Tasha Dhanraj goes to her first hen do

I went to my first hen do this weekend. In a week’s time, my cousin is marrying the man she has been with since she was 15 and so all her friends and my family gathered to give her a proper send off. If I’m honest, playing rounders in a field and making wedding dresses out of white bin bags means that this was undoubtedly the tamest hen party I will probably ever go to. A stripper did arrive at around midnight, but I had long since gone home. I couldn’t be expected to stay up past 11pm after my feisty evening of Pimm’s and hot chocolate. The fact that most of the party was exceptionally tame seemed to translate into the assumption that the hen was a bit of a prude.

I must say, I find the whole idea of stag and hen dos just bizarre. The traditional image of going to a strip club to celebrate your ‘last night of freedom’ seems so wrong. Surely marriage (at least at the start) is about living your life with someone you love? If you’re so distraught by the idea of being with one person for the rest of your life, then what on earth are you doing marrying them?

I think if I ever get married, I would spend my ‘last night of freedom’ watching every Richard Curtis film ever made. But then again, maybe Hugh Grant is my own version of a sexy fireman. Maybe I’m slightly missing the point of what a hen do is. Maybe it isn’t so much about indulging in unsatisfied lusts, but about allowing yourself those guilty pleasures that you know you’ll have to compromise on when you join your life with someone else’s. People celebrating the weeks before marriage seem to be being forced to behave how they feel that they should, rather than what would actually make them happy.

“I find the whole idea of stag and hen dos bizarre”

Unfortunately, it isn’t just hen and stag parties where this kind of thing ends. The media so convincingly tells us what it is we are supposed to be chasing after, that we feel that if we don’t want what everyone else seems to want then there is something wrong with us.

In the same way that I refuse to go clubbing, despite often feeling that that is what teenagers like me ought to do. I am proud that my cousin crafted a hen party that reflected her actual desires and her own personality. But I suppose a scantily clad fireman never hurt anybody.