My big day? Yeah, right ...

When Emma Wallis told her family she was getting married, she found herself overwhelmed by everyone else's ideas of what kind of wedding it should beIn our age of personal choice and freedom, where brides run riot through popular culture, we are supposed to believe that marriage is all about the bride, and er, ahem, the groom. "It's your day!" people trill. Already marrieds go misty-eyed recalling their own special day and squeeze your hand saying, "It will be the best day of your life." Wedding magazines, blogs, books and films abound telling the bride how to make her day extra specially special.What they don't tell you is that "your day" has to fit within the norms of family convention and tradition and that ? unless you want what everyone else wants ? it's not really your day at all.I didn't grow up dreaming about how my wedding would be and I don't have a box tucked away with magazine cuttings of bridal dresses, table settings and flower arrangements, but sure enough my inner bridezilla surfaced as soon as marriage was on the cards ? just not in the way everyone expected.I'll admit (as I'm constantly being reminded by my family, who find my attitude upsetting and incomprehensible) that we did at first entertain the normal idea of a massive party with all the trimmings. But as soon as I started to talk about logistics, the feeling of social obligation and being forced to adhere to convention overwhelmed me, and I started thinking what marriage is really all about.For me, it's not the "symbolic joining of two families" as it is for my dad; marriage is about love, commitment and the two of us. A cool European capital, food, wine and a lot of time spent in bed would be a perfect celebration, in my opinion.I simply wanted a day alone to celebrate our commitment. Minimal planning and the two of us, so that it could be as spontaneous as we wanted. I didn't want anyone else there because I didn't want other people's expectations weighing on me."Why don't you just have a mini-break then?" says my brother. "There's no need to get married to do that."But I love my husband-to-be and want to make that commitment to him ? just not in the way most people do, with a big wedding. Why can't our love be enshrined in the marriage we want, instead of the one everyone thinks we want? "But you've got the rest of your lives to be together," said my brother. "Why on earth do you want to spend your wedding day on your own?""Because it's meant to be about us, not everyone else.""So you want it to be individual and the masses would ruin it all.""Exactly. It's all about social obligation and nothing to do with actually building our relationship."But we had already made the first mistake. Announcing our intention to marry meant we'd forfeited the right to run off and be on our own. My parents reacted strongly and told me in no uncertain terms: "A wedding is not a wedding without the rest of the family involved." Given that they're paying for it, I guess they've got a point."I think this is a very selfish attitude," my dad says."The definition of marriage is a public declaration," one friend gently reminds me.It seems most people agree.Then my husband-to-be chips in: "I want to declare my love and commitment to you in front of the people we care about. It's important to have our families there."When he says that I feel all melty and it's harder to keep pushing my point, when my other half has been turned by the weight of family expectation. So the wedding train cranks in to action. We find a venue, think about homemade food, home-grown flowers and how to keep it individual and us. The only thing I'm really looking forward to is the BYO picnic the following day, with a football match.I've still got no dress. I don't want to make a big deal of it, so I don't want to wear white, but as everyone else will be dressed up I can't really arrive in pyjamas.On top of that, organising 35 people from five countries is just not low-key and easy. My fiance realises this too, as he's called on to mediate in various family rows. I feel like the whole show is threatening to dilute any real emotion. I'm being forced to be happy and grateful. You can't be spontaneous with 35 guests to look after and a timetable to keep to."Welcome to married life," say my fiance and my mum. "It's all about compromise."Money is perhaps the key here. If we didn't think it was ridiculous (and impossible) to blow thousands on one short day, then perhaps we wouldn't have thought so hard about how we felt our union should best be celebrated. It annoys me that the wedding industry seems to suggest that your love is not good enough unless you throw a lot of money at it. They triple the price as soon as you mention the "W" word. And no one else seems to notice that spending most of your day talking to guests, and months organising the event, means you don't have much time to spend on the person you're marrying. But now that the invitations are out, and everything is booked, it's too late to stop ? the show must go on. I also don't understand half the wedding traditions. Fathers escorting daughters up the aisle goes against every feminist principle I've ever been taught ? we're nobody's chattels today; the best man apparently goes back to a time when "wedding snatching" was popular and the bride was married against her will. Bridesmaids, too, were meant to confuse evil spirits and thugs wanting to steal the bride and her dowry. Who needs that today? The big dress? Most of us are no longer virgins or princesses, so why do we insist on spending thousands on a dress we'll probably never wear again?It all seems an unnecessary performance, just another excuse for showing off, which to me is not what marriage is about. Including people is about including their expectations and their requirements, too. What I see as a relaxed picnic for me is, for my mum, the "wedding breakfast" ? complete with cold cuts and a buffet. A few picnic rugs in the garden has turned into a militarised operation with dark green gazebos and "with multiple chairs and tables for us oldies" says Mum.Trying to do low-key, stress-free, alongside homemade is impossible. I naively thought our plan would avoid a lot of the performance element, making it more personal, but actually it has just created yet another source of friction between me and Mum.Whenever I feel it's getting too "wedding-y", I feel allergic and start to itch. The family wonders why I'm being deliberately miserable about "this wedding thing" as I have taken to calling it, especially given my romantic nature and normal attachment to all things sentimental.The word marriage with all its conventions has brought out my inner punk, my anarchist side, the teenager within, and makes me want to play Billy Idol's White Wedding very loudly as I walk down the non-aisle dressed in black.And here's the rub: perhaps my allergy is more about how much I want to state my independence and non-conformism. My rebellious intentions are perhaps my last shouty protest before accepting that I'm becoming my mother.But all this fuss (and my own strops) could have been avoided if everyone just accepted that not all brides want a big fat family wedding.The build-up to any wedding, people tell you, is stressful. "This is what marriage is like ? it's good preparation because if you can survive this, you can survive the marriage," they say.But, in my impossibly idealised 37-year-old-going-on-teenage way, I still think that, if you didn't try to fulfil everyone's idea of what a wedding should be, that if you were allowed to mark it in your own way, then it wouldn't need to be so stressful."Well, you were the one who enlarged the wedding list, Emma," says Mum. "We're all just trying to go along with your plans."This, sadly, is true because once I realised that there was no chance of the two of us running off, I wanted at least a few friends along, and, as plans progress, the idea of a party is starting to grow on me too. Just don't tell me that it's "my day" and that I can do what I want or I might have to swing my bouquet at you.What I've realised is that just as in days of yore, weddings are still all about family and social obligation, and the two supposed stars of the show seem to have been swallowed up in a big white meringue of other people's expectations and squashed beneath a couple of drunken uncles under the table.FamilyWeddingsRelationshipsParents and parentingguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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