When someone blithely accepts a man's proposal of marriage (as Ryan Bolger this week famously accepted the public proposal of Tim Wilson MP) how can they be sure that the proposer is not already married? What if, at home, he has a mad spouse locked up in a secret room?
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Well-read readers will recognise at once this reference to Charlotte Bronte's great gothic novel Jane Eyre. This week's great, gothic proposal scene in the House of Representatives has sent me scampering to some of the many websites that celebrate (sometimes with shudders of horror) proposal scenes in great literature.
In Jane Eyre and after Mr Rochester's tortured proposal to Jane (and her tortured acceptance of it) a giant tree is smash-tackled by a bolt of lightning. We find that this is an omen, a display of divine indignation, for it emerges Rochester is already married, albeit to a madwoman locked away in a remote wing of Rochester's lonely mansion.
But no giant Canberra trees have been rent by lightning since Tim Wilson's proposal to Ryan Bolger and so Ryan can probably rest assured.
Going a'Googling after Monday's heartmelting proposal event I have discovered that there is a whole marriage proposals industry. There are professional "proposal planners" who will tee-up for the lover who hires them the ideal circumstances and places for the lover to pop the question.
Then, relatedly, there are cities (Paris, London and Las Vegas are among the leaders) where great tourist-attracting thought has gone into recommending venues in that city where a proposal is most likely to pack the most romantic oomph. So for example London's Eye (that giant Ferris wheel) is highly recommended. It even has a proposers' Cupid's Capsule. Within it the encapsuled lover can drop to one knee and beguile the beloved while the capsule is paused 135 majestic metres above London.
Of course the idea of a meticulously planned proposal, especially one planned to have a big audience in a public place, may make some romantics wince. Proposals like these run contrary to the idea that love should always be expressed in madcap spurts of spontaneous passion. One winced a little for the damsel proposed to in the 'Gabba pitch-side swimming pool during last month's Test match, the boy having secreted the ring in his budgie smugglers.
But I am in no position to scoff at those folk like Tim Wilson and Budgie Smuggler Boy who artfully choose a fine place to propose. For, to propose to Sandra I took her on a whale-watching excursion.
And so, out on the romantic deep there was an ambience-stoking cast of albatrosses and humpback whales at the moment when I asked her to marry me. My Plan B if she said "no" (for I can be a bit of a drama queen) was to fling myself over the side, as sharkbait, in a theatrical display of despair.
But Sandra, not even pausing to ask if I already had a wife (perhaps mad, and imprisoned in the garden shed of my Kambah townhouse) said "yes".
And at that moment it seemed to us that a dozen mighty humpbacks surfaced and saluted us with spouts of joy. Two wandering albatrosses paused in their ceaseless wanderings to perch for a moment, one on Sandra's head the other on mine, to endorse our union. Unlike Tim and Ryan we had no media there to record this heartmelting moment, but we treasure it nonetheless.
And my discovery of websites singing the praises of other cities' ideal proposal places (see for example "20 Romantic Spots to Propose in Paris") has me wondering about my own dear city's potential proposing "romantic spots". Is our young city sufficiently Parisian, yet, to have any such places? Reader, where in the ACT would you lure the beloved to maximise your chances of squeezing a heartfelt "yes" from him or her?
Proposing Canberrans will soon be able to choose (in a way imitating the London Eye Cupid's Capsule) to entrap the beloved in a bright-red tram of the forthcoming light-rail system. After all (think of the Orient Express) railway journeys are innately romantic.
Why not, if expense is no object, lure the beloved to Aspen Island and there, as twilight descends, have a hired carillonist play on the National Carillon a medley of the beloved's favourite heartmelting melodies?Proposing to Sandra today and going for a public, bogan proposal like Tim Wilson's and Budgie Boy's I might contrive to publicly propose to her during an interval at a CBR Brave ice hockey match. We are both hockey tragics and it would be bliss to declare our love in front of a wild audience of our tattooed and pierced peers.
Then, more poetic Canberrans might elegantly pop the question at the fabulous Wide Brown Landsculpture at the National Arboretum. Of course the three words are taken from Australia's most-loved poem, Dorothea McKellar's sentimental classic written in London while she was suffering chronic homesickness for Australia.
Chronic true love of one's beloved country and chronic true love of a beloved human soulmate are such eerily similar emotional conditions that, yes, as the ideal Canberra spot to propose it is The Wide Brown Land for me.
