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2011: The Year of the YouTube marriage proposal
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The Toronto Star
David Graham
Life Reporter
Get up from your bended knee gentlemen. It just doesn’t cut it anymore.
The traditional deeply private and heartfelt marriage proposal — he genuflecting expectantly, she overwhelmed with emotion — has gone Hollywood. There was even a live marriage proposal on So You Think You Can Dance.
2011 proved to be the year of the YouTube marriage proposal. And just capturing the moment is so three years ago. This new generation of proposal has all the hallmarks of a cinematic blockbuster: casts of thousands, surprising twists in the plot and exotic locations. There was a gay marriage proposal at a Kylie Minogue concert. There were hot air balloon proposals and underwater proposals.
But whether they were produced as musicals, romantic comedies or sappy tear-jerkers, they were all love stories.
And BTW, not all of the most viewed proposals were sweetly romantic. Some of them were terrifying and some went terribly wrong — like the woman who greeted her public proposal, and Sweet Caroline serenade, with a hasty departure. Ouch.
Here’s a roundup of our favourite online marriage proposals from 2011.
“Occupy my life”: Deb Zep’s boyfriend, with some help from chanting fellow protesters, asked her to occupy his life in the middle of the Occupy Wall Street movement at Liberty Plaza (formerly known as Zuccotti Park) in New York. He told her he was waiting for a moment “big enough to demonstrate my love for you, for all you are, and all you believe in.”
“The most creative marriage proposal ever”: It features an outdoor skating party, filled with odd diversions — including a fallen skater — and a handful of co-conspirators dressed as colourful characters. Very sweet and a little corny.
“Movie trailer”: She went to the movies with a friend and the annoying trailers began — the cinema verite scene opened with the clammy hands of a young man asking his girlfriend’s father for permission to marry his daughter. With a camera trained on the girl sitting in the front row we see her expression change as she realizes this is her life.
To the letter: One Montreal man spends five years travelling around the world with his girlfriend having their pictures taken with a different “letter” in each location. The large letters drawn on a cardboard sheet spelled out “We always knew.” At their final location in Montreal, friends stood behind the couple with a large banner that read “ill you marry me”. He was holding the “W”.
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