I now pronounce thee Man and Man

When so many straight couples have messed it up, why are so many homosexual couples bothering to tie the knot, asks Lin Sampson

The wedding iconography is intact. There are deliberately aged urns at the door, an epidemic of white peonies, rows of Tiffany chairs, a lot of mist (the latest wedding accoutrement) and a string quartet.

Through the mist, now crowded with white doves, can be discerned a man in a white linen suit, standing beside the altar/chuppah/shrine - the modern wedding incorporates all religions.

Beside him is a man trying to uncloud his countenance with a sunny smile, probably pa.

Hacking her way through the peonies is the mother of the bride, with a tumbleweed of hair and a Häagen Dazs-coloured outfit. On her arm is a man with an enormous bunch of gypsophila in his shiny lapel. He has a fragile vivacity and is wearing a white satin suit. There is a priest with an estate agent's voice.

The intended atmosphere, one of a normal marriage, isn't quite right. There are false notes. The father of the bride gets muddled in his speech and says "her" instead of "him" and somehow talking about the bride as a guy who really likes to chop wood sounds an odd note.

Look, this is apocryphal, the only gay wedding I have been to took place in a registry office with Pachelbel's Carolina (apparently the most popular wedding music) played through tinnitus-inducing speakers. The bride, or maybe the groom, it's all so muddling, wore a faded striped towelling dressing gown and a turban. The grandmother from die plaassaid: "I think this is something that has come from overseas."

Even at this much lower-pitched occasion, everything in me screamed: "Why are you copying the heterosexuals when we've all made such a mess of things?" You had lives devoid of antenuptial contracts, estate Volvos, children who needed expensive dental treatment, mortgages, divorce and horrible old faithfulness - well that is if the writer Edmund White is anything to go by.

Now the new promiscuity, and I am talking gay males, is getting married. Like Elizabeth Taylor, you sleep with someone you marry him. Gay men can't wait to swear to faithfulness. They meet on Monday and marry on Saturday, so enticing is the thought of the metaphorical meringue frock.

Here's a strange thing: straight males about to marry women are often frightened. Commitment is such a wonky companion. They say: "Do you think I should really go through with this?"

They finger their antenuptial contracts and discuss with lawyers who will get the holiday house should the marriage dissolve. I have a close male friend who has been engaged for 40 years but cannot make the jump into marriage.

However, talking to gay men I encountered an enthralment and desire, a great longing to walk down an aisle.

Product designer Patrick de Wet says: "Ever since I was a child I have wanted to walk down an aisle in a huge billowing dress, a real meringue, and settle down in Windsor Close."

It appears the gay gulag is divided.

Andre Naude, a publisher, who recently married his long-time lover, Jaco Barnard, says: "There are gay people who don't want to have a dog and a child and an antenuptial contract, and there are those who love the idea.

"I wanted to get married and my wedding was a really normal affair."

However, even as little as two years ago, the idea of two men getting married in Bredasdorp was not normal. I mean, would Andre's mother, a farmer's wife, ever have thought of taking him down the aisle to marry a man?

For Andre, getting married is a practical step: "It makes no difference to the dynamics of the relationship. It's practical - mortgages, wills, bank accounts. I also see it as a political statement. You want this relationship to be recognised by wider society. It has a right to exist."

South Africa, so far behind in so many things, is very forward with same-sex marriage.

It is the fifth country in the world to recognise them and the first in the world to specifically prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.

The first gay marriage in South Africa took place between two game rangers on December 1 2006, a day after same sex marriages became legal. They wore boots and khaki shirts with snap-on epaulettes, pictured mano-a-mano, their faces as shiny as newly peeled potatoes. They looked happy but, I have to say, faintly silly.

Marriage, straight or gay, has always dwelt in the realm of the approximate, the slightly fictionalised, the deformed, even the doomed. Each relationship might be different, but all marriages, gay or straight, are the same: they are unnatural; they are arrangements, frequently for procreation.

I have often thought how lucky gay people are not to be forced into this unholy alliance. How fortunate not to have to live with the words "Where have you been?" and to be able to snap your handbag shut and move at the first sign of trouble.

A fair swap would be to give straight people a few of the privileges of being gay.

Perhaps it is our hidden selves that prompt us to attach ourselves to people who fill some need of which we are not aware, or to reinforce some pattern we cannot see.

We all want to be loved but will marriage provide this? Will saying "I do" give Jonathan and Barry, recently married in a bonfire of a wedding, a feeling of security?

Says Jonathan: "No, not really. We have an open marriage. Faithfulness was never part of the deal."

So what was the deal? What did the marriage vows say again? Or is it just a matter of "if heterosexuals have it, we want it"? If they thought this was having your beefcake and eating it, they might look back with envy on packing up the old Vuitton in a minute and scarpering.

Now they have to consult a lawyer and return the dying azalea to the garden centre, reroute parent night at the child's school, bake the chocolate brownies for the church fete, fight over the fridge, go for divorce counselling and chunder up money for legal fees.

It is impossible to get statistics on how many gay marriages fold, but two out of the four same-sex unions that I personally know about have fallen apart - one with the sort of financial recriminations usually associated with trophy wives. And that is only in two years.

Mark and Peter, Petrus and Dominic, Andre and Zolile, Charlie and Richard. When read together these names constitute another story, unique and unknown.

But the mystery is why they would want to take part in the sometimes sublime, but generally monotonised, invention of marriage, when so many straight men and women are trying to get away from it.