For some people - for quite a lot of people, actually - their wedding day is the true, confetti-covered apogee of their existence. I say people; really I mean women. I have never yet met a man who has spent two years planning the minutiae of his nuptials but I have met plenty of women for whom the wedding was such a high point that their married life couldn't possibly live up to it.
My attention was caught last week by the spectacularly tasteless wedding of Lancashire bride Kirsty Lane. Kirsty had thought of everything, from the black Ugg boots bought only to keep her bridesmaids feet warm during the exterior photographs to the jewel-encrusted iPods they received as a memento of Kirsty's big day.
And what a day it was. The 29-year-old reportedly skimmed £168,000 off the books of the company she worked for - Pure AV - to help make her dream wedding a reality. Alas, Kirsty's dreams omitted the folly of inviting her boss and his board of directors to the reception; the look on their faces as they realised there was no way Kirsty's £15k salary could possibly have paid for catering by an award-winning chef, the free bar and personalised fireworks display must have been absolutely priceless.
At the other end of the scale, there was also the wedding that never was. Following the revelation that actress Jessie Wallace's fiancé Vince Morse had, most bizarrely, sent a rather risqué photograph of her to his ex-girlfriend, Jessie called off her £300,000 wedding only hours before it was due to take place. After ensuring that delivery of the cupcakes and flowers was diverted from the reception to her home - a girl after my own heart - a battle now rages between the estranged couple for the £18,000 worth of wedding champagne.
This is a tricky one, and reminds me of a case I dealt with a few years ago when a divorcing couple were having one helluva row about her engagement ring. Admittedly, it was an absolute corker - a huge emerald cut diamond mounted on a platinum band studded with smaller (I use the term loosely) diamonds. He maintained it was a symbol of their binding contract to stay married and was therefore conditional, she maintained it was a gift pure and simple and therefore she was entitled to keep it.
The law requires three elements to constitute a gift: the giver's intent to give the item as a gift; the giver's actual giving of the gift to the receiver and the receiver's acceptance of the gift.
However, conditional gifts are the exception to this rule and in essence exist when the giver presents the gift in the expectation that some event or action will take place. This is why many courts view engagement rings as conditional gifts and typically reject the idea that the gift's condition is the engagement, instead holding that the condition to be met is the marriage.
My client argued - successfully - that she had indeed met the condition because the marriage had taken place and indeed she had been married to her husband for five years. She kept the ring.
And on that topic, one wonders what might happen should The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge ever divorce. For her engagement ring isn't any old engagement ring but that of the Duke's late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. Probably the best known engagement ring in the world and almost certainly priceless, one cannot imagine the scenario where she refuses to give it back and yet should the worst happen, she might well do.
So as I keep saying and will continue saying until prenups are part and parcel of every marriage - sort this kind of thing out before the wedding. And if you can't afford your dream wedding, trust me. It doesn't matter. It's the life that follows that's important.