Confess your love to your partner, not the world
By Jessica Berget, Editor-in-Chief
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe proposals should be something that is solely between you and the person you love. A special moment for you both to share your love and dedication to each other. Unfortunately, I feel like the people who do it use them to brazenly put their love on display. The worst part? They don’t even ask their partners if they are okay with it or if they even like public gestures of love.
Public proposals are like surprise parties; people are either going to love them and want to be celebrated in a public way, or they detest them and hate any form of public surprises. Personally, I am of the latter, and I’m sure many would agree with me. And in fact, many do. In a US poll done by VeraQuest research in 2016, they found that 84 percent of respondents said they preferred a private proposal with their partners. If you are unsure what they would prefer, the best thing to do is just ask. If you are planning to ask them to marry you, you should at least know how they feel about public proposals.
The main problem I have with asking someone to marry you in a public place is that you’re putting them on the spot. It forces the person being proposed to feel like they have to say yes because there are so many people watching. Being asked to marry someone while many people are watching is a lot of pressure. This is coercion and it is never under any circumstances the right way to ask someone to spend their life with you. The audience also plays a big part in proposals and also may encourage the person being proposed to say yes, especially if there is any hesitation on their part.
Another form of public proposals that I take issue with are public prom proposals. I have seen many viral videos of teenagers asking their classmates to go to prom with them and I hate it, even if they say yes and it has a happy ending. There is something wrong about this trend of young kids publicly asking the people that they have a crush on to go to prom with them with elaborate signs and candles and all that junk. Isn’t high school hard enough without having to worry about asking someone you have a crush on to a dance in front of all your friends and peers? Think of how devastating it would be to be that kid who gets rejected in front of the entire school. As someone with extremely low self-esteem in high school, that is nightmare fuel.
I think any form of public proposals are cringy to watch, even if they do say yes, and especially if the other person says no or is obviously uncomfortable. You should never force someone to go through as awkward a situation as this. Unless the both of you have talked about it before and both like the idea of public proposals, don’t do it.
