It is every woman’s dream to have a big white wedding. To arrive in church in a helicopter no less, to be walked down the aisle by her father as a mighty, crisp white bridal train trails behind.

To impress friend and foe, to show off your sartorial splendour in an imported gown. To have an invite-only intimate ceremony in an absurdly expensive golf resort.

Not me. I don’t believe in the big white wedding claptrap. Call me a man, a cheapskate or frugal, but I think expensive weddings are just a load of tedious nonsense. I am a simple ceremony kind of girl.

We could go to the Attorney General’s office for a civil wedding for all I care. I just don’t care for the limos, the imported wedding gowns and the outside catering.

We could hire a tent and a faulty PA system and have the wedding in the man’s shagz. Have his aunties’ cook that delicious gichagi “mashed” rice and boiled stew with carrots and potatoes.

Flashy, big white weddings are for broke people. Those who have a point to prove to their friends and rivals what a big wedding they can put together. Big white weddings, the much publicised and much tweeted about weddings are usually for broke attention seekers, who want to make a statement to their childhood friends whom they grew up with in the village.

They are for the poor, who are spending money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need to impress people, who don’t even like them in the first place. People who already know that you clearly cannot afford that wedding on your modest salary.

‘PHOTOGRAPHY BLOGS’

They are for those who call their friends to wedding committees and ask them to fund their wedding. You will see them all over social media and on ‘photography blogs’ giving us a blow by blow account of their weddings.

They will be littering all over your Twitter, Instagram and Facebook timelines ‘flossing’ their expensive weddings like we don’t know that is their maiden ride in a Jaguar and their second time at Windsor Golf Hotel and Country Club. The first time being when they went to book the venue.

If it is not pictures of borrowed Range Rovers and Mercedes, the desperate brides are busy disgusting us with pictures of their sweat-ridden cleavages in their ill-fitting bustiers. Oh, and selfies of their over powdered faces and fake nails.

Look around you, the bigger, the more insanely expensive wedding, the poorer the couple and the deeper the debt. I laugh and cringe when I see people getting married in an ‘all-invite’ ceremony.

What are you hiding? Your unplanned pregnancy? I couldn’t care less if I had a slathering populous wedding, in fact, my mother is welcome to assemble her entire women’s guild sorority with their blue and white head regalia.

In most cases, these big white weddings are engineered by the women, the brides and their mothers, who want to outdo the other. From my intelligence, men hate weddings. They would rather skip the entire hullabaloo and jump straight to the honeymoon stage before they can start entertaining a swarm of girlfriends.

It is usually the women who insist on ‘the bigger, the better’ weddings to compete with their girlfriends and to show their colleagues who is boss.

BIG WEDDING

It is usually the women, who insist on posting these pictures all over social media and in blogs, their men are just happy to lay low and pretend to be single.

It is usually the women, who will count down to the big wedding and overshare on the details of the wedding. Of course, it is not lost on me that there are some men who do this, but those are loser types. Real men don’t go all over bragging about big weddings and borrowed Jaguars.

I am not writing this with sadistic criticism, I am merely stating sad facts. Look at those who famously got married in absurdly expensive weddings; complete with photography blog posts and websites to advertise their nuptials.

Their future looms ahead like a tightening noose. They never go far, and most will not reach the five-year shelf life I am proposing.

You begin to see cracks in their marriages even before the end of the second year. I could have given you the connection between big, flashy weddings and broken marriages, but I will leave that to the relationship experts.

Flashy weddings seldom translate to happy marriages. They focus too much on the drama and the borrowed guzzles that they forget it is all about the quality of the marriage not the quality of the tents that matters.