By Francis Nicholson
This guy was pretty crafty when it came to working out the perfect time and place to propose. Taking her a few thousand feet up in the air all alone is the perfect environment to get the answer: “Yes, yes, of course, but please don’t kill me.” As he starts rabbiting on about how much he cares about her and how much she means, yada yada, I couldn’t help thinking. What if this was only the second date? You’re being filmed from multiple angles, he has covered a football ground with “Will You Marry Me?” you’re pretty sure there is only one parachute, and you start to wonder if this is one of those planes that have an “eject seat” button as you scan the control panel to see if there are any red buttons with the letter E. In this context, can you really answer the question honestly? At one point, she just keeps staring out the window, maybe hoping there was a door and staircase back down to Earth. In the end, it seemed to turn out ok, and I’m sure they probably have a great relationship, but it’s situations like this wherein I seriously wonder whether they are subconsciously or consciously set up to minimise the possibility of the dreaded answer, “No.”
Though his proposal compared some other guys’ is not that OTT, others seem to blow their wedding budget, honeymoon budget and deposit for a house to make such Hollywood style productions where the climax builds up to a single question and single-word answer. Each romance pissing contest seems to be better than the one before it. It’s like the formal wedding dance that breaks into funky hip-hop; come on, have some fucking originality for Christ’s sake. There is a deluge of these dances, some of which were Broadway-level productions. I could consider myself romantic-ish, but this stuff goes beyond romance and overflows into a kind of vain form of attention seeking. Maybe I am just showing my 41 years of age, but we are in the era of video, recording and watching anything on any subject, no matter how inane or possibly private that may be.
Then we have this guy with a different slant on setting up the optimum “yes” environment. It appears his exhausted and fatigued girlfriend has just birthed a mini human, and Mr. Romance uses this moment to make his marriage proposal. With your newborn baby in your arms, are you really going to say, “That was the day I rejected your daddy?” Is it sweet, stupid or straight-up wily? I’ll let you judge that for yourself. Then, if you really want to be cynical, it seems like Dad is muscling in for attention on his daughter’s big day. One would hope this isn’t the beginning of a daughter/father battle for mummy’s attention. Honestly, I have no doubt sometime in the coming years someone will propose in space, and with any luck they may stay there.