What makes a good wedding these days? I say flirting and chaos, but not three days in a French castle | Rachel Connolly

Am I allowed to start a column about weddings by saying I don’t know exactly what I think about weddings and marriage in general? Well let’s see.

One thing I do know: I really like attending weddings. I love to go as a valued guest, to see close friends in love and watch dads I have known for many years gruffly and fearfully breach the dancefloor. But I also love to go as a totally minor guest (the better for people-watching) and collect anecdotes about who, from the various overlapping families, hates who. People will just tell you these things, especially if your presence is quite random. I like to see the freshly single sporting their revenge dresses and haircuts and physiques. I like to witness and partake in the abundance of flirting. I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad time at a wedding.

I asked friends their views on weddings while writing this. One of them said: “In general, I feel like weddings bring out behaviour we could use more of. For example flirting, dancing, and making plans, getting dressed up etc.” I agree completely. In fact, I have always dreaded getting the call to write about weddings precisely because I don’t want to compromise my cherished status as a frequent guest. But the truth is, I do feel some ambivalence about the contemporary execution, and I do consider my generation’s approach to weddings, and even marriage, a little odd.

I started thinking about this after former rugby player Danny Cipriani and his fiancee, the actor Annalynne McCord, launched a “tacky and distasteful” (as one source had it) crowdfunding page asking guests to help pay for their wedding. The total amount they are asking for is £10,660. It seems fair to say that their combined earnings considerably outstrip those of your average newlyweds.

And yet, unexpectedly, I find myself feeling sorry for them. I feel wary of the spectacle that weddings have become. I don’t think it was always like this. Talk to older people and you’ll hear stories of a family dinner and then a dance in the local pub. These days – even for non-celebrities – they are often big, flashy affairs, perhaps in exotic destinations, sometimes over several days. I hear so much about arguments when people don’t get invited, even though we all know space is usually limited. I wonder why people feel it has to be like this. I wonder, too, if the opulence makes the whole thing even more emotionally charged.

Admittedly my own views on weddings and marriage, as these things might apply to me, make no sense at all. On the one hand, I’m an Irish Catholic who has been in a heterosexual relationship for a while. On the other hand, the institution of marriage feels odd to me. I wouldn’t argue my own lifestyle is radical, but I am sometimes surprised that big white weddings are still such a widespread norm.

I never imagined my own wedding as a child. And when I try to picture a wedding for myself now, it would have to be in a Catholic church. The version of Catholicism I subscribe to could absolutely be described as “one I just invented in my head”. I stop into churches all the time to light candles and pray, meanwhile I pay attention to basically nothing the church has to say. Some would say that a humanist wedding might allay my discomfort with the institution of marriage, and I would agree. Still, the idea of being married in a humanist service by someone wearing, say, skinny jeans and a black T-shirt gives me willies. Why is this? Logically, it makes no sense. But that’s how I feel.

And actually, I think that’s the core of it. Weddings seem governed not by logic but by random yet passionately held whims. Maybe that is what causes people to have their names monogrammed on to hundreds of napkins, or to demand hundreds of people traipse to a country that even the two people getting married have never visited. It is precisely this sense of heightened and crazed emotions that makes weddings fun.

So much deranged behaviour occurs. I myself have been asked out several times over the years, at weddings I have attended with my boyfriend. Once, memorably, a man with swept-back hair (a doctor no less) sort of charged up to me and said: “Look how are things going with your boyfriend? It seems like they’re going well. But if not …”. Then he gestured at himself, to present the alternative option. You have to admire it.

I’m not deluded enough to interpret this as proof of my startling beauty or charm. Instead, I see it as evidence that the sentiment and nostalgia that suffuse every wedding does something strange to us all. Picture the kind of man who’s spent a decade or so juggling situationships arriving on the dancefloor as the music of his misspent boyhood floods the room (a Calvin Harris song or Mr Brightside, say). He thinks: “God, I’m tired!” And then, casting frantically around: “Look, just pick somebody, anybody! Well she would do, would she?” Time comes for us all.

All the money in the world wouldn’t make up for this kind of experience. The atmosphere at weddings exists all by itself. There’s no need to book a French castle for a memorable day. Having said that, if you have cash to burn, why not? I wouldn’t turn down the invitation. Which is all to say: please continue to invite me to your weddings.