It seems its wedding season at the moment. Every time I log onto facebook I find another batch of wedding photos from some friend or another. But I’ve only had to go to one myself: the beautiful wedding of a friend of mine who got married last sunday.

As it happens, I acquired the bride’s bouquet. I don’t say I “caught” it for reasons that shall become apparent. But it was thrown at some point, and now here it is gently drooping in an empty wine bottle on my kitchen table.

Although I have no plans to ever have one myself, I love going to weddings. Perhaps because the majority of those I’ve already attended were weddings of either my parents or my brothers, which makes them one of the few occasions when my large set of siblings and I all get together. At some point they always descend into giggles and food fights. Although this is not, I am told, a common wedding experience in other families, there’s still a lot to love about an ritual that is, after all, about love. Seeing your friends and colleagues all dressed up, having an excuse to drink champagne in the morning – whats not to like?

And as far as I’m concerned, the more obscure and ridiculous the ritual elements, the better. In Bolivia, weddings involve setting off a lot of fireworks in small confined spaces, and throwing a lot of alcohol around indoors. In the US, there is this weird thing about the bride and groom feeding the wedding cake to each other, which apparently usually means shoving it in each other’s face.

The one really obnoxious wedding ritual, however, is the bride throwing the bouquet. Its about as close as you can politely get to public humiliation of single women without actually rounding them up in a big cage and forcing them to wear sackcloth over their heads.

Being a single woman at social events in the US is, I have discovered, a tad trying. Once your social circle settles into paired off couples, being the one single person makes you something of a social leper. Dinner invites dry up, only to magically reappear if you acquire a mate. Presumably its a sign of being able to sustain a civil conversation: “Well, we weren’t sure before if she could talk properly without dribbling her dinner down her shirt. Now she’s got a man, that must prove she’s civilized!”

You really start to really notice the strange fear of single women at parties, though.

Example: Standing in the line to get a beer at a party. Turn around to talk to the guy behind me. While we are discussing the titillating topic of whether there is going to be anything other than PBR left by the time we get to the front of the line, out of nowhere a woman appears, smiling manically and clamping herself to his arm. She doesn’t have an opinion on the PBR. She just stands there, staring at me, body language screaming that if I don’t back the fuck off, bitch, I’ll regret it.

Example: Wander over to join a friend in conversation with a group of guys she works with. Start making vague small talk with a short, fat guy closest to me about his rather boring job. In seconds, his woman appears out of the blue, grabs one of his elbows with one hand, while reaching over his body to dust down his shirt with the other. She appears to be only just restraining herself from throwing her body between us, eyes wide and nostrils flaring. The conversation turns immediately to their wedding plans.

Example: Mixed group of friends out dancing. A guy will never dance with a single women unless he’s hitting on her. A single or an attached man can dance with a woman who is the partner of a friend, but never with a single woman. An attached woman is safe, and she can dance with other guys as jokingly as she likes. A single man dances with a singe woman, and all the couples surreptitiously watch out the corner of their eye. I guess waiting for them to start humping on the floor or something.

I could go on. Single women, it seems, are scary things. Too dangerous to allow your man to talk to in case she grabs him by the hair and drags him back to her sordid singleton cave. I thought for a while that maybe it was just me and that shifty look I have in my eye. But I see it happen to other women too. I’ve tried diffusing it by addressing all conversation to the woman, but usually she’s too intent on staring you down to actually talk. Oddly, the guys tend to clam up as soon as their woman appears out of thin air too. No amount of ooing and ahhing over their wedding plans and mortgages will convince them that, behind this dowdy and fairly unattractive appearance, I’m not actually an evil seductress out to destroy civilization one relationship at a time.

Anyway, I say all this as background to why I think its hard enough already to be a single woman at a social event, let alone one as loaded with innuendo and gender play as a wedding. But then comes the bouquet ritual, which is all about herding up the single women and getting them to compete with each other to be the next one to “get hitched”.

There’s always something creepy about it. You’re happily enjoying your cocktail and cake, chatting away to your friends or shaking your booty on the dance floor. Then some bridesmaid comes stomping over to round up all the ring-less women and put them in their place. You all stand huddled together like the bunch of spinsters it makes you out to be, while all the smug marrieds and who-cares-if-we’re-married-or-not men look on making innuendo laded jokes.

A good bouquet throwing, everyone knows, should involve some hair pulling, punch throwing and screeching. Its all a part of this hilarious stereotype of crazy women desperate to cat fight their way to the alter. Because that’s what all single women really are after, a chance to be made into a properly socialised human being by getting married. So we gotta fight! fight! fight! to catch the talisman thrown by our lucky sister whose just shown us how its done.

The symbolism isn’t even subtle.

So this wedding, the reception was in a restaurant, and I was sitting at a table near the dance floor enjoying some cake and conversation with some guy friends of mine, when they came round trying to round us up. The bride was ready, the crowd of spinsters was assembled on the dance floor, and I still refused to go. The groom even came by to try and insist I went up. Not budging. For all the reasons above, and a few more to do with the “hilarious” jokes and nudges that amounted to the personalization of the command to take part.

But as they kept going on about it I hit on the perfect excuse. You want me to want to get married? Well I’ve got a better plan than catching a bunch of flowers. While all those women are over there jumping up and down, I’m sitting here surrounded by four guys. Now who do you thinks gonna get hitched first?

They leave me in peace. The guys and I hunker down to some cynical analysis of the whole sorry spectacle.

The bride stands on a chair. The women put their hands in the air as she throws it…. over all their heads and right under a table.

One of the guys leaps out his chair and dives after the bouquet. Seconds later he emerges with it held aloft, leaping up and down and cheering that he’s going to get married next. The bridesmaid look a bit pissed off. But even more so when he bounds back to our table and presents me with the bouquet to the cheers of our cynical little crowd. Ta da! We told you sitting with the guys was a better strategy!

There you have it. Work the system baby.