It has become my Muriel moment. I find myself standing in the back pews of church watching a dear female friend led down the aisle on her father’s arm, blubbering uncontrollably through my MaxFactor. But these are not tears of joy, of nostalgia, or even envy. These are tears of despair. Of confusion.

Another comrade has fallen. Another secular, strong-minded, sexually-liberated, independent Gen-Xer is giving up her name to a man before God in an alabaster scene straight out of Bride to Be magazine and all I can think is, “all John Howard’s dreams have come true”. And why? Oh, because he wanted me to.

This week, the European Court of Human Rights overturned an archaic Italian law which prevented children from adopting their mother’s surname, deeming the rule "patriarchal", "discriminatory" and a "difference of treatment between men and women". And yet, faced with a range of choices, it seems that Australian women are overwhelmingly volunteering to maintain this patronymic practice, choosing their husband’s name not only for their children, but for themselves.

A 2013 survey found that around 82% of married Australian women still assume their husband’s surname, while around 90% of children are registered in their father’s names. Taken alongside other stock wedding practices, from white frocks to paternal giveaways, these figures reflect the resilience of patriarchal customs in marriage between Australian men and women; a consent to inequality which is baffling.

Across the country, women are getting married later and older, with more cohabiting and bearing children beforehand. We are more inclined to be university-educated, professional, property-owners. We overwhelmingly support same-sex relationships and profess a belief in the need for greater gender equality. And yet, when it comes to our weddings, most of us still appear happy to insert politically-correct clauses about the right to same-sex marriage into our ceremonies, then proceed to throw out our lifelong identities, retrofit the trappings of virginity and be handed from man to man.

It's depressing not to recognise half your Facebook friends list because their names have changed overnight. They have been cast off for the happy tags of "Mrs X", as if to proclaim “forget who I was before – I am now loved, wanted and owned by a MAN!”

So why do I feel unable to ask why? It is testament to both the strength of these norms and current weakness of feminist debate in Australia that even amongst our closest friends it feels taboo to discuss frankly customs which many of us find exclusive, offensive or regressive.

It is not that I don’t celebrate the union of loved ones. I don't think my female peers have dropped their principles or their IQs, and I don't regard their husbands as anything other than enlightened gender-egalitarians. But for all symbolic purposes, it seems that supposed allies in the struggle for female equality are drifting back half a century on a sea of Tiffany.

The choice to marry is deeply personal. But when publicly performed, it becomes a statement of implied social values and virtues. And when we are asked to participate in this ritual, to bear witness and to endorse it even in the face of our disagreement, the least we can ask for is an explanation.

When (another) Australian Prime Minister is doing his best to roll back women’s rights, to peddle exclusive family values and remove women from power and public life in exchange for an antediluvian scene where “an enormous number of women simply [do] housework”, the need for this justification is all the greater. When feminism seems increasingly to have become a dirty word, every battle counts - the symbolic ones no less.

As some in same-sex relationships seek to enter, and thereby alter, the inherently prejudicial institution of marriage, it is possible that greater scope will open to challenge and reshape its gendered norms. But in the meantime, the take-home message of marriage in Australia seems still to be very much "man and wife". So when myself and my fellow naysayers do finally pluck-up the courage to spit the figurative penis-straw and ask why we are continuing to swallow it whole, I will expect a damn good answer.