The background
Asking someone to share the rest of their life with you is a serious business. So what better way to propose marriage to the one you love than by faking your own grisly death in a car crash before, Lazarus-like, popping up to pop the question?
Wealthy Russian businessman Alexy Bykov hired a director, stuntman, screenwriter and makeup artist to stage a fake car accident, reported Gawker, then arranged for his unsuspecting beloved to arrive on the scene. “I wanted her to realize how empty her life would be without me and how life would have no meaning without me,” said Bykov. The interesting part is that she said yes.
Pimped-out public proposals are nothing new, with videos of false film trailers and maniacally lib-syncing friends and family clogging up YouTube. But is faking your own death a step too far?
A slippery slope
“We were ready to turn a blind eye to the social media Will You Marry Me?s and the embarrassing flash mob extravaganzas choreographed to Michael Jackson songs, but enough is enough,” wrote Jen Doll at The Atlantic Wire. “Car crashes and presumed fatalities have gotten involved.” Doll suggested would-be proposers follow some basic sanity rules – including “do not fake your own death in order to find out how much your fiancee-to-be truly loves you”.
The end of public proposals
Fake-dead or alive, loved-up couples should perhaps consider keeping their proposals to themselves. “Public marriage proposals are almost always cringe-inducing and manipulative, and we’re sick of pretending they’re adorable,” wrote Katie J.M. Baker at Jezebel. “A proposal isn’t supposed to be a spectacle. It’s supposed to be the beginning of a partnership.”
You could always just marry a stranger
A Ukrainian artist has come up with a novel way to start a marriage. In a Kiev Museum, five young “sleeping beauties” took turns to lie on a bed with their eyes closed. As The Guardian explained, visitors to the museum “were allowed to kiss whichever young woman was on duty. Should she open her eyes during the kiss, they would be married instantly. Both the visitors to the museum and the sleeping beauties on display had previously signed a contract agreeing to the quickie marriage”. Because romance isn’t dead, every visitor was required to undergo an oral herpes test before entering the room.
Cute or cringemaking? The lip-synching marriage proposal video that became a YouTube sensation.
Lovely or laughable? The film trailer proposal.