Never did it cross my mind that he might have planned something like that. This is mainly, my sister maintains, because I am an idiot - but it's not for me to judge.

My boyfriend and I were on the final day of our holiday in New York (in freezing January) and he had insisted on us going down to the far end of the reservoir in Central Park at dusk to see what he had read was one of the best views of the city's famous skyline. I moaned, but he insisted.

So I stomped grumpily ahead of him, muttering imprecations under my breath. 'I hate the cold! I don't care about views! You'd think someone who'd been going out with me for three years might know that!' and dreaming of hot coffee and a salmon-stuffed bagel the size of my head when we got back to our hotel.

At last we got there, and watched as the sun set slowly behind the skyscrapers at the other side of the water. 'There!' said Christopher triumphantly, as the sky turned orange behind the towering black silhouettes. 'The most beautiful view in New York!'

Despite my teeth chattering with cold, I had to agree. 'Actually,' he added suddenly, 'it's the second most beautiful view in New York. Because you're here.'

I turned round, expecting to see him pulling any one of the variety of revolting faces he keeps to accompany his delivery of ridiculous lines, but there was no one next to me.

Then I realised that he was down on one knee, and holding up a ring. 'Will you marry me?'And I - I who had spent my life declaring I would never get married, who had never spent a moment imagining my perfect wedding day - found myself saying 'Yes. Yes, please.'

Like pony-trekking, backpacking round Europe or salsa dancing, marriage had always seemed to me like something other people did. Not me.

First of all, despite coming from a Catholic family, I don't believe in God. And while this doesn't exactly mean I therefore believe that marriage is 'just a piece of paper', it does remove one of the traditional main impetuses towards embracing the state.

Second - well, it has just always seemed like such an impossibly huge thing to be doing.

You don't have to believe in God to be daunted by the prospect of plighting your troth to someone for ever. I've watched a million friends get hitched and I've never come to see it as a mechanical or soulless experience.

At some point during every service I find myself become overwhelmed by the enormity of the undertaking. Not just at assembling unboned chicken breasts for 90 people, but promising yourself to someone else for life. For life. For life.

It always seemed to me the most grown-up thing you could possibly do. I know having children should have taken that pole position, but a lot of my friends got pregnant at school (well, not at school - at the nightclub round the corner) so childbearing has always been, in my mind, more firmly linked with adolescent idiocy and haphazard condom application than maturity and decision making.

Marriage, on the other hand - that's different. Among my friends, it is only those who take the matter seriously who have bothered. I've never been to a wedding where people are sitting in the back pews muttering 'Of course, it'll never last' because the couple at the front are 17, met three days ago in Faliraki and haven't sobered up yet.

They have all been solid, significant affairs by solid, significant couples and everyone has made me feel more like a seven-year-old child than anyone who might one day feel old enough to do likewise.

In addition, I have always been almost pathologically anti-social. I have barely ever thrown a party, let alone one with a sacrament and chicken kiev for 100 thrown in.

And a wedding day, however low key, is still a day on which you are, inescapably, the centre of attention. And the immutable laws of wedding statistics state that although 95 per cent of the people there have come to love and support you, the remaining 5per cent are there to judge, mock and report back to all the people who weren't invited on how terrible the whole thing was.

This is not knowledge to lighten the reluctant bride's heart. So why, six months after the sun set in New York, did I find myself walking down the aisle on my dad's arm, in a pale-gold gown, towards a reassuringly smiling vicar and a morning-suited fiance, watched by a hundred guests, with a champagne and canape reception waiting for us all down the road?

I first met Christopher at a mutual friend's book launch. After a few glasses of wine, I was chatting to a group of fellow guests when I noticed a man standing by the window. He caught my eye for many reasons.

First, there were the clothes - an ancient pair of blue cord trousers, a frayed red gingham shirt and a green (probably) velvet (originally) jacket. He had a shock of thick, prematurely grey hair and a furious face.

When he caught me looking at him, he raised his glass so unsmilingly that my first thought was to wonder whether you could be hit in the face by a face.

My second thought was to raise my glass in turn, go cross-eyed and stick my tongue out so far that I almost licked my shoulder.

A moment later he was by my side. 'I've been looking for a woman who would realise that I can't help my terrible face all my life,' he said. 'I hoped I was beaming at you over there,' he said, frowning ferociously, 'but I wasn't, was I?' 'No,' I said.

'What about now?' he said, still frowning in a manner that would have killed any small child in the vicinity. 'Not really.' From such unpromising beginnings did our relationship grow.

A short while later, we moved in together. I won't pretend it was easy. In fact, we were lucky to survive it - going from short-term, dates-at-weekends-only relationships to cohabitation is the equivalent of trying to get a Morris Minor up from 0 to 60mph in eight seconds - but I made a leap of faith.

Because I felt, almost from the first moment, that he was different from other boyfriends and that this was different from other relationships. The voice in my head that usually whispered 'Hmm, I reckon this one's got three/six/12 months to run, tops' was strangely silent.

Christopher was strangely vocal - about how much he liked me, how happy he was to be with me, how many plans he had for our future - immediate, near and long-term. It was immensely disturbing and uplifting at the same time.

I suppose, in the language of romantic novels, I knew - at some level - that I had found 'The One'. But it is impossible, really, to define what that feels like. It certainly doesn't mean that everything was perfect.

He was, and remains, among the most unbelievably undomesticated men I have ever met. I had to take him round the supermarket for the first time and show him what various meat and vegetables looked like in their original, 'un-Ginstersed' form.

He still puts leftover sausages into the fridge not on a plate, no matter how many times I drop to the floor in despair. When we first began living together, I wanted to tear his throat out at least 12 times a day.

We've got that down to single figures these days, and I know from long, wine fuelled discussions with other female friends that I am not alone, but still - I suspect there are nevertheless more beatific marital idylls out there.

But these were surface details. Underneath, somehow, gradually, planning a life together almost stopped feeling baffling. It started feeling natural. The desire to get married, I realised, grows out of a desire to mark the difference in quality of this relationship from all the others.

And from there, it is but a small step to all-out madness. Within, I think, seven minutes of us arriving home from New York, my mother and sister arrived with 18 bags of paper, Europe's entire supply of lever arch files and a gleam in their eyes that boded ill for all of my hopes of a lowkey affair.

'We've printed out the internet,' said my sister with a demonic grin. 'Let's get to work.'
I thought about resisting, but it was futile. And as the day came closer, I felt increasingly loath to take the register office route. Wouldn't it feel a bit too much like going to get a passport or something?

I felt like I needed all the sense of occasion I could get - and even if you don't believe that God is in the building, 200 years of human history rising all around you has an impact all its own.

Christopher picked the church as his friend was the vicar there. It was a large church.
From this, I realised too late, all else flows. Large churches have to be filled. With lots of flowers and lots of guests.

Lots of guests have to be fed lots of food and drink in a large reception venue. And once you have lots of space, lots of guests and a lot of reception, you cannot let the side down by getting married in jeans.

You need a lot of frock. Which in my case also meant playing a lot of tennis, not eating a lot of chocolate and finding a dressmaker who could build a lot of corsetry to amend the rest.

I may not believe in God, but I do now believe in whalebone. You may condemn me for being so weak-willed, but in my defence, I must say to all those of you who have not yet had the pleasure and displeasure of organising such an event for yourselves that - contrary to what you may have heard - it is not Your Big Day.

It is everybody's big day. Your mum's, your dad's, your fiance's, your brother's and sister's, all the way down to your great-aunt Jessie, even if she hasn't left her bath chair for a decade.

They all get a say - some larger than others, but they all get a say. That's what weddings are. A giant snowball of excitement, emotion, rows, hysteria, laughter and, occasionally. delight.

As I stood in the church foyer, my father by my side, my fiance just visible at the altar, I knew I was glad that I had agreed to be married.

I was glad that I had agreed (even if only in cowardly and passive fashion) to a 'proper' wedding - and particularly glad I had agreed to hire someone to do my hair and make-up for the occasion. But 18 months on, I'm even more glad I never felt the need to be married at all costs.

I'm glad I waited for someone who felt 'different'. Because he did make me feel different. And no longer like a reluctant bride.

source::dalimail.co.uk

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