Will you marry me?: spectacle and consumption in the ritual of marriage proposals.

JOEL FERNGHETTI HAS BEEN DATING ANNIE FREDERICKS FOR OVER FOUR years. Joel is a simple and honest man who shares a wonderful relationship with Annie. The two met on a summer night at a country fair in southern Alberta, where they were both born and raised. Introduced by common high school friends, they danced, talked, and kissed the night away. Now, Joel has held a regular job for quite some time and feels ready to "pop" the question to Annie. Bedeviled by his insecurities and motivated by the will to make a nice and lasting impression on his girlfriend, Joel decides to log on to the Internet to search for some inspiration. At http://www.storybehind-therock.com, one of the dozens of burgeoning Web sites specializing in engagement services, Joel finds:

 
    You'll need a bag of Hershey kisses, and a lot of roses, some 
    scented candles, etc. First set up the candles in the bathroom, low 
    lighting helps. Then decorate the bathtub all over with the roses 
    and its petals, especially the tub! Then leave a trail of Hershey 
    kisses from the door of the bedroom (or wherever) to the bathroom. 
    Leave a card to wherever you finally lead her that says: "Now that I 
    have kissed the ground you walk on, and showered you with roses" ... 
    (you take it from there!!). ("Story Behind the Rock") 

This sure sounds like a nice shopping list to Joel, a good place to start. The shopping list, to be sure, also should include at least one of the scores of advice books on the subject, a book on engagement rings, perhaps the services of a professional photographer, a groom survival kit, a financial assessment by a private auditing firm that should give him an idea whether he is financially ready ... you get the picture. Romance, as every relationship in a capitalist society, has been permeated by the logic of exchange.

Love, as Eva Illouz writes in Consuming the Romantic Utopia, has been increasingly commodified with the advent and growth of capitalism and consumer culture. A host of novels, movies, paperbacks, DIY guides, songs, and ads have created the image of romance as a service to be offered and purchased for a price. Romantic love, as she suggests, reflects the democratic inclusion of all people into the ideology of romance, and the division of lovers into socioeconomic classes. If romance ceases to be an authentic expression of intimate sentiments, researchers must understand its impact at a macro level and analyze the cultural logic of romance production and reproduction. In this article, I attempt to examine romantic love as a cultural rather than an interpersonal phenomenon. In particular, I intend to focus on the ritual of marriage proposal as a reflection of the commodification of human feelings. Even though marriage and romantic relationships have been given much research attention, no academic work has yet explored marriage proposals. Marriage proposals represent an important step in an intimate relationship. Upon engagement, couples shift the nature of their rapport from casual or steady dating to projection toward marriage. Just as our hypothetical friend Joel would have done, I spent some time on the Internet researching stories of marriage proposals narrated by the individuals and couples who enacted them. I offer my analysis of such shared experiences by integrating the theoretical work of Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and Erving Goffman into my own thinking. I offer a collection of themes and excerpts from proposal narratives to synthesize and exemplify such experiences. My reader may or may not agree that these proposals are representative. The very fact that they were posted on the Web, my detractor might argue, testifies for their originality. Personally, I do not believe that this is the case. I have discussed the nature and form of marriage proposals with many people before embarking on this research project, and therefore I have attempted to select narratives that are representative and particularly illustrative. Of course, my purely exploratory approach should be justifiable in light of the fact that no previous empirical research whatsoever exists.

Consuming Romance

Feeling is a social act. Linguistic conventions and cultural habits allow us to make sense of social contexts and interaction and respond in socially appropriate ways (Shweder). When someone asks us to marry him or her, for example, we may respond with shame, surprise, joy, anxiety, or mixtures of similar emotions, but it is very doubtful that we will react with envy and respond by asking for a basket of fried chicken to go. By learning to express ourselves emotionally and to perceive emotions in a socially appropriate way, we become integral members of our society.

Romantic love is one of the defining sentiments of our culture. The ideology of romance has undergone tremendous changes over time. It has moved, for example, from a courtly idea of love as painful longing and idolization to the expression of spiritual purity typical of the Victorian era, and on to the hedonistic quest for self-fulfillment of our days (Branden, 33-51). Although many remark on the rampant individualism of contemporary love, Francesca Cancian suggests that love is moving away from self-fulfillment and toward the idea of androgynous interdependence. Illouz instead sees romance undergoing a different set of changes. Two interconnected processes are at work: the romanticization of commodities and the commodification of romance. As production and consumption have expanded, mass communication has been transmitting to the public a visual idea of love as spectacle. The romanticization of commodities occurs when media portray certain products and services as romantic. A cheap fast-food meal is not romantic, but the consumption of a candle-lit three-course meal at a French restaurant is. As Illouz points out, this "oblique consumption" (1) is invested of typically postmodern values such as leisure, ...