Public marriage proposals are coercive and oppressive

Imagine you’re in a restaurant and a hush descends across all the guests. You look around and see, in the far corner, a man who has gone down on one knee, open ring box in hand, proposing to the person he is with. How romantic! Will they say yes?

Now imagine you’re that person being proposed to. It’s all romantic and lovely if you do actually want to get married but if, like many people, you are not ready or you’re not with the right person or you just don’t believe in the institution of marriage, what on earth can you do? Even in an intimate setting, a public proposal applies an immense amount of pressure to the person being proposed to.

And now, as public proposals get bigger and bigger, planned around flash mobs and parades and sports games, that pressure gets only more and more huge.

How on earth can you say no when dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of people are willing you to say yes? How can you negotiate for yourself in such a reductive situation? How can you get out of that scenario?

In fact, public marriage proposals are almost always a form of manipulation. Call me an aromantic cynic – you wouldn’t be wrong – but unless you have already firmly agreed to get married and the public proposal is just the icing on the cake, you should stop planning your ‘event’ right now and ask the person you love to marry you when they have a real opportunity to say what they genuinely want to say. If you know that asking them at your mate’s engagement party or your kid’s football game would add too much pressure for them to realistically say no, then you must not ask them in that way. Ever.

And if you’re happy knowing that you are essentially coercing your partner into saying yes, then you need to reassess your life and step back from the relationship altogether until you have fully understood the point of mutual respect.

Going viral

As most of us walk round with high-tech cameras and video recorders in our pockets these days, the quest to go viral has been democratised. Anybody can take a stunning photograph, anyone can arrange a stunt and make sure people are recording it from different angles. Software lowers the degree of difficulty of turning photos and videos into something shareable and there we are, a viral proposal.

There was the cop who proposed to his boyfriend at London Pride, there have been proposals at all kinds of parades and sports games and flash mobs and parties and weddings and days out. Each of them made my skin crawl. Because, at risk of repeating myself, how can the person being asked say no if they want to?

The atmosphere for a person who does not want to get married must turn oppressive in a split second. And their partner either a) knows they don’t want to marry so are using the public situation to manipulate them into saying yes, or b) doesn’t know they don’t want to marry, and so probably doesn’t know them quite well enough to be asking at all.

I know, I know, I’m a spoilsport. But wrecking somebody’s life for the sake of Facebook shares or Twitter retweets is a horrible thing, and even if there is a trend for asking in the most public way, keeping the question private will reduce some of the pressure on the recipient to be honest, not coerced into something they may regret for the rest of their lives.

The more elaborate and involved the proposal, the harder it would be to say no. If your partner’s work choir is singing a song while your school friends are all dressed up in t-shirts reading “Will you marry me?” and your parents are pointing a phone in your face, all while strangers stop to watch and your partner looks at you expectantly, what – realistically – can someone not keen on getting hitched do? Say yes with a view to saying no later? It’s hardly ideal.

Stealing someone’s thunder

A less serious, but still significant, problem with some marriage proposals is that they can really steal someone else’s thunder. Proposing to your girlfriend at your sister’s wedding, for instance, is not appropriate and takes away from her day.

And what Qin Kai did at the Rio 2016 Olympics can certainly come under this category. As his girlfriend He Zi was on the podium receiving a silver Olympic medal for the three-metre springboard, Qin got down on one knee and proposed. She could not enjoy the limelight for what is probably the pinnacle of her athletic career for a few minutes without a man inserting himself into the picture and taking the spotlight for himself.

She said yes. She put on a happy face. Of course she did. What else could she do?

Photo: The US Army