This is the trap that many women fall into, and I understand it, really. The princess myth is true: I have watched many of my friends claim they would “never wear a meringue dress”, only to fall for dresses that made Lady Diana Spencer’s look like a flimsy little slip in comparison. Subconscious ideas about weddings that have been lurking in secret since we were children somehow surface, and even the most sensible bride might end up considering spending several hundred pounds on something ridiculous like chair covers. (To quote my cousin, “What on earth is wrong with a bare chair?”)

Trying to resist, I ran to a vintage sale at Chelsea Town Hall and bought a pair of antique French lace curtains, which my mother, a skilled seamstress, was trying to remake into a copy of the dress. Then a miracle happened: I found a sample of my dream dress in my size for less than half the price. My mother and godmother kindly chipped in and paid for most of it.

Why am I telling you this? Because sometimes I look at my dress hanging in the drying room, ruined from a night of drinking, and think of the sunk costs. Not having the dress wouldn’t have meant I could have put a deposit on a house instead, not for me anyway, but there are undoubtedly women out there who have had huge, lavish weddings and are still waiting to get on the property ladder. In some ways it makes financial sense to get married before buying a house together, and I love a good wedding. There’s no other occasion where you can manage to get everyone you love together in one room. But as unromantic as it may be, consider the cost – and the divorce rate.

I don’t know what can be done to stop women feeling the immense pressure to have a perfect wedding and their families – usually the fathers – feeling like they have to pay for it. The inconvenient truth is that many men just don’t like weddings and think the expense is unnecessary. Why not increase their down payment to show they don’t care? Or maybe they have a big wedding anyway, but their girlfriends’ fathers pay for everything. And so the patriarchal cycle continues.

Other theories about the gift gap have been put forward, from the fact that more young women than young men go to college to the idea that daughters are better at saving money than sons. Whatever the reason, it remains deeply unfair that a large family contribution is in many cases the only way for young adults to enter the property market (the survey found that those who were supported by their parents bought their home at age 32, compared with age 39 for those without parents). It’s hard to talk about the shame one can feel when all your friends already have their second or third home and you still haven’t bought your first, if you ever will. It’s easy to buy into the tired media narrative that you should have bought less brunch, but the problem is structural. It’s a national scandal that you can reliably pay high rent sums for years but can’t get a mortgage for a comparatively small monthly outgo. I hope our new government will try to change that.

You may say that maybe I shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place, but so many of us were waiting impatiently for adulthood to finally begin, and the traditional milestones were denied us due to generational injustice. Young adults have a right to romance and a right to family gatherings; these are the things that make life worth living. However, if you look at the hierarchy of needs, a safe, warm home is the most important thing of all, aside from breathing, food, water, and clothing.

I still have these beautiful French antique lace curtains. They are carefully folded in tissue paper in a suitcase waiting for their forever home. I hope to hang them one day.