He shoots! He scores… a yes!!!

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/03/2017 (3135 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

At Tuesday night’s Jets game at the MTS Centre, a fan got down on one knee and proposed to his girlfriend on the jumbotron in front of 15,294 people. It was obviously a surprise — in the video, you can clearly see the bride-to-be say, “Shut up” in disbelief.

She said yes, and the crowd went wild.

I recognize that one person’s dream proposal is another person’s living nightmare. Maybe this woman has always wanted to share what I would consider an intimate moment with 15,294 screaming hockey fans, and he made her dream come true. I don’t know their life, and it’s none of my business.

But public proposals have a way of becoming everyone else’s business.

This modern phenomenon is bigger than the couple from Tuesday night’s game (congratulations to them, by the way). Somehow, we got to a place where asking someone to marry you has become a spectacle, with ever-increasing production values. It’s not enough to get down on one knee or hide a diamond solitaire in a tiramisu. No, now you have to choreograph flash mobs, or cut fake movie trailers, or arrange intricate scavenger hunts, or release 1,000 white doves into the sky at sunrise. There’s a barely concealed element of one-upmanship. “Oh, you proposed at a hockey game? That’s cool. I proposed ON THE MOON.”

The pressure and anxiety about executing a perfect day used to be reserved for the wedding, but propsals themselves have become a fast-growing segment of the Wedding Industrial Complex. One can hire boutique proposal-planners and photographers who specialize in capturing the special day before the special day. Some people spend thousands and thousands of dollars to pop the question, and maybe go viral in the process. In an era in which even the most intimate moments of our lives are curated for and shared on social media, it can be easy to forget that not everything needs to be designed for public consumption.

And it’s not just marriage proposals that have become more ostentatious; teenagers are spending their (or their parents’) hard-earned cash on ‘promposals.’ If you’re behind on your trend pieces, allow me: promposals are elaborate and almost always public stunts in which highschoolers ask each other to prom, another pressure-filled and much-hyped event in one’s life.

On the face of it, the public proposal seems like the ultimate romantic grand gesture. But there’s something inherently manipulative about them. The person being proposed to might feel like they can’t say no, because they’ve now been put in the position of potentially publically humiliating or hurting someone they love.The person being proposed to might feel like they have to say yes, because look at all the work that was put into this proposal. I always wonder how many times “we’ll discuss this later” has been hissed through a gritted smile. That’s often why public proposals are so cringe-inducing. We onlookers feel like we’re seeing something we shouldn’t be seeing. It can be hard to tell the difference between a delightful surprise and an ambush.

Some public proposals are more heinous than others. At the Rio Olympics last year, Chinese diver He Zi was proposed to by her boyfriend, diver Qin Hai. He decided to really carpe diem and propose to her right after she won her silver medal, effectively making her moment all about him.

When my now-husband proposed to me, it was in a public place — a Minneapolis restaurant — but it was a private proposal because he knows how I feel about public proposals. He didn’t kneel. I didn’t cry. Instead, my nervous reaction, unfortunately for him, was to laugh directly into his face. I ordered a $16 deconstructed carrot cake and then promptly disappeared for half an hour to call my mom and best friend from the Ladies’, leaving him stranded with a puddle of nutmeg-infused ice cream. (I know. I am a monster.) It was perfect, because the man I love asked me to marry him.

That’s the thing about proposals, whether they are public or private: the how and where doesn’t matter, so long as the who and why is right.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti