Prom-posals becoming trendy
Social media gets into the act
Morgan Rogers wasn’t expecting to spend Valentine’s Day with her boyfriend, Nick Dunn. But when Dunn wouldn’t give up on coming over, Rogers admitted defeat.
When Dunn arrived, he asked Rogers to go in the other room for a few minutes.
Frantically, he whipped up a nice display with candy, flowers and balloons.
“Ready,” Dunn called out. Rogers opened the door and smiled.
“PROM?” read the balloons from the middle of the room.
But that wasn’t all Dunn had prepared for his prom-posal for Rogers.
“I gave her a card that said ‘Thank you for putting up with me. I PROMise to never stop loving you’,” said Dunn.
It also said “of all the fish in the sea will you go to prom with me,” he added.
Dunn handed her a bag of Swedish fish candy, forcing her to fish for her Valentine’s Day present.
“It was really sweet,” said
Rogers.
“I knew he was setting something up, but I never guessed it would be for prom too.”
Over recent years, promposals have become a popular way to ask a significant other or friend to the prom, often showing up on social media outlets giving way to new ideas each prom season.
“It can be a really fun and creative way to ask someone to go to prom. You see a lot of them on Facebook, Instagram and other forms of social media,” said Rogers.
However, not everyone is as keen on prom-posals.
Bella Gallant, a fellow Grade 12 student at Three Oaks Senior High School, felt the pressure of asking her boyfriend, Erik Stewart, to prom.
“He’s in Grade 11, and I find that when you’re the one in Grade 12, you have to do the asking. I had so many people coming up to me asking what I had planned, but I didn’t know either.”
Gallant enlisted the help of a friend to plan out the promposal, a poster of memes asking him to prom.
“He has an Instagram account where he’ll be making funny memes from my Snapchat messages. So I printed off a bunch of them and put them on a poster. I wanted to do something simple but also something he would like.”
Stewart added, “The surprise of her asking me was my favourite part. I wasn’t expecting it at all. It was really funny and personal.”
But sometimes, prom-posing becomes more of a competition, said Gallant. “People can make it about outdoing one another rather than a creative way to ask someone to prom. I didn’t want mine to be like that.”
Rogers and Dunn agreed. “It puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on people to go to big lengths to ask someone to prom. Morgan and I have been dating for a few years so I wanted to make it really special, and Valentine’s Day helped with that. But at the same time there are people who just want to ask their friends but find it hard because they don’t know how to do it.”
Rogers added, “I’m sure there are people who are stressed about how to ask as well as some who are afraid they won’t be asked. But it should just be about having fun.”