Why a lavish marriage ceremony in an otherwise pragmatic age, wonders Monica Dux.

WHEN I WAS AN angry young uni student, I disgraced myself on my brother's wedding video. Every time the camera focused on me, instead of giving a rapturous bridesmaid smile, I surrendered to an irresistible urge to pull a face and go googly eyed, all to the uplifting soundtrack of  Endless Love.

It was a pathetic little protest, brought on by accumulated frustration at a full year of wedding preparations, shower teas, dress fittings and a water-sport-themed hen's weekend. I've since settled down, found true love, and become more sympathetic to people's desire to formalise their union. But the events that are meant to launch those unions - weddings - still fill me with a desire to go googly eyed.

We wedding sceptics are confronted with an increasingly strange world. We live in an era in which divorce is common, heterosexual de facto relationships are legally recognised, and it's the people who refuse to have extra-marital sex that are seen as radical and suspicious, not those of us who do. Yet in recent years, weddings have on average become bigger. The amount of money people spend on their nuptials, and the time and preparation they put into them, has ballooned, even as the chances of the marriage lasting has plummeted.

In 1959, long-standing US bridal magazine Bride recommended putting aside two months to plan a wedding. By the 1990s, the magazine was suggesting 12 months. While the wedding industry recently reported a small recession-related dip, it's a downturn coming off the back of a long boom.

In the past few decades other milestone-marking social rituals such as baptisms and 21st birthdays have declined in importance. Funerals retain their significance, but have tended towards less formality and theatre, not more. But weddings have bucked the trend.

The arguments against weddings are easily made. Elevated expectations of that "one special day" also bring devastating disappointment. Bridal magazines regularly warn against post-wedding blues. The "how to have a wedding" guides that cram bookshop shelves are as much about "surviving" and "coping" as they are about the importance of choosing the right corsage. The journey of planning and enacting a wedding is jam-packed with jeopardy, which is, perhaps, why they make such fine fodder for romantic comedies, television sitcoms and soap operas. Indeed, a convention in soaps is that the characters have numerous weddings, which are usually a dramatic signal that something ominous is about to occur. Sound familiar?

Consider the outlandish behaviour that regularly accompanies weddings: sane and sober people degrading themselves on buck's and hen's nights, control-freak brides driving everyone crazy with unreasonable demands, "hilarious" drunken speeches that manage to end lifelong friendships. The wedding is an event which sanctions bizarre behaviour in the same way that large sporting events unleash violent, primal urges. Then there is the array of peculiar and expensive paraphernalia. A dress that costs thousands, yet will never be worn again; bridesmaid outfits designed to humiliate the wearer; registry lists that would bankrupt a small central American nation (if it was invited).

Most weddings are supreme acts of kitsch, right up there with Christmas and Mardi Gras. But of course they're not all of the frou-frou-pumpkincoach-beef-or-chicken-dinner variety. There is also the "non-traditional" wedding, sometimes known as the "we're not really having a wedding" type wedding. These are much favoured by the bohemian set who 20 years ago were turning their nose up at marriage and are still desperate to distance themselves from anything that looks like Beck and Posh's do. Melbourne celebrant and RRR radio identity Jon von Goes oversees a lot of these events. "Don't call them alternative," he insists, "they're just modern."

Yet all too often a desire to break down the boring, inappropriate old rituals simply results in the invention of boring, inappropriate new ones. Most of us aren't poets, and self-penned vows offer powerful testimony why this should remain the case. Another decidedly "modern" development is the wedding performance. One friend of mine related her horror as a tonally challenged bride surprised her guests with a performance of the Bangles' Eternal Flame. Another spoke of an ordinarily sober couple - an obstetrician and a nurse - who, without any warning, performed a rockabilly version of The Cure's Love Cats on their wedding day.

Even with an op-shop wedding dress, a Kahlil Gibran reading, and finger-food catering, the difference between the modern and the traditional wedding is usually quite superficial. The basic structure follows the same path: the preparation, the vows and the reception. Unless you get married at a registry office, or elope, you can't escape these three basic elements, and in attempting to reinvent them most people crash into the limits of their own imaginations. Ariel Levy, an American journalist who coined the term "raunch culture", was confronted by this when she organised her own gay wedding. "The thing is ... you have to serve something, and you can't very well go naked. You can call it a party about love all you want, but you still have to make all the same decisions that every other bride has to make, and you have to make them very carefully unless you want everyone you know to schlep to some crummy party in the middle of nowhere."

So why do the likes of Levy persist? Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman cursed a generation of young romantics when he opined that we live in a time of "liquid love" in which relationships are fleeting and disposable. And many do attempt to explain (or defend) their weddings as a rebellion against this trend. In Altared, a collection of wedding stories from North American writers, Gina Zucker explains that, unlike her parents, today's young generation is drawn to tradition. "A wedding ritual with trimmings underscored my hope for permanence," she writes. "It was a way to trumpet the beginning of something strong and stable." What better way to give the finger to the nay-sayers and pessimists than by throwing a huge party at great emotional and financial expense.

While we might tell ourselves that weddings are about two people celebrating their enduring love, an alien from outer space could be forgiven for thinking that they are about just one person: the bride. Brides are encouraged to imagine themselves as the luminous epicentre of the wedding universe. Our culture is finely tuned to a femininity that celebrates women wanting to be princesses, and the wedding is a unique moment in a woman's adult life when she is encouraged to enact this fantasy. The bride can transport herself (and her entourage) into a fairy tale in which she is the heroine and the groom the noble prince.

But acting out the princess fantasy is intensely infantilising. Many young boys have dreamt of flying a rocket ship into space but imagine if a grown man insisted on living out this dream for one special day, expecting his family and friends to rally around and support him. They'd be more likely to have him committed than to oblige by dressing as Martians and eating space cakes as they applaud his simulated lift-off. Similarly, brides who get carried away with their "dream" do run the risk of attracting ridicule. Siri Agrell's book Bad Bridesmaid is as much a diatribe against the bride, as it is a defence of their attendants. The hit television show Bridezilla trades on our willingness to laugh at the hysterical bride, sent mad in the preparation of her nuptials. This is a quintessential feminine hysteria - a madness brought about by the frantic pursuit of being a princess.

The underside of the happily-ever-after-princess dream is an equally pervasive cultural message that not finding a partner is the supreme failure of womanhood. The derogatory image of the "spinster" has enjoyed a pop culture makeover in recent years ala Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw, but it is still the stuff of feminine nightmares. Perhaps it is the desire to publicise their "success" in finding a partner that provides the biggest motivation for many brides. What better way to signal to the world that you've avoided the catastrophe of singledom than by throwing a big, public wedding?

But if you've ever attended a bridal show, the sort that fills an entire exhibition centre, then you might be persuaded that the contemporary wedding juggernaut is fuelled, if not created, by a commercial imperative, an industry that sells rather than merely caters for the dream. Most weddings are consumer binges, with a huge amount of money spent on an event that lasts less than half a day. Our "affluenzic" society encourages the betrothed to believe that spending money will act as an insurance policy, ensuring that their wedding is the perfect day that they dreamt about.

Recently, a woman was reported to have sued her dressmaker after the bridal gown came unstitched during her vows. Part of the damages claim included the accusation that this had ruined not just her wedding, but also her marriage. In any other context the suggestion that the disintegration of a dress had caused a marriage to fail would seem ludicrous. But if you consider the investment that goes into the minutiae of weddings, with the accompanying expectation of perfection, you can almost sympathise with this litigious bride's point.

In Cinderella Dreams: the allure of the lavish wedding, Professors Cele Otnes and Elizabeth Pleck argue that weddings have evolved into "a highly unique consumer rite". From its relatively humble beginnings "the wedding has been elevated to the special status of luxury good". The recent growth in the planning and expenditure on weddings has been driven by a convergence of consumerism and the contemporary cult of romance, itself fuelled by consumer culture.

For those who would protest that capitalism doesn't work in a vacuum and that the wedding industry is merely catering to a pre-existing tradition, albeit one pumped up on steroids, it's worth remembering that a lot of these "traditions" are relatively new. In Altared, Professor Catherine Ingrassia discusses the history of weddings and points out that many of the "traditional" accoutrements (veil, tiered cake, white dress, diamond engagement ring) are actually quite recent.

However, like so many commentators, Ingrassia ultimately defends weddings, concluding that "the familiarity of the white dress and the cake help us - as individuals and as a culture - find comfort in rituals". Otnes and Pleck are also finally optimistic, insisting that in addition to consumer culture, weddings are about embracing a "living happily ever after" fairy tale: "In short, people want lavish weddings because they want to experience magic in their lives".

If this is the case, then perhaps weddings are to marriage what Santa Claus is to Christmas. The Santa we recognise today is, like the contemporary wedding, a fantastic and relatively recent marketing device, superimposed onto an ancient rite. From time to time there are calls to strip away the detritus that has gathered around the Christmas ritual. But even if it was possible to do that, what would we be left with? A religious festival that for most of our secular society would be entirely irrelevant. For those of us who lack Christian faith, Christmas really is nothing more or less than the bundle of detritus. But it's no less socially valuable (call it magical, if you like) for that.

Perhaps weddings are the same. Strip away the rigmarole and the childish nonsense and there would be nothing left. But in a strange kind of way, the nonsense has come to mean something. Personally, when it comes to my own special day, I'd prefer to go for something more informal. For those who get an invitation to my space rocket launch, please bring your own ray-gun.

Monica Dux is a guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

http://www.mwf.com.au.

The Age is a sponsor of the festival.

Dux's book The Great Feminist Denial, with Zora Simic, will be published by Melbourne University Press in September.