Have you seen the latest viral wedding proposal, in which regular Joe - Dean Smith - holds up "Will you marry me" signs every day for an entire year? Yes, that's 365 days of question-popping. 365 days of the same guy grinning cheesy grins, lip-syncing cheesy songs, and otherwise doing mundane things like cooking and flossing his teeth for a whole 15—almost 16—minutes.
(Frankly I'm surprised he's not holding up the placard while sitting on the can. See, Jennifer, this is what you can look forward to in married life!)
Enough already.
Maybe I'm just bitter because my own proposal took place over a harried, teary phone call and contained all the romance of a root canal. Or not... Because what followed has been a lengthy, solid, and deeply loving partnership.
Such public displays lead me to wonder who they are really for. The YouTube element is so show-offy, so look-what-I-did, that it seems beside the point of what is arguably the most intimate, personal question you can ask another person: Will you share your life with me?
A wedding proposal is not a PowerPoint presentation you are delivering to the world at large.
Commitment, after all, is singular. It has a single intended audience member. Maybe it's time to scale back on the grandiose, and what this writer calls the egoistic, wedding proposal.
Want a Happy Marriage? Cheap Out on the Wedding
Sure, you can be creative. But you don't have to be desperate. You don't have to spend a lot of money, or even hire extras. In hindsight, I'm thankful that I tied the knot in quieter times, when you weren't expected to play a character in your own reality TV show.
Sorry to break it to you, Dean Smith et al. Marriage doesn't require a video production. Marriage—and love for that matter—isn't rockets firing in the sky. It isn't Niagara Falls, but the start of a slow, steady current that, if you're really lucky, will run throughout your life.
Image Source: YouTube
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