When William Shakespeare got hitched to Anne Hathaway in 1582, there was much speculation surrounding their marriage. But it wasn't the fact that it was a May-December romance that got tongues wagging (William was 18, Anne was 26). Instead it was the fact that their daughter was born just six months after they walked down the aisle, which had Elizabethan gossip queens' tongues running amok.
So was it a shotgun wedding? Did Will rush to get hitched to avoid the embarrassment of knocking up Anne before he had gotten down on one knee? Would he have dared to break the social conventions by letting her have the baby out of wedlock? (Gasp!)
We'll never know the full story but, according to Shakespearean scholars, the pair rushed the wedding so fast, they didn't even have time to complete the entire ceremony! Of course the urgency of it all isn't too surprising either, considering it occurred more than four centuries ago.
But fast forward to today and it's seems despite modern women claiming they don't need men, couldn't give two hoots about traditional conventions and would rather eat their own toenails than listen to their mums when it comes to marrying the man that got them knocked up in the first place, modern femmes aren't as independent as we once might have thought ...
According to Maternity Bride, one in six women are choosing to rush the nuptials and opt for a shotgun wedding, walking down the aisle with a growing baby bump courtesy of their bun in the oven.
Hollywood starlets Jennifer Garner and Amanda Peet both did it, Ashlee Simpson and Beyonce are rumoured to have done it, and my good friend Miranda did it because by her reckoning, it's all about tradition, family values and the ultimate belief that it will be better for the kid in the long run.
"We always knew we were going to get married anyway," she says of her boyfriend of five years. "And when I found out I was pregnant, we just decided to speed things up a little. No-one really knew until Matti was born a few months later, and we're both really glad we did it. At least when she was born it gave the neighbours something to talk about!"
As Bride Magazine's editor-in-chief Millie Martini Bratten told The Early Show on CBS, "Brides with bellies are no longer taboo".
Yet not everyone agrees with her sentiment. Especially the growing number of Aussie single mums out there. And thanks to Halle Berry and co, it seems being an un-hitched,
mum-to-be has never been so hot.
No longer viewed as social pariahs, these days singletons are proudly flaunting their expanding waistlines and showing off their wedding fingers (sans ring) more often than Lara Bingle.
And considering the median age for first marriages currently sits at a sobering 27.3 for women and 29.1 for men, many rationalise this: why wait around for a man to do the proposing? Why wait for the biological clock to go tick-tock until it slows down so much that it's renders itself utterly useless? Oh, no. Instead they're taking matters into their own hands, proving you don't have to be a Mrs to have a baby.
There's also another, albeit more conservative tradition, that is emerging in the unions of modern couples. It seems that for some wise folks, only after they've been together for a half a decade, raised a couple of kids and discovered that their courtship can indeed survive dirty nappies, dirty laundry, electrical bills, jealousy and the threat of infidelity, then, and only then, it might finally be time for them to even think of tying the knot.
As SMH columnist Adele Horin recently wrote, "A wedding now is like a badge of survival rather than a leap of faith". Which would make sense really.
But back to shotgun weddings. What worries me is lately the number of women who are purposely getting pregnant, or pretending to get pregnant, in order to con their unknowing gent into tying the knot, and fast. Which seems to work like a charm, until after the wedding when he catches wind of her little conniving plan.
This reminds me of the storyline in the brilliant TV series Dirty, Sexy, Money, where a young and extremely wealthy Jeremy Darling is tricked by his girlfriend Natalie into proposing after she declares she is pregnant. In hope of keeping up with traditions, a naïve Jeremy vows to marry her before the baby is born. Luckily he discovers there was no baby before it's too late, but either way it highlights the lengths men in love are prepared to go in order to satiate their pregnant partner.