Stealing the limelight
Before you propose in public, ask yourself why you’re doing it.
Will it increase the joy and happiness for your partner, or might it steal their thunder? Do they enjoy being the center of attention, or do they prefer quieter moments together? Will they say yes, or might the prodding from strangers nudge them there?
If any of your answers are more about you than your partner, cancel the flash mob and call off the Jumbotron.
The debate over the public marriage proposal — is it harmless and cute or narcissistic and manipulative? — surfaces nearly every time another one goes viral. This past weekend a man proposed to his girlfriend who was in the middle of running the New York City Marathon. According to CBS News, reported that Dennis Galvin hopped over a barrier and onto the marathon course and asked his girlfriend, Kaitlyn Curran, to marry him.
CBS said that it was Curran’s first time running a marathon. She’d trained for a year and still had 10 miles to go when Galvin interrupted her to pop the question.
She said yes, cried (tears of joy or annoyance?), hugged him — and then kept running. In the video footage, she looks happy. But couldn’t he have waited? Let the woman have her moment — all 4 hours and 24 minutes of it, which she has trained so hard for — without pulling her over to give you 30 seconds of glory.
On Twitter, readers aired their thoughts for and against the proposal.
“This is a perfect proposal because there’s no better metaphor for hetero marriage than being well on your way to accomplishing your personal goal only to be stopped by a man asking you to do something else,” one person commented.
“The last thing you want part way through is to have your concentration and pace interrupted by anything, much less by a selfcentered guy who needs you to stop mid-race to capture his proposal on camera,” another wrote.
The couple hasn’t responded publicly yet. But most people prefer a private proposal — and most are done that way. In a Knot article detailing 5 big proposal mistakes, proposing in front of an audience was one of them.