Jesus.

Weddings are great for one reason and one reason only - food. There's food beforehand, there's food at the reception, there's food afterwards, there's food the next day... pretty much unreal. One of the most under-appreciated aspects of the wedding food hype has to be the wedding cake. By the time that comes around, everyone's already pretty full and not really in the mood for a load of sponge and icing. And you definitely won't be in the mood for it at all once you hear what the cutting of the wedding cake signifies. Way back when, people used to have to wait until their wedding night to have sex. Or rather, the bride had to ensure she waited until her wedding night. Didn't really matter what the lad did, did it? Anyway, in order to let everyone know exactly what was going to be going down on their wedding night, the bride and groom had to cut the cake in front of everyone... to signify the breaking of the wife's hymen. Yeah, really. According to Aleisha McCormack, founder of wedding website Bridechilla, the trend started way back when cakes still symbolised vaginas in ancient Rome. Because apparently that's a thing. She told Mamamia podcast:

"This is a very old school tradition, a lot of us don’t think about the connection between the vagina and the cake. “To be honest, I love eating cake and I’ll have any excuse and I don’t see it as a salute to the patriarchy."

Weddings themselves are riddled with salutes the patriarchy as it is. A man walking the bride down the aisle, the father of the bride giving his daughter away, and the word 'obey' still being in many wedding vows is testament to this... we just weren't aware that the cutting of the cake had such strange connotations either. And it's not the breaking of the hymen that's the strange bit either - that's a fairly regular occurrence depending on what your body's like - it's the obsession with the breaking of the hymen and the fact that all your wedding guests would have to stand there knowing what you were both thinking. Unreal. Luckily, wedding guests these days don't sit there thinking that. Instead, they're too busy thinking about when the free bar is closing - and about how much they don't want to eat cake. Standard.