How you get engaged is beside the point
Becky McCabe and Jessa Gillaspie proposed to each other at the zoo.
Despite my recent efforts to avoid the internet — I’m trying to spend my summer as offline, overall shorts-ed and existentially free as I was in the 1990s, but with more SPF — the viral story of the week, about a couple visiting the Memphis Zoo, made its way to me: Becky McCabe got down on one knee (yes, at the zoo) to propose to Jessa Gillaspie, who responded by bouncing away, still squealing, to rifle through her bag and produce the engagement ring she brought to the zoo, for McCabe. A friend, of course, recorded everything.
Viral videos have become the funsized moments of connection that we still need, post-Must-See TV, and still delight in: This one hit because it’s the right combination of random, adorable, funny, sort of exciting and authentically romantic. Like the best viral content, it tells an entire story in a second, this one about kismet, and just in time for wedding season.
The zoo moment is also the sweetest possible answer to the question of who should propose outside of the heterosexual, heteronormative relationship paradigm (the answer is “anyone”). As with paying for dates, performing emotional labour and vacuuming, same-sex, genderqueer and/or nonconforming couples can offer the best models of equitable romantic and domestic life for everyone, including straight couples finding their own balance between the traditional mores and habits they might have been raised with — when a whiteknight fairy tale made its way into a nascent fantasy life, it’s in there pretty good — and the ways in which those are dumb.
Still, whatever identities and orientations and dynamics are in play between two people, the concept of “getting engaged” seems increasingly a little bit beside the point. A proposalproper could be a particular, singular, beautiful moment in the life of a relationship, maybe especially when it goes nuts online, but in this era, they’re kind of like a preamble to something that they’re also right in the middle of. I know endless meet-cute stories — My mom was my dad’s nurse in the hospital! I mean! — but very few good proposal stories, just a lot of sweaty hands and bad weather, long and awkward pauses while someone balancing on one knee tries to push a ring whose size he guessed at onto a finger from an unfamiliar angle. Most of them, lately, are ring-less (or diamond-less), more likely done on a couch than a beach.
Now, people get married later in life, or never, making the big-deal engagement not so much (or not at all). Women increasingly earn more money than their partners, making the ring thing, the diamond-as-down-payment, weirder. Monogamy, more generally, is starting to feel like a failed social experiment, even to those of us who still want it for ourselves.
I had been proposed to twice before saying yes to my then-boyfriend, nowhusband. This isn’t a brag: One of those guys dumped me soon after; I had never even kissed the other one; neither counts as anything on the aspirational-romantic continuum. But, when I got engaged, I knew it was coming. We had been planning our life together before we even met, and I’d chosen the ring and sent him the link. The day we moved in together, very soon after we met, I came home from wherever and stepped over a package in the entryway, a gift for me that I’d assumed was mail — which I guess I just stepped over? — and walked into the living room, now a candlelit Proposal HQ.
That night, I looked at my ring and called my sisters, but didn’t really tell anyone else other than my parents for a while. So much of my relationship had been an emotional bullet train, and so much of my life, like most social-media lives, already felt like it was sprawled out in public view. I wanted the engagement to be a private experience — I got married very soon after getting engaged, staying on-theme — because what could be more romantic than privacy, other than maybe a perfect viral video? A moment such as McCabe and Gillaspie’s demonstrates how much more important the love is than the ceremony, than tradition, than the various parameters we put on how to be with each other.
In the video, they never seemed to really finish getting engaged, exactly, overwhelmed by coincidence, but they both seemed so completely happy, to be proposing and proposed to.
Same-sex, genderqueer and/or nonconforming couples can offer the best models of equitable romantic and domestic life for everyone