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Nat’l Post: Why public marriage proposals are generally a terrible, doomed idea

January 22, 2018 — 

As the National Post reports

This week, when federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh proposed to girlfriend Gurkiran Kaur Sidhu, he made sure to invite press photographers….

University of Manitoba postdoctoral fellow Lisa Hoplock is the world’s only researcher who has probed into the uncomfortable phenomenon of rejected marriage proposals.

For her doctoral dissertation, Hoplock analyzed hundreds of online written and video accounts of marriage proposals.

So far, one of her more illuminating findings is that the more strangers there are at a marriage proposal, the more likely it is to fail. In one analysis, the chances of rejection were 1.7 times higher in a public versus a private proposal.

“In movies they do these big elaborate (marriage proposals) to save the relationship, but that just doesn’t work,” said Hoplock.

This isn’t to say there aren’t thousands of men and women who dream of a proposal in front of a crowd. But the fact remains that if a man is unilaterally drawing up plans for an elaborate public proposal, the risk is eminently higher that they are setting themselves up for disaster.

“Talking in advance about the state or future of the relationship would have saved some people some heartache,” concluded Hoplock’s dissertation.

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