An affair with marriage

The bells! The bells! Ordered your tux and chosen the prezzie?

"I do" or "I don't," you can't escape movie weddings. Film-land keeps sending us multiplex invites to those happily-ever-afters.

Paul Weiland's Made of Honour is the latest in a long line of white tulle stretching from Anita Loos's 1913 script The Wedding Gown to Anne Fletcher's 27 Dresses, which netted well over $20 million in its opening weekend, assuring Katherine Heigl's star status.

The trouble with these films is that they stop at the ceremony, as though the ensuing five decades or so don't matter. The bride industry veils rising divorce stats over the frills of a wedding that can set you back £20K.

No wonder more couples opt for something unsanctioned on paper. Wedding movies fail to make wider social connections. It's time for a reality check.

In 2004, Bush initiated a billion-dollar scheme to "train couples for marriage," hoping to placate the religious right. But the figures are against him, especially for a nubile generation which does its sums.

Britain alone has seen the number of adults who decide to marry drop from 68 per cent to 55 per cent in the past 30 years, with a rise from 15 per cent who never married up to 23 per cent. This is a trend, not a blip, as more women test independence. aided by relative rises in pay and family planning.

Not even the neocons or trad Tories want to restrain the free choice of people to live out of the bonds of marriage. After all, they're potential voters whom no-one can afford to alienate.

Bemused policy-makers used to quantifying "traditional" family behaviour in the tax and benefits system face a quandary.

The recent chaos of tax bands and family credits reflects political confusion at the trend towards more anarchic personal relationships. Despite hustings rants, legislators can't afford actual policies which endorse one behaviour over another.

There are class issues underpinning wedding films too with a potent sepsis of aspirational capitalism injected from the US.

Long before Jane Austen's admonition to middle-class men with fortunes, aristos have had it both ways. Not only do they fulfil family obligations with alliances that guarantee primogeniture but they also obey tacit social rules that ignore extracurricular sexual strayings.

A flashy wedding, topped off with the whipped cream of conspicuous consumption, yells loud and clear that Estuary girl and her hubby are just as good as the royals. Any humanist can only agree, but it's not the money on show which makes it so.

Are we starting to equate money with emotion? The McCartney settlement seems to imply a converse that the price of the wedding indicates the depth of the love promised in the ceremony.

What's for sure is that wedding films tend not to feature people in real poverty, who have far less choice about all aspects of their lives. For them, the marriage licence is about as relevant as a fistful of confetti.