The Wedding Bouquet

If you’ve ever been to a wedding, you’ve almost certainly seen the tradition of throwing the wedding bouquet as the new wife is leaving.  In fact, if you are a woman, there’s a good chance that you’ve participated in it as well. Because this is such a longstanding tradition, I thought I’d share my general thoughts on the matter.

The tradition, in case any of you don’t know, is that the newly married woman is to turn around and throw the bouquet over her head and into a crowd of (single) women. And whoever caught the bouquet would be the next woman to get married. Pretty interesting right? But I bet you don’t know how the tradition we all know of today actually came to be.

You see, the real tradition was for women to literally rip off pieces of her wedding dress, due to the belief the dress was some sort of good luck charm. However, this a long time ago in Europe and over time, women began to want to actually keep their dresses rather than have them torn apart by the single ladies that attended her wedding.

So the newly married women started throwing other objects, at first to simply distract the other women so that they themselves could get away, but eventually the flower bouquet itself became the most commonly thrown object from the bride, and that slowly morphed into the new tradition.

Although the story behind it is pretty cool in my opinion, I personally don’t think much of this tradition. To start off, I am not a superstitious person at all, and so the very thought of grabbing a random bouquet of flowers somehow magically going to make you the next woman to get married just makes me laugh.

But I guess it is fun to think about, as long as you aren’t too serious about it. And it definitely can give a currently unmarried woman a bit of hope moving forward if they do in fact get a hold of the bride’s bouquet.

However, there is one thing that really gets on my nerves more than anything and that is the scene that such a tradition can sometimes cause at a wedding. Depending on how many single women show up at the wedding, as well as the size of the venue, it can become pretty violent as women literally are running over each other and doing whatever it takes to get the coveted flower bouquet. Sometimes women get legitimately injured during the process.

And that entire violent nature really gets to me. While I can live with a whimsical tradition that can get single women hopeful and excited about their own futures, when people take it so seriously that people get injured as a result, that’s where I draw the line.

So even if you are a full-believer of the tradition, please don’t injure any women while going for that wedding bouquet. Trust me when I say that it happens more often than you think, and that you definitely don’t want to be the one causing the injury. Just keep calm and in control and think of it this way: if the bouquet is truly meant for you this time, then it’ll end up in your hands when it’s all said and done, without the need for unnecessary violence.