By far the most creative proposal I have ever seen. The groom to be created a comic strip that once folded at the right parts would spell out the words “Will You Marry Me?”
The plan was to create a series of images that I could work on at home, without giving away too much about the end (folded) result. The images would act both individually and as a series of captured moments of the irrelevant and mundane, utilizing street-signs, strange signage and various forms of odd-ball graffiti to spell out the proposal. And naturally, when she’d ask me what I was working on, I could easily say “oh, I’m practicing my hand created type because it needs A LOT of practice” and I’d be out of trouble. The hardest trick was working out how I could form the word ‘MARRY’ because just putting it into an individual image would blow my unique cover.
When the day came around, I was a nervous wreck. At around 2pm in our hotel room, after necking a beer at a nearby bar, I’d laid the extended piece, unfolded across the hotel bed. I hid the ring underneath the envelope behind me and I asked Liz to fold it together to match the structure in the diagram on the cover.
Naturally, with my luck, this didn’t quite work and she quizzically held one end in hand and said she didn’t get it, so I awkwardly fumbled around with the piece, slowly assembling it together, like my grandfather with an IKEA bookshelf. As I pulled the two ends together to keep it stable, she read the final message and put her hands across her face in shock, which I didn’t quite know how to read. It looked like it could’ve been either “of course” or “dude, what the fuck?!”
From behind me, I smoothly took the ring from underneath it’s hiding spot and got down on one knee and told her I want to spend the rest of my life with her. The following 5 seconds felt like an hour of free-falling, fumbling for the parachute chord, my heart was in my throat as I waited for a response. Then, and only after telling me off for being so cheesy and proposing to her in Bali of all places, she said “of course”.
