebrant. (“His and His” or “Her and Her” hand towels make a perfect pressie.)
Alternatively, you could say “I do” while parachuting a few thousand feet above or scuba-diving a couple of leagues below. Or just take the money your parents intended to spend on the reception and elope – you can always throw a more casual party at a later date. At least you then avoid starting your honeymoon with recriminations about cheapskate relatives and tasteless speeches; a case of the mourning after the knot before.
When I married, 18 years ago, it was in a registry office, because our local vicar refused to perform the ceremony in his church, as I was a divorcee. We finally found a chaplain happy to unite us if we could secure a licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury, only for his office to refuse permission. The irony that the Church of England was founded by Henry VIII to cater to his marital indelicacies seemed completely lost on that sanctimonious, pinstripe-underpanted brigade. Now that marriage rates in the West are lower than Paris Hilton’s bikini line, perhaps the Church of England will show a more lenient attitude to its diminishing flock. (Surely one previous marriage with no children only made me a beige, not a black, sheep.)
While couples seem happy to chuck more and more cash at their weddings, fewer and fewer seem to be tying the knot. The reasons are unclear. Brides may be desperate for the perfect wedding day, but it’s their grooms whom marriage treats better. Married men live longer than single men, suffer less heart disease and mental illness; whereas single women live longer than married women and suffer less heart disease and mental problems. I suspect that it’s women who are developing PMT (pre-monogamy tension). Perhaps women are wising up to the fact that being a wife erodes your mental health, reduces your leisure, dries up your libido and increases the odds that you will be assaulted or murdered in your own home. In one recent marriage survey by the Guardian, 42 per cent of women said they often thought about running away with someone else, half wished they’d never married and a third found sex boring. Modern women are seeing wedlock as little more than a padlock.
If the institution of marriage is not to be jilted at the altar, we need to love more realistically. Let’s start by revamping wedding vows. It’s not sickness, infidelity or lack of money that breaks up marriages; it’s cellulite, snoring, not helping around the house or interrupting each other’s anecdotes. Vicars should say, “In irritating, snorty laughing noises and in thickening thighs, I now pronounce you man and wife… till extreme irritation do you part.”
Marriage is worth saving because it does have its good points. At its very least, it is an immunisation against loneliness. And what a relief not to have to go naked in front of a stranger ever again. Not to have a bikini wax every five seconds. Or lie on your side to make your breasts look bigger. The very thought of having a husband is relaxing. Like looking at tropical fish. A spouse is the person who knows all about you – and still likes you anyway.
As Britain has the highest divorce rate in Europe (more than half of all marriages end in divorce), it’s tempting to lower our expectations and do away with vows altogether. But if the thought of a wedding is irresistible, the hard work begins the next day, as you try to count the broken glasses and dismantle the marquee. So here’s the most important marital survival tip for newlyweds: never put each other on a pedestal. Not only is it hard to make love on a pedestal, but you end up lonely, exposed and covered in bird shit.
Kathy Lette for The New Review (The Independent on Sunday, 15 June 2008)
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