Spoiler alert: this article contains spoilers about Game of Thrones

In days of old, weddings were simple affairs. All you needed was a man and a woman, a couple of rings and a rubbishy cake, and a life of unending happiness would be yours.

Try to pull that off today, though, and you’ll be lynched. Guests have expectations now, and their expectations must be met. Luckily, some of the most famous people on the planet got married in 2014, and they have given us a bulletproof blueprint. So, if you’re getting hitched next year, just follow these rules and you won’t go wrong. But do follow them. Follow all of them, every last one, or you’ll be laughed out of town, you crap wedding idiot.

Find some kooky transport

Ask any little girl how she wants to arrive at her wedding and she will say, “In a Rolls-Royce” or “In a Cinderella carriage” or “Listen, you fool, I’m four. Stop pressuring me to conform to your outdated gender ideals”. But Solange Knowles’s wedding to Alan Ferguson proves attitudes are beginning to relax.

Solange and Alan rocked up on matching white bicycles. That isn’t just adorable, it’s a complete paradigm shift for the wedding industry, and the rest of us now need to follow suit. Ditch the car and turn up to your wedding on a skateboard, roller skates or a diamante-covered Segway. Better still, boing all the way to your venue on a spacehopper, or crawl there on your belly like some sort of freakish man-baby. The choice is yours – unless your choice involves some sort of car, in which case go die in a fire, you unimaginative nimrod.

Wear a dress made of blankets or whatever

It’s a classic wedding conundrum: what if you have a child? How do you make sure they feel just as involved as you? In the old days, you would be confined to putting them in a pretty dress and having them lob petals at guests. However, in a moment of raw ingenuity, Angelina Jolie created the perfect alternative: she had her children’s drawings printed on to her Versace gown.

Now, obviously, you might not be able to afford a custom-made designer dress for your own wedding, but why not just pin their drawings to your outfit instead? Or, if you’re a more recent parent, why not make your dress out of loads of stitched-together swaddle blankets? Sure, your baby will become dangerously cold as a result, but it’s your big day and they need to understand that.

Get 50 cases of tequila for the reception

You might not be George Clooney, all suave and dashing, or Amal Alamuddin, all smart and lawyery. And you might not be able to afford a fancy wedding that can only be reached by boat. That’s OK. That stuff doesn’t matter. But what does matter is that you copy their example and make sure there are 50 cases of tequila at your wedding reception. Exactly 50. Big fancy wedding with hundreds of guests? Fifty cases. Small shindig in a pub? Fifty cases. Even if you are both recovering alcoholics and you need to be incredibly sensitive about these things, you should still have enough tequila there to feasibly drown a cow.

Obsess about the photos for days

If Kim and Kanye’s wedding can teach you anything, it’s that you should expect nothing less than total perfection. If that means hiring cranes to hoik your ceremony equipment over the wall of a 420-year-old Italian fortress, so be it. If it means building a 50ft-high box to house some toilets, then so be it.

And if it means spending four days of your honeymoon tweaking a single wedding photograph in a billion infinitesimal ways until you have completely lost sight of the job at hand and have reduced yourself to a furious husk, so be it. That’s more or less what Kanye West and Kim Kardashian did before they posted their official wedding photo to Instagram, and they were rewarded with more than 2m likes. How many likes will your wedding photos get, huh? Twenty? Not good enough. Get back indoors and tinker. Tinker for ever. Tinker until you are on your deathbed, and then make sure your last words are: “I only wish I’d tinkered more.” Kanye West demands it.

Get Elton John in there

When Neil Patrick Harris spoke about his wedding this year, the story was full of magical details. It took place near Perugia, where Neil and his husband had their first holiday. There was a perfectly synchronised firework display. And, best of all, their first dance was introduced by Elton John.

You’re nobody if you don’t have a famous person at your wedding, though obviously Elton John is a very busy man and can’t attend every wedding in the world, so you might have to look elsewhere. Perhaps Barry Manilow. Failing that, maybe Eoghan Quigg from the 2008 series of The X Factor. Failing even that, the man who was in the local paper for getting his bum out in a chip shop. Just don’t be the most famous person at your own wedding, because that will literally ruin everything.

Get poisoned and die

Ever the romantic game-changer (remember when he wooed his last fiancee by chopping off her father’s head?), Games of Thrones’ Joffrey Baratheon took nuptials to the next level this year by getting poisoned and dying in front of his assembled guests.

It really is a masterstroke – what better way to ensure that your loved ones will speak of your wedding for years to come than by knocking back a goblet of poisoned wine, vomiting in front of the top table and then slowly turning purple as blood seeps from your freshly evacuated corpse? In fact, if you happen to be at a wedding and it doesn’t look as if the groom will be poisoned to death, why not just vault across the table and strangle him yourself? Someone needs to make this day memorable, after all.