Have a Lovely Weekend.

Oh. My. GAWD that proposal story is precious. Possibly the most romantic story I’ve ever heard, and I’m a Jane Austen binger. Also s/o to homeboy who kept the ring on hand for the perfect moment!

The creator of Sushi Go is a pastor at my church here in Australia. So wonderful to see it getting love across the world….just another way CoJ makes me feel like part of a global community. <3

Or any other variant (“Italian English” or “African American English”). Do those qualify as dialects?

That proposal is the sweetest ❤️ Thank you for highlighting that awesome story!

That proposal… OMG. So sweet!! I love an understated proposal. My husband proposed in Paris (swoon) but we were in our underwear watching 40 Year Old Virgin in our rental apartment, and he paused the movie, dug in his sneaker, and got down on one knee. It was so perfect.

I loved reading the proposal comment because that’s how my husband proposed to me so well. He came into the kitchen with the mail and, as I was opening the first letter, he started nervously telling me about our life and our love while pulling the ring out of his pocket! He had just picked it up and knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it to himself for a single second lol (he can’t keep my Christmas presents secret either ?). We’ll be married four years this month.

Such a good question Liz and one I have often pondered myself. My husband and I just agreed to get married – no ring, no question-popping, no performance, no big shebang of a surprise with a million cogs and pulleys and lookers-on. It suited us. We’re both really shy, both utterly non-theatrical, both hate being the centre of attention. I find surprise proposal stories almost painful to read about, imagining the pressure and performance of those protocols – but obviously I am in a massive minority and recognise these kinds of moments bring others great meaning and joy.

I do not however buy Cedar’s explanation above, that marriage is so hard and solemn and life-threatening for women that they deserve and indeed demand some kind of ritual recognition that they might die in childbirth. Marriages were arranged between families in the old days, after all, a contract negotiated by parents, rarely by lovers – surprise question popping wasn’t a thing until relatively recently in human history.

So honestly I think it’s just about movies. People like to feel like the stars of their own life stories and those key turning point moments (marriage proposals, weddings themselves, announcements of pregnancies etc) demand something special, memorable and cinematic. I guess it feels like something worth marking, worth turning into a ritual. And in our culture, through movies, that ritual has evolved to include a surprise. There must be anthropological reasons behind the security blanket of ritual but I wouldn’t presume to understand them. Though I do feel like a bit of anthropologist sometimes, looking in from the outside at these communal moments that bring genuine joy to those involved and yet seem, to me, such strange performances, rife with pressure and the burden of expectation. I don’t know. Humans are weird. Why do some Amazonian tribes paint their faces? Because they’ve created a culture of meaning around face painting, and subscribing to that culture reinforces the idea that they belong.

That is a sweet proposal story, and it reminds me of my own – my future hubs and I pretty much unspokenly knew we’d get married, and we’d just hit the 3-year dating mar so I figured a proposal was coming soon. He came over to my apartment on a Thursday evening after work, I’d just gotten the mail and had just sat down when he got down on his knee and pulled out the ring!! Totally casual and sweet (and we still both almost cried). He told me later that he’d just picked up the ring that day and was SO nervous he’d lose it that he decided to propose that same day! Haha. :)