Proposal Ideas Worth Actually Doing

Start with the person, not the plan

Almost every list of proposal ideas is really a list of proposals that photograph well. That is a different thing from a proposal the person being asked would enjoy, and the gap between the two is where most of the bad ones happen.

So the only genuinely useful question is: does this person want an audience?

If yes, the restaurant, the flash mob and the family gathering all work. If no, and it is no more often than the internet suggests, then a public proposal is asking somebody to perform surprise in front of strangers on the biggest day of their life so far.

Ideas that tend to land

At home, done properly. Underrated because it sounds like the lazy option, and it is not. The advantage is total privacy and total control, and the reason people avoid it is that they end up cooking, which means they are in the kitchen and visibly anxious for two hours. That is solvable. See below.

Somewhere with a story. Where you met, where you first went out, the walk you do every Sunday. It requires no budget and it beats a hot air balloon for almost everybody.

The morning rather than the evening. A proposal at nine in the morning leaves the entire day free to celebrate and tell people. An evening one is followed by a night’s sleep, which is a strange anticlimax.

With the dog, if there is a dog. People who have a dog want the dog there. This is not a joke.

Ideas to think twice about

Anything requiring a stranger’s cooperation to succeed, waiters, pilots, stadium screens. It introduces a person who does not care as much as you do into a moment that cannot be run twice.

Anything where the ring leaves your hand. Baked into a dessert, hidden in a glass, buried on a beach.

Anything on a date the other person might already suspect. Valentine’s Day and birthdays are the two most guessed, which is fine if you want them to half-know, and a problem if you want genuine surprise.

Catering it at home

This is the part we can help with, and the reason it works is straightforward: you cannot be relaxed and cooking at the same time.

A cold buffet arrives on covered platters ready to put out, with disposable plates and napkins, and our driver collects the platters the next working day. Nothing needs heating or a kitchen at your end. Buffets start at £5.50 a head, delivery is free and there is a £20 minimum on the order value, order by 4pm the day before.

For something that looks like an occasion rather than lunch, a grazing table from £97.00 per crate does the work of an hour’s cooking and photographs considerably better than anything you were going to make.

If the plan is to propose and then have people round the same day, order it for the afternoon and have it delivered while you are out. Coming back to food already laid out is the simplest way to make the second half of the day happen without anybody organising it.

And if they say yes

Then at some point there is a wedding, and the evening buffet is the meal everyone forgets to plan. We wrote about that separately. It is a problem for another day.