Half Decent Proposal: Part One
As with many aspects of life these days, men are increasingly challenged by the modern marriage proposal. It must be always bigger yet more intimate, original but classic, a surprise but not a shock, romantic but not cheesy, something you’ve thought of yourself that was exactly what she always wanted. You won’t have time to worry about minor details like her answer. With expectations so high, I wish now I’d given myself a break and realised sooner that a not-quite-as-planned proposal can still be perfect.
I’d been mulling over popping the question for some months when we organised our holiday to New York, which we’d been wanting to visit for years, and so it was I thought the ideal opportunity. We were going with Hannah’s sister and her fella, so I subtly suggested we have a day where each couple did our own thing and set about preparing perfection.
First thing was breakfast at Ellen’s Stardust Diner which is a kitschy 50’s kind of place with singing waitresses. Fear not, dear reader. I didn’t do anything horrendous like grab a microphone and serenade her with ‘Hopelessly Devoted To You’ from Grease (although I did sing a bit of that when I went to try out the place on my own the previous day. True fact.) This was just a bit of fun and, quite frankly, I needed an obscenely large stack of pancakes with bacon and several pots of coffee to set me up for the day.
Being an attentive, caring boyfriend I notice things about my beloved, such as the fact that Hannah loves stars (the shooting star tattoo was a bit of a clue) so I had booked tickets for a big planetarium show at the Natural History Museum. The museum sprawls over a big old area and, for a large domed building, the planetarium is very hard to find. I ran around in a barely concealed panic for a few minutes and, having got directions whilst trying to conceal from Hannah where we were going (not easy) we arrived just before the Big Bang.
I had imagined it would have all the romance of starring into the night sky, but better; with front row seats for the birth of the universe itself. We certainly had all that but shared it with a hundred or so over excited and vocal Brooklyn school kids, buzzing on luminous Mountain Dew. And crack. Probably. As regular readers will know, I am not Ross from Friends and, while I am usually glad of this fact, when he wooed Rachel in that very same planetarium, he could turn of the commentary, whereas I could not.
So as we sat hand in hand and gazed at the wonder of creation, Whoopie Goldberg was giving us the science bit throughout, which was very truly fascinating but took some of the romance out of it. A plain “Your eyes sparkle like stars,” for instance, sounds better than “Your eyes seem to be producing massive amounts of energy by converting hydrogen to helium in a process of nuclear fusion.”
It was only midday and I had already been lost and consequently flustered, then deafened by a combination of hyperactive school kids and Whoopie Goldberg channelling Stephen Hawking. By now I was beginning to let the pressure get the better of me. Without wanting to sound immodest I was pretty confident the answer would be yes (I am, as you can’t fail to notice, devastatingly attractive) but I was increasingly worried the day wasn’t going well enough romance wise.
This was only going to happen once and by now my intended should be starring with rapture into my eyes, wondering how she ever managed without me to make her feel so special. As it was she was half-heartedly browsing the gift shop. Hannah was having a nice time so far, but ‘nice’ didn’t cut it, not today. I was aiming for heart melting demonstrations of love that matched up to the greats.
One of the things Juliet didn’t say when Romeo turned up under her window was “well, this is nice.” On the prow of the Titanic, as Di Capprio embraced Winslet, she did not, if I recall, describe it as “nice.” As the time to actually pop the all-important question approached, I was actually starting to feel a little worried this wasn’t good enough, unless I could pull something spectacular out of the bag in the next hour or two.
How will it go? What will I think of? Will she say yes? Well, OK, she is going to say yes because I’m blogging as a groom, but still – cliffhanger eh? Stay tuned for Part 2: Senseless Park.
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