I'm worried about Coleen Rooney's butterflies. Each guest at her wedding, we are told, was given a handmade box containing these fragile creatures and at some undisclosed emotional zenith had to release them into the sky. Their fluttering was presumably to represent Coleen and Wazza's ascendant love rather than the motorised shutters of a thousand paparazzi gathered outside La Cervara monastery.

But it rained on Thursday. Did the butterflies get soggy and plummet into the 100-year-old wistaria? Or were they released indoors, only to be fatally attracted to the flames of a thousand white church candles? What happened if a box was opened and, fagged by four days of festivities, the Red Admiral or Camberwell Beauty within was a goner? Where's the touching symbolism in that?

I'm sure Coleen had a crack team of lepidopterists on standby. You'd hope so for £5 million. Perhaps the butterflies were specially bred to match the groom's eyes or the bridesmaids' sandals. Maybe Coleen had their wings embedded with Swarovski crystals.

The scale of the Rooney wedding was imperial: the private jets, chartered yacht, the three bridal gowns, so that despite all that first-class schlepping to New York for six fittings, Coleen only wore her £100,000 Marchesa frock for four hours. It is the style to which one must become accustomed if Richard Desmond has written a £2.5 million cheque and demands enough photogenic moments to fill 70 pages of OK!. And clearly Coleen's intent was to make the Beckham nuptials, complete with his 'n' hers medieval thrones, look like a finger-buffet above a Wolverhampton pub.

But the expense aside, Coleen is really an average British bride. Just flicking through the wedding magazines that have proliferated and thrived in the past decade, bloated with advertising from a bridal industry now worth more than

£5 billion, her butterfly theme fits just fine with the bride-to-be who has saddled herself with a spotty wedding motif and is driven mad trying to find polka-dot organza bags.

The key word of the modern wedding is unique. It is the bride's right, even her duty, to create a day that is a manifestation of every element of her essential self. As the editor's letter in You & Your Wedding proclaims: “Use your personalities to inspire your transport... and cake - so everyone nods and smiles and says: ‘That's just so you!'” But pity the bride and groom raking through their psyches. Are we vintage Roller or Asian-style cab people? Does an artful stack of cupcakes bespeak “us” more than a three-tier chocolate sacher torte with violet-flavoured ganache?

Not that the groom has much to do with it. Last year an American woman called Chidi Ogbuta served guests a lifesized butterscotch-flavour effigy of herself. She claimed the bakery didn't have enough time - or butterscotch - to construct her future husband too, but who believes her, since weddings are less than ever a union of souls and more a festival of female narcissism.

The wedding industry is the control-freak bitch sister of fashion. While fashion's purpose is to convince us that only if we constantly reinvent ourselves through new clothing do we avoid being stale, unloveable and old, the wedding industry promotes the belief that the perfection of this one day is instrumental to the happiness of all that follows. The wedding industry plays to women's picky, list-making, over-thinking, matchy-matchy side, creating imaginary worries that require expensive solutions. Decorate the soles of your shoes, trills Brides magazine, so they won't look too plain when you kneel at the altar.

No wonder the proportion of people marrying is at a 144-year low. Or that the average engagement is 17 months, since if you want a June slot at a premier stately home you can forget it until 2010. Maybe single women should stick down a deposit now, then work on the easier task of acquiring a groom.

The wedding industry this month declared that the average celebration now costs more than £20K. Figures like these are self-fulfilling, designed to make a couple budgeting only £15K - which might still secure a deposit on a house - feel shoddy. (Just as the baby industry periodically declares that the average newborn costs a preposterous sum in its first year, thus stimulating the purchase of £500 prams.)

But no doubt wedding budgets have soared, fuelled by celebrity culture and the notion that if you buy the bag worn by J-Lo you share a shard of her glamour and perceived happiness. And a wedding is the one day when your personal rider can have more diva clauses than Mariah Carey's. Moreover, the notion abounds that the true essence of a woman is a girl. Far from yearning to be grown-up sophisticates as our mothers did, women must aspire to be a sparkly, pink, ditzy, shoe-obsessed princess - and her apotheosis is on her wedding day.

The Sex and the City movie - which I found so cloyingly feminine I left wanting to take up welding, beer drinking and darts-playing - illustrates how even a woman who purports to lack the “bridal gene” can be seduced by the bridal industry's fantasties, which are concerned not with love but the glory of the self.

I realise, as someone who eloped and wed under a cherry tree in New York's Central Park with four witnesses, that I have limited knowledge of marital fashions. But where did they come from, all these weird accretions, which Rebecca Mead in her book One Perfect Day: the Selling of the American Wedding calls “traditionalesque”. Made-up customs such as wedding favours, little guest presents of sugared almonds or chocolates or, increasingly, bespoke geegaws - a miniature of whisky for him, a vial of scent for her - or these three-day bank-busting hen and stag mini-breaks.

Real wedding traditions have fallen away. The Church has lost its monopoly on pretty places to wed. And now the quest for a venue is more like location-scouting for a movie. The production need not have roots in a person's parish or even country. A wedding is no longer about two families uniting but the primacy of the couple, their tastes and demands, which must be respected, however arcane or unreasonable.

Yet while freed from tradition, the dull template and stifling protocol, the cold-cuts and dreary toasts of the past, couples are now tyrannised by choice. Even if your budget doesn't run to chartered yachts, the pressure is on to “personalise” the day, with all manner of faffing. Why not name the tables at the reception after Elvis songs, or characters from Blackadder, arrange flutes of champagne into your initials, embroider your names into your dress?

And the internet has opened up the possibility of incorporating a smidgin of other marital traditions: fusion weddings. Apparently the American style of sending the bridesmaids down the aisle one by one before the bride - which to British eyes looks like a beauty pageant or a line of hookers displayed for selection - is gaining popularity, as is the writing of syrupy vows. All this crazy investment, all this tiresome reinvention of things as old as love itself, all for a day as ephemeral as a box of butterflies.

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