I got engaged recently, for my sins, and though I am naturally overwhelmed with joy to be marrying a man who adds Tabasco to any delicately flavoured dish I cook while complaining about how many books I own, it does also mean that I have been sucked into the terrifying, pastel-hued vortex that is the world of the online wedding blog. For those unacquainted with this particular genre of lifestyle porn, believe me when I say: here be monsters, and those monsters are after your hard-earned cash.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve got nothing against a good wedding. I find such public declarations of commitment and the way they bring friends and families together deeply moving. But I can’t help but be alarmed that not only does the average British wedding cost a preposterous £20,500, but almost all of them seem to be indistinguishable (or at least the heterosexual ones do; gay couples have largely escaped this fate, through not being so doggedly devoted to centuries’ worth of rigid gender norms).

Thanks to the decline of the bridal magazine in favour of the more DIY aesthetic of social media, not to mention a hefty amount of one-upmanship, the same touches and tropes keep popping up. How can your day truly represent the two of you when it is little more than a series of carefully curated conceits nicked from someone else’s Instagram?

It has slowly dawned on me that, no matter how hard I might try to make my own wedding different, it will probably end up being exactly the same as everyone else’s. The only question is, which one of the trending types will it be? Here are 10 weddings you’ve certainly got in your diary this summer.

The Pinterest wedding

Everything looks as though it has been ripped straight from the visual scrapbooking site and made real. There’s a chalkboard welcoming guests in curly cursive, and Facebook profile picture name cards printed out to look like Polaroids. There’s a “cake” consisting of three wheels of British cheese stacked one on top of the other. There’s a basket of “wedding flip-flops” (yes, they are a thing) for female guests who have worn shoes too impractical to dance in. There’s confetti made with real rose petals, there’s pick ’n’ mix, a Gypsy swing band, antique pictures of all the couple’s ancestors who ever got married, even if they eventually got divorced or were bigamists or lived for decades in silent, aching desperation. There are giant, wooden, light-up initials, in case people drink so much cava, they forget the bride and groom’s names. There’s a photo booth. Most of all, there is bunting. Oh, is there bunting.

The barn wedding

This is almost exactly like the Pinterest wedding, except the wine is warm, there are hay bales, it is possible at all times to discern a faint backnote of manure, and in order to relieve yourself, you’re forced to squeeze out of your Spanx in a darkened portable toilet. Meanwhile, the farmer, who knows that the bridal party have never once been near the countryside and will therefore pay through the nose to get married in a glorified corrugated tin can just because it’s got fairy lights in it, has made a cool four grand.

A far-flung wedding ensures most of your family won’t show up. Photograph: Alamy

The exotic beach wedding

For people who dislike most of their family members, the far-flung beach wedding guarantees that most of them will not turn up. Those who do show up have a tendency to treat the bride and groom like their travel agent, and behave as though flying to a four-star exotic beach resort has been nothing but an inconvenience. As a result, there’s an air to all proceedings of “We’ve come all this way, and… you’re only serving us house wine.” Everyone worries constantly about the weather. Also, did you know there was such thing as a bridal bikini?

The emotionally awkward wedding

Everything about this wedding is geared towards making you feel things. There might as well be ushers standing next to the top table holding up prompt signs that read “EMOTE”. The speeches are tearful and peppered with cliches, not to mention inappropriate jokes about ex-partners and the wedding night. The readings are nauseating (“Wherever I am, there’s always Pooh, there’s always Pooh and me” being inexplicably popular). There are homemade signs saying, “Today two families become one, so pick a seat not a side” or “He stole my heart so I’m stealing his last name”. The couple wrote their own vows to include their secret pet names. The first dance is Snow Patrol, and they will french kiss for the duration. If you’re extremely unlucky, as a friend of mine sadly was, they may even grind each other.

The ‘just something small’ wedding

This starts off as being “just for friends and family”, but rapidly spirals out of control until it’s an 11-course meal featuring hours’ worth of speeches and a role for every member of the wedding party, whether it’s handmaking 250 wedding favours, chauffeuring elderly relatives to and from the reception, sewing thousands of silver beads on to the bodice of the wedding dress, or distilling the very essence of the bride and groom into an interpretative dance performance to be uploaded straight to YouTube.

The boho hipster wedding

Everyone is wearing a flower crown. There are so many flower crowns that you have forgotten what people looked like before flower crowns. The groom has a beard and a man bun, and is wearing braces; he and his groomsmen look like a budget version of Mumford & Sons. The bridesmaids are all wearing dresses in different, delicate colours that complement one another perfectly. Decorations come in the form of wildflowers in jam jars, found objects and mismatched china. There is elderflower in everything, and for some reason everyone is encouraged to wear disturbing woodland animal masks that make the entire wedding party look as if they are about to participate in a pagan black mass.

The American wedding

This wedding lasts for approximately 152 days, because there’s a bachelor party, a bridal shower, a bachelorette party, a rehearsal dinner, a wedding brunch, a lengthy service and a 12‑course meal. Everyone is drinking mimosas all the time. There are 27 bridesmaids and groomsmen, the only requirement for such a role being that you once stood in an airport boarding queue next to one of the happy couple and offered them a tissue when they sneezed. Speaking of flights, getting to this wedding has already cost you £2,000 and that’s before you even consider the gift list. All the women are on juice fasts; all the men have undone their bow ties and are thrilled to think that smoking a cigar makes them Donald Trump.

The traditional English church wedding

Bow down to this couple, for they have made the ultimate sacrifice: they have attended Sunday school every week for a year so they can be married in the bride’s parish church, as is her dearly cherished dream. This wedding is essentially unchanged from the days of Four Weddings And A Funeral. The dress is a blancmange, the hats are sensational, the disco cheesy, the salmon overpoached. But the guests do not care, because they know that, ultimately, they are swaying precariously on the dancefloor while burping neat sauvignon blanc not for themselves, not even for the couple, but for England.

The festival wedding

This wedding has all of the bad things about festivals (rain, camping, Calvin Harris) with none of the good (a feeling of blessed liberation from the constraints of society, MDMA). The bride and bridesmaid are wearing matching wellies under their dresses, there are food vans serving hot dogs, a hog roast and, of course (because the couple insist that the Native American deities smile down on their special day), it’s in a tipi. There is guaranteed to be at least one exhausted great-grandma silently wishing for the days when a prawn cocktail consumed while sitting down in a chair was a guaranteed good do.

Make like you’re in a Tim Burton film. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The alternative wedding

This is exactly like all the other weddings, except the couple have tattoos, DMs and a lot more purple in the colour scheme. But why not? Pretending to be in a Tim Burton film is a lot more fun than standing around in a community centre full of trestle tables. So what if auntie Sue doesn’t like Cradle of Filth?

And the one you’re not invited to… the best wedding of all time

Why haven’t they invited you? “Whywhywhywhywhy?” you moan as you peruse their wedding hashtag to watch everyone you have ever met quaff champagne in the sunshine without you there. OK, so you haven’t seen either of the happy couple for five and a half years, and the last time you did was at a dinner party where you were sick, and they had to put you on the sofa under a blanket, and you did sleep with the groom once at university – but then, so did everyone, so it’s not a big deal. And when they got engaged, you may have told them weddings were an outdated, patriarchal concept. But still – why didn’t they invite you? Why?