Leap Year 2020: Why can a woman propose on February 29?
WOMEN don't traditionally tend to be the ones to propose, but there are two days every decade when girls can take control and have their man fanning the tears instead.
Luckily for girls who are getting fed up of waiting for their man to take the initiative and pop the question, 2020 happens to be a leap year.
How many days in a leap year?
A leap year is once every four years and consists of 366 days, instead of the usual 365.
We add a day onto February, which has 29 this year, to keep the calendar year in check with the solar year.
The solar, or astronomical year, is the time it takes Earth to go exactly once around the sun: 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds.
What is a leap year?
The leap year is a nifty timing trick added by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 when he introduced the Gregorian callendar,
We work according to this adaptation of the Roman Julian Calendar, named after Ceasar in 46BC.
The leap year is designed to keep us from falling out of synch with the seasons over the course of centuries.
The extra day has been there since 46BC, but a little miscalculation by the Romans who missed the mark by 11 minutes every year, then over compensated, resulted in us being roughly 11 days behind by Pope Gregory's time.
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This meant that people found themselves sewing their crops at the wrong time and the seasons started shifting artificially.
To get around this, the Italian scientist who developed Pope Gregory's calendar, Aloysus Lilius, adapted it to add leap days in years divisible by four, unless the year is also divisible by 100.
If the year is also divisible by 400, like this one, a leap day is added regardless.
What's the tradition behind leap year proposals?
The tradition is believed to date back to the 5th century when an Irish nun called St Bridget was getting sick of women having to wait too long for their man to propose.
She lobbied St Patrick until he was nice enough to give her one day in February, but only the one that occurs once every four years, when women were allowed to propose.
This does beg the question of how long men at the time wanted to wait if that was considered enough of a relief that the issue was dropped at this point.
However, giving women one day in 1,461 to take control of the direction of their relationship was still a bit liberal for the times apparently.
St Patrick weaved in a bit of fine print to be adhered to by proposing ladies: an early warning system for particularly altar-phobic men, if you will.
Traditional rules say women either have to wear breeches or a scarlet petticoat to pop the question.
Good luck.
