The wonderful thing about the news that civil partnerships are now available to everyone is the feeling of possibility. The feeling of a world expanding as the boundaries of its grey, slightly frayed arrangements for announcing love, shift. And one result of this change, after a campaign by the London couple Charles Keidan and Rebecca Steinfeld, who have been tirelessly pushing for the opportunity to enter into a civil partnership (which until last week applied only to same-sex couples), is that with this expansion, cracks have appeared in the traditions we’ve held dear for centuries. Suddenly, doesn’t marriage look a bit… silly?

I speak as someone who’s been with the same person since I was 23, but missed the opportunity to get married when it really made sense, after a year or two when there were still patches of each other’s personalities we were yet to discover, when our commitment to each other was not yet grounded in mortgages, children and cats. When the relationship was small and malleable enough that it required shaping with the cold hand of ceremony. Instead of formalising it with a wedding, we bought a flat. Ahh I loved that flat, we loved that flat, with its chicken smell up from the kebab shop downstairs and the screeching drug deals that serenaded us for 10 short years. We got a new kitchen, instead of a ring. And I speak as someone who’s been to very few weddings, compared with acquaintances on Instagram whose summers appear as a B-roll of white dresses and hashtags of conjoined names and Cotswolds champagne, so perhaps I am ill-equipped to discuss the modern wedding and all its flaws. But I want to, so let’s go.

A wedding looks not unlike a historical re-enactment, or live-action roleplay. He’s the orc, you’re the elf

The expansion of possibilities beyond marriage means we can now stand back from the wedding and consider it afresh, as one of many options with which to celebrate love. And from this distance, a wedding looks not unlike a historical re-enactment, or live-action roleplay. He’s the orc, you’re the elf. The costumes are accurate, down to the face-coverings, as is the choreography. Rather than theatrical jousting or the hurling of lightning bolts, there is the walk down the aisle and exchange of rings. Scripts have usually not been altered for generations, these grand dull monologues with words only repeated in churches or fields and only then by a stranger with another job on in Osterley at three.

Neither marriage nor civil partnership are ideal. The first carries the weight of centuries of subjugation, of institutionalised inequality between the genders, women the property of their fathers before being handed to husbands; the legal position of married women in the 19th century was little short of that of a slave. The second is still smoky with the stench of its history as a consolation prize to gay couples when a homophobic society, under pressure to modernise, was still unable to bring itself to fling open the doors to “actual” marriage. The rights and protections for both are the same; the difference is in the language. When you enter a civil partnership, though you’re not dealing with religion, you are accepting state regulation of your relationship whether you stay together or are the one in three who divorce. And yet of course, for all my cynical moaning, there’s joy in both, for both are opportunities to make a party out of a relationship, and invite other people in to dance around it and eat cake. However, as last week’s success proves, with Charles Keidan and Rebecca Steinfeld’s argument focused on the basis that marriage is outmoded, patriarchal, and built on inequality, there is no need to settle for what we’re given.

I would push for an alternative partnership, one rooted not in the graveyard of ancient patriarchy or modern homophobia, but in new ground. How has it taken so long to get here? The fact that ministers spent £65,000 fighting Keidan and Steinfeld’s case, seemingly only in order to reinforce outdated sexist values, adds a darker energy to this move onward, out of the past. And it needn’t rely on the expensive trappings of romance, either, with its pink-lit fairy tales and insistence on forever, its promises so shallow they can be written on a grain of rice. Its weddings that cost more than the entire relationship to date, including the time you booked the wrong train and had to get a taxi all the way to Brighton. Its weightloss and white dresses, its scrabble for the bouquet as if this is the bride’s friends only chance to take control of their own chance at happiness. But neither should it be scrubbed of the ecstasy of love in a ceremony so embarrassed of its own weight that it must be mumbled quickly and explained away with death and taxes. A signature on paper, done, and what? An afternoon off work, an insistence nothing has changed.

The widening of language, of possibilities, is exciting and necessary. I look forward now to a hundred new types of commitment ceremonies, partnerships, weddings; a hundred new ways to say I love you.

One more thing…

After Danny Dyer spoke the most reassuring truth about Brexit, calling David Cameron a twat on TV, twice, an unlikely fan was revealed, with Lena Dunham tweeting, ‘My obsession with Danny Dyer is real and I think about him on average four times a week.’ Two of my worlds collided. I had to take a moment.

Thinx, the period-absorbing underwear brand, has branched out into bedding with its new $369 ‘sex blanket’. It is purple, and silky, and more than the price or the concept, the weirdness of laying out a ceremonial blanket like you’re in the Handmaid’s Tale is the thing that gets me.

Now Magazine printed the most marvellous interview with Towie’s Gemma Collins, who, in refusing to answer any questions, gave the appearance of someone who had not yet read the book she had had ghostwritten. Are celebrity Q&A’s eligible for the Pulitzer prize?

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman