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Getting engaged is a bit like losing 10 pounds. It feels nice, but after a while the relentless congratulations start to make you wonder if there was something horribly wrong with you in the first place.

“Of course there was,” my boyfriend said dryly when I pondered this out loud the other day. “Before, you were incomplete, unable to form a thought for yourself. And now you have a man to complete you.”

Har har. But the sentiment isn't so far off perceived reality, especially here in England, where the common social response to a woman showing her engagement ring is, “Well done.” Translation: You've finally bagged one. Now, you can relax.

For a well-behaved feminist (which I do not consider myself, prone as I am to offending the delicate sensibilities of my vigilant line-toeing sisters), getting married is a political minefield. On the one hand, you have all the ludicrously outdated “traditions” to contend with – grown men falling to their knees, accomplished women being “given away” by their fathers, sexually liberated thirtysomething party girls donning virginal veils, to name just a few – and on the other you have the hard-liners who would like to scrap the feudal institution altogether.

In this contradictory era of bridezilla reality shows and record-low marriage rates, is there any way to find a balance as a modern, feminist bride-to-be?

It's a question Jessica Valenti, 30-year-old blogger-in-chief of feministing.com and author of the book The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession With Virginity is Hurting Young Women , has been exploring of late.

The first thing she noticed when she got engaged to her boyfriend, Andrew, was the way people demanded to know all about the proposal. “There was a real pressure to have a perfect story to tell,” she said in a phone interview this week, “when the truth was we just had a conversation and decided to get married.”

After a while, the couple got sick of disappointing everyone with their egalitarian honesty. “It became so tedious we just started saying it happened on vacation in California, which was technically true.”

Having long detested the coyness surrounding engagements, I admire Valenti's dry-eyed approach to her own impending nuptials. Here, finally, is a woman who doesn't feel the need to act “surprised” by the decision to spend the rest of her life with someone – like the thought had never occurred to her until the sight of a diamond ring dazzled her into saying, “Yes!”

In a recent piece for The Guardian, Valenti wrote eloquently about her struggle to balance the somewhat contradictory roles of bride-to-be and feminist author.

“The fact that Andrew and I had had conversations about the misogynist traditions that accompany marriage made us a bit of an oddity, it seemed. Then there were the fellow feminists who felt that getting married was a sop to the patriarchy, and the problems that we encountered as a couple. Because, with the best will in the world, kissing goodbye to gender roles can be more difficult than it looks.”

Like many couples, Valenti and her boyfriend struggled with the division of labour when it came to wedding planning. While they set out with the best intentions (he'd do the music, she'd do the flowers, etc.), reality soon came home to roost. “Several months later, when I found myself up to my eyeballs in sample invitations and band websites – while Andrew read the newspaper or dallied online – I was ready to throw in the towel on so-called domestic bliss.”

They have since worked out their issues, but the pressure to have a traditional wedding continues. Valenti puts it all down to consumer culture. “When you're getting married, there's a lot of pressure to buy a lot of useless stuff.”

I agree, but suspect it's much deeper than that. Weddings, after all, are one of the great markers of social status.

Whether she knows it or not, this is why your mother almost certainly wants you to have one. It's also why so many young women start pining for a ring and a pouffy dress before they've even fallen in love.

The more traditional our weddings and engagements are, the more we play into this ceremonial rite of passage – providing our friends and relatives with the correct markers to determine our relative position in society. These start with the size of the diamond (translation: How much does he love you?) and carry on to the colour of the dress (how good have you been?) through to the lavishness of the party (how much are you worth?).

Romantic, isn't it?

But what is romantic, and actually quite thrilling, is the idea of falling in love with someone and deciding to spend the rest of your lives together. I might not be a good bride or a well-behaved feminist, but just like Jessica Valenti, I am determined to be an excellent wife – provided I can keep my own name, of course.