February 29th is Thursday this year. We take a look at the origins of an Irish custom – women proposing to men on this extra day.
This is a real Irish practice, which some accounts trace back 1,500 years to the moment when St. Bridget supposedly proposed to St. Patrick. It seems like a romantic story, although St. Patrick biographer Philip Freeman says it's wrong.
"There's nothing in the earliest sources on St. Patrick and St. Bridget to suggest that Bridget ever proposed to Patrick," Freeman said. "I think since Bridget was a nun and Patrick was a celibate priest, this is pretty unlikely."
Never mind the facts, people have held on to this legend.
Katherine Parkin of Monmouth University asked why this tradition has persisted.
"It looks like female empowerment, the premise of women being able to ask men to marry them," she said. "What I discovered is that it was actually intended to ridicule the idea that women would have this opportunity."
Parkin collects leap year postcards featuring women proposing to men going back to the early 1900s.
"They're portrayed as taller than the men," she said. "They're portrayed as bigger, heavier set than small men. And so they use all of these visual imagery to suggest that the women are taking a man's role. And so there are all these ways in which that plays to a public that sees that as absurd."
But people still give the tradition their own meaning. One NPR listener in Austin, Texas, told us what she did with her boyfriend on the last Leap Day in 2020.
"I got down on my knee and I had a flower and I proposed to him with the flower," she said. "And I gave him this long speech of why we were meant to be together forever."
Another Leap Day approaches and they're still married.