‘Well, yeah, I figured,’ she replies. ‘But… I don’t know, I don’t think I thought you’d go through with it.’

I laugh.

‘And yet here we are,’ I say, smiling at her.

‘Daniel is… you know, he’s fine,’ she says.

‘Fine,’ I repeat back to her. Just what a bride wants to hear on her wedding day.

‘Yeah, he’s fine… he’s maybe just fine though?’

My best friend hasn’t waited until my wedding day to say this, she’s been telling me for years that Daniel was just too boring to settle down with. I think this is a ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’ type conversation, not that the latter sounds remotely like something Ali would do.

‘I know you think he’s boring,’ I tell her. ‘But, maybe “boring guys” are the ones you settle down with? Take that playboy banker you met last weekend – you wouldn’t marry him, would you?’

‘Well, someone clearly did,’ she points out. ‘There was a wedding ring in his hotel bathroom.’

‘Was?’ I dare to ask.

‘Yeah, I flushed it down the lav,’ she says casually. ‘I really don’t appreciate being lied to.’

Ali is a real force to be reckoned with.

‘I know you’re only being semi-serious with the whole talking me out of getting married thing,’ I start. ‘But honestly, I’ve thought this through. I love him, we’re happy together – OK, things might not be wild, but I know in my heart that it’s time to put sexy playboy bankers behind me.’

‘Well, that’s what I do with them,’ Ali says with a wiggle of her eyebrows.

I know that Ali just wants me to be happy, but I did consider all of this before agreeing to marry my fiancé, Daniel Tyler, and when I say I considered it before agreeing, I mean I literally asked him for a moment, before I gave him my answer. The reason for this is because marriage is something I take seriously. My parents, both sixty-five years of age, have been married since they were nineteen. I might be thirty-one, but I want to marry once, and for life. I had a blast in my twenties, Daniel and I moved in together when I was twenty-nine and now, comfortably accepting of the fact I am in my thirties, I finally feel ready to tie the knot.

When some women say they have been planning their wedding for years, what they really mean is they’ve been dressing up in net curtains as kids and trolling Pinterest for flower arrangements as adults. Well, I really have been planning weddings for years… sort of. Not my own wedding and I’m certainly not a wedding planner.

I’m a rom-com author and although the weddings I work with may be fictional, I haven’t just planned a lot of them – I’ve ruined a lot of them too. I’ve written ten books now, so it’s pretty safe to say I’ve considered every possible triumph, every little hiccup and every epic fail my romantic yet devious mind can conjure up.