Love in the Time of YouTube

This is both weird and endearing:



And it has spawned a small industry of production houses specialising in marriage proposals. Maybe the question of why people do this sort of thing is too obvious. The more interesting one is:

Why do we like to watch these videos, even as many of us recoil at the idea of exposing what were once some of our most private moments? For the same reason humans have ever shared or reënacted stories in any form. We get to experience a fraction of the life-affirming frisson of emotional excitement. As for why people keep making the videos, the answer is a little more nuanced. Pogue pleads in his own video, “This is an epic love, it deserves an epic proposal—something big, something fantastic, something PUBLIC!” I gather he’s experiencing the oft-cited desire to “shout it from the rooftops.” Personally, I’d be content to whisper it from a step stool, but if others so choose—whether in the form of a poem, a painting, or a digitally condensed narrative—that is their given right as expressive beings. Why else do you think our species invented video cameras, fan fiction, and Instagram?