Good Luck

[Content Note: Faked injury; coercion. Previously: Liss on "Your Underdog Lovelorn Romantic May Be My Rapist" and Shaker sbvds on "The Obligation of Happily Ever After."]

So, y'all know how much I hate public proposals, right? I haaaaaaaaaaaate them. I hate them as much as I love Jesus appearing on a piece of toast.

I hate them for a slew of reasons, but mostly because they are inherently coercive. Even if the person (woman, usually) being publicly proposed to would have said yes under any circumstances, the context of a public audience when being asked to make a profoundly intimate decision, no less an audience who urgently sides with only one potential response, necessarily creates an imbalance that subverts meaningful consent.

Pressure and consent are mutually exclusive concepts.

So I hate public proposals.

And I hate this one most of all the hated public proposals about which I've ever had the displeasure of reading:

This man wanted to see if his girlfriend really did love him to death, so he faked the moment he "died" in a horrific car crash – and then got up to pop the question.

Alexey Bykov hired a movie director, stuntmen, make-up artists, and even a script writer to stage the bogus motor smash.

The 30-year-old then planned for girlfriend Irena Kolokov to meet him at the crash site so she would be convinced he was dead.

Irena said: "We'd arranged to meet at a certain place but when I arrived there were mangled cars everywhere, ambulances, smoke, and carnage. Then when I saw Alexey covered in blood lying in the road, a paramedic told me he was dead and I just broke down in tears."

But then "dead" Alexey climbed to his feet and proposed to Irena – still covered in fake blood.

Irena said: "I was so cross I almost killed him again, but for real this time."

Luckily for Alexey, she saw the joke, said yes – and the couple were married last week.

All of this? Gross. Super gross. And yet I still haven't even gotten to the grossest part!

Alexey, from Omsk, Russia, said: "I wanted her to realise how empty her life would be without me and how life would have no meaning without me."

A decent person does not actively want hir partner to have no life, no meaningful pursuit, outside of their relationship. That is the foundation of chronic abuse, in which a person (woman, usually) is increasingly isolated in order to reduce hir life to an infinitesimally tight orbit around hir abuser.

It is possible, of course, that Alexey was "joking," in which case he was merely having a laugh at the idea of ruining his wife's life through cruel subjugation, after an emotionally manipulative marriage proposal. What a catch.