The real price of true love

Ask any happily married couple about their wedding and they will say the same thing: ‘it is the best day of your life.’ Dear reader, I write today, as this year’s wedding season draws to a close, and on the eve of my own wedding, to expose this lie. Like the Easter Bunny or Gordon Brown’s iPod jam-packed with songs by the Arctic Monkeys, it is a noble myth, a disingenuous redaction, perpetrated to reassure an anxious populace. They don’t mean ‘best day’, these married folk, what they mean is: the wedding process will take an exhausting, shambolic, and ultimately paranoid two months of your life. These long months will be punctuated by hour-long rows about, of all things, table decorations, which will push your formerly supportive relationship to the edge of the abyss. Then, at the end of that, there will be a party. The worst of it is that this whole rigmarole will probably set you back about twenty grand.