A graduation proposal? If I ever did that to my girlfriend, she’d kill me

A good romantic gesture can be a defining moment in the life of the person receiving it. The viral video of the man proposing at Newcastle University’s graduation ceremony isn’t one of them

I don’t want to sound like a cold and unfeeling robot who doesn’t understand this emotion you flesh-humans call “love”, but there’s a time and a place for romance.

It’s a difficult thing to pull off, but a good romantic gesture can be a defining moment in the life of the person receiving it. It can be one of those stories you tell your grandkids, or the glue that holds a relationship together in difficult times. It can also be a hilarious disaster that makes everybody wonder what exactly is wrong with you. Why would you do this? Why would you think anybody could ever possibly like this? Nobody will ever love you!

This article is about that second thing.

Recently, a video went viral in which a man proposed to his girlfriend as she collected her degree certificate in a graduation ceremony at the University of Newcastle. The clip was shared on the University’s Twitter page, with the caption: “There’s more than one way to make your day in King’s Hall memorable.”

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanted to do something a bit weird on your graduation day to help you stand out from the crowd. At the University of Kyoto in Japan, students are allowed to wear whatever they want on their big day, meaning that some people accept their degree certificates dressed as Gundam mechs, anime characters, and – in one case, for some reason – as Jim Carey’s character from the 1994 slapstick action-comedy film The Mask.

Or, take a recent incident at the University of Sussex, when a graduate challenged television actor Sanjeev Bhaskar – who is chancellor of the university and so was present on stage – to a push up contest. Bhaskar, being a good chancellor and an even better comedian, enthusiastically accepted the challenge, making the moment a little more special for that student.

The difference between these sorts of episodes and what happened at Newcastle really comes down to a question of agency. It’s one thing to choose to do something wild to commemorate a huge achievement that you’ve worked the past three plus years to secure. It’s entirely another to gatecrash somebody else’s moment, even if your intentions are ostensibly good.

Whether you meant to or not, you’ve made yourself a part of something that really has nothing to do with you. You’ve piggybacked over the finish line at the end of a gruelling marathon. “Look at me, everybody!” you say, to a crowd who has no reason to care that you exist, “I was here too!”

What if she’d said no? What if they break up? Now all those pictures of her special moment are going to be tainted by the presence of “that guy, from the graduation thing. Do you remember that? Yikes”.

Not to mention the optics of going up to a woman in the moment she accomplishes something great in her career, and immediately stuffing her into a big box labelled “my wife”. Whether he meant to or not, by walking up there and announcing to the world his intention to make this poor woman an extension of himself, this guy just set feminism back about 60 years.

My partner is in the final stages of her PhD, and I can tell you without a single ounce of doubt that if I jumped up on stage and proposed in her moment of triumph, she’d kill me on the spot. And she’d be right to do it. I’ve seen how hard she’s worked for this thing. Not a single jury in the world would convict her. They’d probably give her a second doctorate.

People tend to think that romantic comedies are giving women unrealistic expectations of what men should do for them in a relationship, but that isn’t true. Women can enjoy John Cusack turning up outside Ione Skye’s bedroom with a boombox in Say Anything, blasting Peter Gabriel and getting soaked by a conveniently timed rain shower, while also understanding that if that happened to them in real life they’d probably send their dad out there with a baseball bat and a pocketful of bad intentions.

Many men did not learn this lesson. The romantic parts of their brains crossed wires with the stupid, impulsive, horny parts of their brains, and they’ve convinced themselves that the only way to secure a woman is to do something impulsive and stupid in front of as many people as possible. Gestures like proposing at a graduation ceremony are like a cheat code to romance. Why put the work in, when you can just declare your love as loudly as possible? Appropriate context? What’s that?

It’s worth pointing out that the girl in the video said yes, so maybe I’m just a humourless, unmarried 30-something who resents the young and their unbridled joy. I’m pretty sure, though, that for every time a girl accepts a proposal in a situation like this there are 50 incidents where she karate chops the guy as hard as she can and then never speaks to him again.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe women love it when you bum rush them as they’re being given their “you’re very smart” award so that you can do something that they were expecting you to do during an expensive holiday in Dubai. Maybe they love it when their graduation is the second most important and memorable thing about their graduation. Who knows? Love is a boundless mystery.