I know proposing marriage isn’t a creativity contest, no matter how much YouTube culture has tried to convince us otherwise. But special girls need special treatment, and when I decided to ask Kiki to marry me, I couldn’t help but put some pressure on myself. I had the ring in hand—pink tourmaline, gold band—but a month or more after deciding to do it, I was still mulling how to actually do it.
Then one night we rewatched “Yesterday,” a movie about a guy who realises he’s the only person in the world who remembers the Beatles (goofy premise, I know). Ed Sheeran plays himself in a supporting role, and the end of the movie features one of his ballads, “One Life.” Here it is:
As we watched, it hit me: this is it. This song is how I’ll propose. That was a half-burst of inspiration, but how exactly would I sing it? In a karaoke bar? With a hired musician playing backup? Then the other half-burst arrived: I’d play the guitar myself! How romantic!
An important caveat: I have never, ever played the guitar.
I didn’t have a particular proposal date in mind, so there was theoretically all the time in the world. But we had a trip to Australia for Kiki’s cousin’s wedding, and it seemed wrong to wait until after that. So I had a deadline to learn to play exactly one song on the guitar. No time for scheduling lessons or studying theory—I had a specific mission to complete in a finite amount of time.
Based on some of the utter dopes I’ve seen strumming a guitar in my life1, I hoped that teaching myself the very basics would be… if not easy, then at least accessible. Turns out it’s really hard, y’all! One hand is doing contortionist acts while the other plucks strings in a particular order—hopefully with some semblance of rhythm—and then you’ve got to remember lyrics and sing them in tune. I made it even harder on myself by using Kiki’s right-handed guitar, so I was doing the picking with my less-dominant hand. And I did all this in secret, waiting until Kiki went into work or on a long errand and then pulling the guitar out and practicing until she was headed home.
I relied on an extremely helpful YouTube tutorial for “One Life,” but I’m not sure how to emphasise how little I understood about this stuff. I had to figure out by trial and error how to read the chords chart. (Is it even called a “chords chart”???) The guitar was wildly out of tune until I found a digital-tuner widget in the case and figured out how to use it.
Despite the difficulty, there were signs of progress. Initially I just pressed the E string (index finger) at the appropriate times. Then I realized adding the B string (ring finger) was doable. I gradually added complications and, after literally watching the YouTube tutorial at 0.25x speed, figured out the plucking pattern. Before long I was doing kind of okay!
Meanwhile, there was a separate, even nerdier project: I’d gotten a bee in my bonnet to make a ring box out of Lego. A Google search had brought me to some fan-made instructions at rebrickable.com2 and I’d ordered the necessary bricks, but the design turned out to be unusably fragile. I then enlisted the help of my friend Ryan, who had adopted my card catalog full of Lego when I moved to Europe. He jumped on the project with gusto, iterating half a dozen times before landing on something both workable and beautiful. He then conveyed the design to me via private YouTube video; I ordered the Legos; and when they arrived, voila, the box was done. I just love it.
My guitar lessons suffered some setbacks. Some days my fingers seemed to have a mind of their own, refusing to land in the right place outright or offering passive resistance by touching strings without plucking them. It took me forever to stop twanging the D string, and I’m still not sure what I did to fix it. Once I finally got comfy with the playing and tried to add vocals, I realised with horror that singing requires brain cells, too.
But as the week before Australia arrived—this week, that is—I felt comfy getting through the whole tune without any *major* fuckups. On Tuesday afternoon when Kiki returned from work I secretly set up my phone, settled her on the couch, and had my moment of truth.
OKAY SO I WAS A LITTLE BIT NERVOUS. But I asked. And she said yes. And I’m just the happiest guy. And I never have to touch that damn guitar again.
Incredibly sweet! I was expecting you to pick up the much simpler, gender-bending Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da that has five chords and strumming, but you went for finger picking a special song!
Shout out to Ryan S’s cameo in the story! Not that I’m buying my love a ring anytime soon, but are you and he willing to share those instructions?
Most importantly, congratulations and best wishes to Kiki! You two are a great match, her reaction is perfect, the cat is cute, and the guitar is in tune. I wish all y’all great joy as life goes on. FA-la-la, how the life goes on!