I don't know all the details of the weddings, unfortunately, due to the best magazines having already been nicked by the time I was at the hairdresser's. But I know one was held at Blenheim and one at Cliveden and it gives me great pleasure to think that these former bastions of the aristocracy depend now on the custom of the moneyed working-class. Revolution is accomplished in most unexpected ways.

That very weekend , Garret FitzGerald, in his column in the Irish Times, was thinking about childcare, which led him, of course, to thinking about marriage. Late marriage. He cited statistics to show that whereas four out of five Irish women used to marry before the age of 28, nowadays most women postpone their marriage until their 30s. He attributes this to "the movement of married women into employment, which accelerated after the resolution of the financial and economic crisis precipitated by the disastrous policies of the Lynch/Haughey governments between 1971 and 1981". (This is a party political point, by the way, not an undisputed statement of fact. ) It is the case, it would appear, that who gets married when and in what numbers is the product of forces far outside individual consciousness, much less control . Garret reminds us that he predicted, back when a "take-off of the Irish economy was well-enough established and there was a drop in emigration" that there would be a 40% increase in the marriage rate within 10 years. He was proved right. I suppose most analysts, public policymakers and historians have the larger picture in mind all the time, same as him.

But we never do. Our lives don't feel as if they're part of a trend. They surprise us. They're unique. And other people's lives don't seem like that, especially when, as in footballers' marriages, magic seems to have entered into an economic situation and transformed it. On the whole, a top British footballer is a not-veryprivileged young man who has managed to turn one precarious gift into a fame which will be temporary and earn a very small fortune.

This entitles him to the hand of a young woman who, though from the same unprivileged background, is also exceptional in some way. I don't think the guys pick wives just for their looks. Footballers have good-looking women coming out of the woodwork so I take it that they marry the ones who are nicer or stronger or more loyal than the others, or the ones with exceptional energy and ambition, such as Victoria Beckham.

But every marriage has an element of magical thinking to it. The middle-class sneers at young people who have a fairly tacky idea of the beautiful but every extravagant theme wedding;

every piece of Disneyish kitsch is an articulation of an idea of the beautiful, and it is wonderful that such ideas survive the deliberate coarseness of tabloid culture. And the closer the wedding gets to a fantasy made real, the more it seems to me a kind of victory - a privileged site in which the bride is being allowed for once in her life to enforce her personal aesthetic.

For some women that will involve a carriage and white horses with diamonds in their manes.

For some, she and her partner will have chosen a simple ceremony on a beach or a mountainside with a few friends. But however it is done, it seems to the doer that she and her partner have made their own decisions, all the way from choosing each other to choosing the how and when of the moment when they will turn away from everyone else and go off to begin ordinary, married life. As Garret and Joan FitzGerald did. As the English footballers and their new wives did.

Our politics are small and feeble because we live in our own bubbles - we can go through the whole lifespan without seeing any link between experiences like these, which seem to us freely chosen and under our own control, and the wider state of the society we live in. But Garret discussing the marriage rate reminds us that what we do is linked to the world. Thus, the modest weddings of the past with a few bottles of Guinness afterwards and a honeymoon in Bundoran were connected with international as well as local manifestations of the economic failure of the independent Irish state. They weren't an expression of a higher moral code.

And today's weddings are not decadent.

They are excrescences of late capitalism.

Ever-proliferating extras - having cosmetic surgery on your feet so they'll look good on the big day is the latest - are flourishes of the consumer capitalism of which we are all, except maybe for Chavez and Castro, blind servants.

Not everyone would want to be Garret - capable of looking and seeing himself as a statistic at the same time as a happy bridegroom. But neither is it clear-eyed to think that Hello! -type weddings just happen to happen and are not linked to the systems we live under - systems which are locally and globally unjust. However puffed-up with lace and tulle and flower arrangements, a wedding is a dream, not a fact.