This is a topic that might be a little controversial for some, and I understand that I’m taking a risk in putting my opinion out there. But this is something that’s been bugging me for a while now, and I can’t hold back any longer:

It’s totally weird to pay a professional photographer to secretly capture your marriage proposal taking place.

Whew. That felt good. I should probably elaborate.

Proposal
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I’ve seen these pictures pop up on Facebook and Instagram more and more over the past couple years. It’s usually a series of pictures taken at a weird angle with the guy on bended knee in a park or somewhere. The girl is so surprised! And yes, it’s typically capturing a beautiful moment in which two people are dedicating their love to one another, but the whole time I’m thinking, wait, where the hell is the photographer hiding? How long have they been there? Is this a thing now? This all feels a little presumptuous. What if she said no? Am I going to be obligated to do this? There’s no way I’m doing this.

It just feels like another step in the escalation of people feeling obligated to overpay for weddings. Or just oversharing in general. I blame Instagram, Pinterest, your girlfriend’s best friend’s boyfriend who proposed during a hot air balloon ride last month, and basically every show on the TLC network. But hey, you do you, man. If you have the money to spend and want to capture a moment you’ll remember forever, go for it. But why stop there? If you really love your future bride-to-be, then you need to make haste and spend thousands of more dollars on a professional photographer to do the following things as well:

  • Pictures taken from a nearby Pretzelmaker of you walking into a jewelry store at the mall about to buy the “a diamond for your best friend, and a diamond for your true love” ring that you saw in a commercial during a football game
  • Pictures stealthily taken of you asking her dad for permission to wed his daughter. For an extra fee, they’ll Photoshop out his uncomfortable facial expression when he sees the photographer furiously snapping pics outside his window.
  • A montage of photos of her saying no to the dress, no to another dress, another no to that dress, and then YES TO THIS DRESS! That’ll be $2,000, please.
  • Intimate photos of your wedding night – wait, that’s already a thing!

Just stop. Go ahead and take a million photos of your fiancé wearing her engagement ring. You know how much that costs? Zero dollars! That’s what I call a Pinterest-quality lifehack! And don’t worry, you’ll probably get the same amount of Facebook and Instagram likes, because that’s what this is all really about. Don’t lie.

And for the sake of full disclosure, let me point out that I’m a single man with absolutely no prospects or a realistic chance of getting married anytime soon, so you can probably take everything I’m saying with a grain of salt. I believe in love and romance and all of that, but I just think it’s abso-freakin’-lutely deranged to pay $500+ for a complete stranger to lurk in the shadows and creepily snap photos of you and your girlfriend like a Peeping Tom. At the very least, let’s make it a rule that if she ends up saying no, you still have to post the pictures to Facebook.

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