When Nick Buckton got down on one knee to propose to his girlfriend, Mackenzie, beside the Butter Cow at the Iowa State Fair, he must have known this might not turn out well.
First of all, she could simply say, “No,” and there he’d be in that frigid 40-degree F. room, next to the woman of his dreams and 600-pounds of congealed milk fat in the shape of a cow, feeling like a jerk as his family and friends filmed his failure through the display window.
Secondly, the entire setup might not go over the way he planned.
“Did you just ask me, ‘Will you be my buttercow?’”, Mackenzie might have said, with fire in her eyes. “Excuse…me? What exactly are you implying?”
What Nick actually said was, “You ‘butter’ believe that I’ve had this idea for quite a while,” adding, “I was ‘dairy’ nervous at first.”
And so he should have been. Using butter puns to make arguably the most serious and important offer of his life, inviting Mackenzie to be his butter half, was a stomach-churning decision and only margarinally funny at best. Instead of standing pat, Nick was spreading himself thin, practically toast already, his chances of success shortening by the minute. How dairy?
Some men just don’t get the whole proposal thing. Take the guy who brought his girlfriend to a jewelry store and pulled out an enormous diamond ring, asking her to marry him. Trembling with emotion, she said, “Yes!” whereupon he admitted he only borrowed the ring from the store and couldn’t actually afford one. She slapped him so hard, the sound startled the basset hound in the pet store next door, making it howl mournfully.
Then there was the clueless guy who bought his girlfriend a diamond ring for her birthday. What was she supposed to think? “Oh, you stupid guy,” she said. “Of course I will!” And, rather than explain the awkward situation, he went ahead and married her.
After dating his girlfriend for only a few weeks, a man decided to pop the question at a chain restaurant over an order of chicken wings. To make matters worse, he had dressed up in a suit and tie and brought a big bouquet of flowers. When he got down on one knee, the woman sputtered, “I…I can’t do this!” and literally ran off into the bathroom to hide, leaving him with the chicken wings and staring at his flowers.
Then there was the guy who wanted to make a big impression with his proposal by renting a helicopter to fly his girlfriend over a huge message in the grass, asking her to be his wife. But as the chopper circled closer and closer to the spot, the man’s motion sickness got worse and worse until, when the message finally came into view, he took out the ring and barely croaked out, “Will you marry me?” before throwing up on her shoes. But she was a good sport about it and married him anyway.
And so it seems the classic marriage proposal is sometimes not so much a celebration of an inevitable conclusion, but the ultimate test of the relationship. Fortunately, Mackenzie appreciates Nick’s jokes. They proved to be soul mates after all, getting along like, well, bread and butter. And, yes, Mackenzie said, “Yes.” Yes.