Let's face it, feminism can be exhausting. Not that I've ever doubted that fighting for equality is the right thing to do, in the midst of sexism, discrimination and abuse, obviously. I'm just saying the Onion had it right when it recently published an article entitled "Woman Takes Short Half-Hour Break From Being Feminist To Enjoy TV Show". It's not easy to go about your daily feminist business without encountering multiple dilemmas. Like how do you protest about a sexist Samsung advert when you've just got a new phone and can't upgrade for another year and a half? How many films can you loudly accompany with a running commentary on their failure to pass the Bechdel test before your family and friends refuse to accompany you to the cinema again?

The latest such dilemma I've encountered is a big one. Until I told my friends I was getting married, I didn't know marriage and feminism could be considered mutually exclusive. I mean, just because a bride's engagement ring is a symbol of ownership, and just because changing her name erases her identity as a separate individual, and just because the whole thing is ludicrously assumed to be the woman's domain… Well, OK, marriage doesn't look great in certain lights. But it was a commitment my partner and I wanted to make. It felt right for me. And surely at least a small part of being a feminist means forging new paths through old traditions?

Two years ago I launched the Everyday Sexism project, an international campaign to highlight the harassment and abuse of women and girls. Since then I have briefed politicians and party leaders, addressed the UN and worked with police forces, schools and businesses on treating women and girls with respect. Not once have I felt any desperate urge to break up with my boyfriend in order to dedicate myself to the fight. In fact, in the middle of what became a daily bombardment of rape and death threats, his support was what stopped the whole thing from falling down around my ears.

But in the months after our engagement, I had to deal with a stream of expectations that were difficult to reconcile with my feminism. Loving someone, and saying that in front of family and friends, shouldn't be controversial. Yet the whole ritual is riddled with patriarchal symbolism.

I grew up with girls who knew they never wanted to marry and girls who had their wedding day planned in meticulous detail. Personally, I wasn't completely decided either way. But if I ever thought about my wedding day, I certainly didn't think about it as a day on which I'd be given from one man to another, like a piece of property. I never looked at the bride's white dress and thought of her as a virginal gift to her husband.

And now here I am, a couple of decades on, wrestling with candles, confetti and cake. I am dealing with a whole load of dilemmas I never knew existed. Such as: what is "bridal underwear" and why does it cost a fortune when it looks suspiciously like normal underwear with a fancy label? After years of deflecting questions about when we'd "tie the knot", why am I being asked when I'll be starting a family? And why, in God's name, has no one banned the word "bridezilla"? I'm not over the finish line yet, but this is some of what I've learned.

The engagement

Here the pressure is all on the man rather than the woman; there is an unshakable expectation that he'll be the one to kick everything off. The world has embraced female presidents, footballers, astronauts and engineers, but heaven forbid a woman ask the man she loves to take the next step. How crude that would be, how emasculating.

So it is the man who is besieged with demands for "The Story" and who must hone an envy-making epic. White horses, the Eiffel Tower and dance videos ripe for YouTube all go down well.

My boyfriend kept his grandmother's engagement ring hidden away in a box of cufflinks for months, then made a spur-of-the-moment decision to offer it to me buried in a bowl of popcorn. This would have been romantic except that, in his panic, he chucked the whole lot in, box and all. The result was less pleasant surprise, more genuine bafflement: "What are your cufflinks doing in the popcorn?"

We had talked about the future at length, so it was always going to be a toss-up which of us would end up proposing: if my fiance hadn't asked, I would have. And although I'm the one wearing the engagement ring, being more into jewellery than he is, I know couples who've done away with it, and others who've both chosen to wear one. We will both be wearing wedding bands. As for the man asking "permission" from the bride's father, one friend expressed my thoughts exactly: "If I'm going to get married, I sure as hell want to be the first to know about it."

The dress

Should it be white? I veered back and forth on this one. I get that the historic, one-sided virginal connotations are stupidly sexist. But I also feel quite confident that those associations have largely fallen away – nobody at our wedding will be under any illusions, knowing that we've lived together for five years. Over time, the symbolism behind other aspects of weddings has changed in meaning (the bouquet used to be a pungent posy of garlic to ward off evil spirits), so I'm reclaiming the right to wear a white dress, too.

Far trickier than the question of colour or style was the issue of size. The assistants in most bridal shops assumed I hated my own body. One called the lace sleeves I wanted a "comfort blanket". As it happens, I'm not insecure about my arms – I just love the whole Cate Blanchett in Lord Of The Rings vibe. Another declared: "We don't have church-appropriate boobs, do we?" (What are they? Round as a rosary bead? Flat as a communion wafer?)

In conversation after conversation, I was surprised to face the same question: "How much weight are you planning to lose?" It was not only well-meaning acquaintances and shop assistants; it was plastered on the walls of the changing rooms, too. "Extra charge for alterations due to last-minute weight loss" brides-to-be are sternly warned. The final straw was the comment: "You look two sizes smaller than you did when you first walked in, and that's no bad thing." I'm pretty sure men aren't having their wedding buzz killed in this manner, nor being threatened by their tailors with "weight loss" fines.

It's baffling to me that on this of all days, a woman's chief preoccupation should be thinness. Here you are, presumably overjoyed after somebody has declared their undying love for you just as you are, complete, perfect, unalloyed. Why, at this very moment, would a woman want to transform herself into a shrunken, hungry version of herself? It is not enough, it would seem, to be happy on your wedding day. Mostly you have to be thin.

When my bridesmaids finally strong-armed me into another boutique, I emerged from the changing room alternately resembling an exploding meringue or a corseted clown – and noticed one bridesmaid sniffed and welled up each time, however disastrous the frock. "What on earth are you doing?" I asked. It turned out she was feeling the romcom pressure and thought it only polite to burst into tears, just like in the movies. And since there was no knowing which dress would turn out to be The One, she was spreading her bets.

Photograph: Jay Brooks for the Guardian

Whose wedding is it anyway?

The dress is generally understood to be the bride's domain. But what about everything else? One wedding guide I read suggested the bride "ask the groom for his opinion occasionally, just to make him feel involved", in the manner of someone absent-mindedly patting a spaniel on the head from time to time. But if you both plan to be equally married, I don't see why you shouldn't both pitch in. Without some shared duties, the wedding can morph into something that women organise and men attend. Women are expected to plan everything down to the last sequin, and are then ridiculed if they dare to get too overwrought about any particular detail. When people ask if my fiance is being "good", in a "is he putting up with your female wedding hormones" sort of way, I have to grit my teeth not to mention that he is getting married, too.

The ceremony

Having chosen to marry in a church, my biggest worry was getting around the looming spectre of the promise to "obey" (not bloody likely, as my boyfriend is very well aware). So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the promise to obey has dropped off the agenda in the last 20 years. In fact, our charming rector seemed surprised we even asked about it. (The option remains available "upon request", which makes the mind boggle.)

Slightly trickier to get around was the idea of being "given away": "Who gives this woman…?" Luckily the answer came from that well-known bastion of feminism, ABC TV series Brothers And Sisters. Namely, a line from Kitty's wedding: "She gives herself freely, with our blessing", hastily scrawled down one night during a marathon box set session (don't judge me). Another piece of our feminist wedding jigsaw slipped into place.

My friends Alma and Daniel Reisel, a Jewish couple who recently married, had issues with the standard wedding text. So they went right back to the start, finding phrases about partnership in ancient Jewish scriptures, which they worked into their marriage contract (or ketubah) instead. They felt uneasy about the tradition of the bride circling the groom seven times (some suggest it symbolises the woman's world now revolving around her husband). But, like me, they didn't want to lose the romantic symbolism – Alma liked the idea of surrounding each other with love, and being at the centre of each other's world. So they solved the problem by circling one another. And, starting as they mean to go on, they stomped firmly side by side into their new life, with both bride and groom breaking the cloth-wrapped glass underfoot.

Two brides

I know two other feminist brides who will be having to reinvent the old traditions, Gemma and Danielle. Gemma told me how frustrating it was to keep coming up against the question: "Who's the bride and who's the groom?" They're both the bride, and what does it matter anyway? They dismissed the traditional "best man" and "maid of honour" in favour of a joyous, 15-person hodgepodge of a wedding party in which nobody's role is dictated by their gender. They will process hand in hand, preceded by their families; they went to great lengths to find a registrar who was "under the rainbow umbrella" and used a specialist travel agency to plan a "gay-friendly" honeymoon. That they had to do this in 2014 made my own wedding dilemmas pale in comparison.

The speeches

What proportion of female speakers does it take to make a feminist wedding? In my case it'll be half and half. There's something sad about reaching the end of a wedding, having heard so much about the couple's characters, lives and histories, and realising that you haven't heard a woman's voice all day. Half the story is surely left behind.

Throwing the bouquet

This is a tradition I love the idea of, but hate the sexist undertones. Come on, girls, scrabble desperately for this fateful bundle of foliage because it's the only chance you have to influence the future of your own relationship. Followed by pitying nudges for the bloke whose partner catches the flowers, as he's clearly now irrevocably caught in the harpy's iron grasp. I shall simply chuck the flowers in the air and the boys will be under clear instructions to join in. I want an undignified non-gender-specific scrum.

The great name conundrum

We wrangled back and forth over this – he would have been happy to take my surname, but already had a friend with the identical name. Would that be weird? We dismissed double barrels. We considered the new trend for combining the two names into a hybrid – this worked for friends with the surnames Sand and Smith (giving them the magical-sounding Sandsmith). But neither Baylor nor Tates has quite the same romantic ring. Of course, the simple thing is to keep one's own name and get on with it. But for me there was something meaningful about making a shift in our official identities. Eventually, my fiance came up with a simple solution: we'd each take the other's surname as an extra middle name, leaving our surnames unchanged. Problem solved. (Until, as my mum pointed out, we might have to think about what surname to use for any children, but hey, we'll need something to talk about once we're married.)

Kudos to Gemma and Danielle, who decided to get around the conundrum by combining Gemma's already double-barrelled surname with Danielle's to create a glorious triple barrel: Rolls-Bentley-Wilde. "My name was already a joke anyway, so why not?" Gemma says.

For me, their breaking of the wedding "rules" sums up the modern-day feminist bride; eschewing some traditions, co-opting others and making the event, and the marriage, a patchwork of equality. If we pull it off, I'm hoping it won't be a case of "Woman Takes Day Off Being Feminist In Order To Marry".

• Laura Bates is the author of Everyday Sexism, published by Simon & Schuster at £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99, with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6847.

Set designer and stylist: Mika Handley. Hair and makeup: Dani Richardson using Dermalogica. Laura wears 1920s pearl headband from Annie's Vintage Costume and Textiles, Islington; dress by Coast; veil by Mirror Mirror. Flowers by Rebel Rebel.