The deflowering of virgins, and the visitation of Aunt Flo

A thought occurred to me that took my breath away in its obviousness.

Picture the following.

In the established fashion, a young bride gets married, and at the end of the evening gets taken upstairs, gets undressed, has sex with her husband and is penetrated for the first time. She loses her hymen, and bleeds a little as evidence of her virginal state. (So picturesque. I could snark a great deal about this established imagery, but that’s for another day.)

And I can’t believe that this has never come up in conversation (or even my own musings) before, but wtf happens if the girl is having her period?

I mean, a girl having a period is not an unusual occurrence. Aunt Flo comes to visit anywhere from half a week to a week, every month. I’m estimating that anywhere up to 25% of women would have their periods on their big wedding night. That’s a pretty significant number.

And this realization leads to more musings.

(1) The wearing of the white bridal dress – how do they manage to not stain it? (at least not in any documentation I’ve encountered)
(2) Do (or did) women attempt to schedule their wedding date in order to “escape” their monthly?

Entering the keywords “menstrual wedding” into Google brings up about 638,000 hits.
Per Wikipedia, the bride and groom in an Orthodox Jewish marriage are required to have knowledge of the menstrual Niddah laws prior to the wedding.

Whau.

I guess the answer, for one of the questions at least, is – yes.