Wedding fever is an illness for sure

Bride without a groom

by

Amy Lynch

3 stars.

Netgalley review

I really don’t get this obsession with the perfect wedding day that small girls plan from childhood. Is it a US phenomenon? Does it happen in the UK? It certainly didn’t in my childhood.

In fact I didn’t plan marriage at all – until I went to university and then decided that the late 30s was best but definitely not until then. Sure enough I was just 22 when I actually married!

But, I insisted on no meringue dress. No big wedding hair – I put my own hair into 6 big rollers to create ringlets. No coronet and no veil – just a big floppy hat and cream and lilac Victorian style dress.

I don’t remember ever reading a Bride magazine and certainly I didn’t lust after an engagement ring. So this whole topic wasn’t of any interest to me.

That said, you begin to feel very sorry for the heroine with her obsession that was fed by TV and celebrity culture fetish. And the competition that arises to have the ‘best’ wedding ever. And to marry when your friends marry. And to have a designer wedding dress eg by Vera Wang. And to compete on cakes and rings and then there are those wedding fairs.

The cost of a wedding in the UK is now running at around £21,000 and many couples are living together and having children whilst waiting to save up for this and the big blow-out honeymoon (We had a weekend in Hastings as I was due to have an operation on the Monday and couldn’t fly, so Paris was cancelled).

So the book shows well just how sad it is to get sucked into these ways of thinking. And that even the potential grooms understand that it is no use trying to stop these runaway wedding plans once a female has them in her head.