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GARBO: . . . Wait, wait . . . what’s the hurry? Let us be happy . . . give us our moment … we are happy, aren’t we, Leon?

LEON: (adoringly) Yes, sweetheart. (He folds her in his arms)

GARBO: So happy .. .

WILL YOU MARRY ME?’ — ‘YES!’ In this simple question and answer lies the highest expression of human love. This is the moment when the deepest feelings are declared, and lovers claim their full rights in one another. It’s the moment when you roll up the map of your future and send it back to be redrawn, the moment of piercing joy when you know that your dearest friend wants to go forward with you and be at your side always.

The celebration of this special event has resulted in some of the richest episodes in life and literature. With a proposal of marriage, lovers stand at a crossroads of their lives. Backwards they can see all the chances and episodes that have led them here — forward lie all the adventures that they will share together as a couple. This sense of the past and the future intersecting makes the proposal a unique occasion, a moment out of time, outside time.

Garbo speaks for all lovers when she says, ‘give us our moment‘. As the world is turned upside down and the powerful feelings of love and joy come thronging in, everyone needs that still, perfect occasion when their two hearts become one in a memory that will live for ever. So what is the ideal proposal? How can the offer of marriage be made worthy of being cherished in loving thoughts, wrapped up in mental cotton-wool for the years ahead?

Maxim de Winter, the hero of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, thinks he knows. After making a superbly romantic proposal to the heroine, he intensifies the romance of it all by asking her:

This isn’t at all your idea of a proposal, is it? It should be in a conservatory, you in a white frock with a red rose in your hand and a violin playing in the distance, and I should be making violent love to you behind a palm tree — poor darling, never mind.

She doesn’t, of course. But this version must be quite close to the ideal, since exactly the same themes come up in other proposals. Louis MacNeice in Les Sylphides takes his girl to the ballet, where his feelings blend in with the exquisite grace of the dancers:

Now, he thought, we are floating — ageless, oarless — Now there is no separation from now on

You will be wearing white

Satin and a red sash

Under the waltzing trees

Is this how we’d all like it to be, floating in joy yet frozen in the experience of discovering it, like the lovers on Keats’s Grecian urn?

When the time, the place and the people are right, nothing can prevent the marriage moment from achieving its rightful immortality. H. G. Wells leads his hero, Kipps, through a series of adventures, but none so glorious as his proposal to the lovely Helen. They have climbed to the top of an old castle in Kent, and here, ‘high out of the world of every day and in the presence of spacious beauty’, Kipps rises to the occasion he has been longing for:

`You will marry me?’

`Yes,’ she laughed, and ‘Yes.’

All the world that evening was no more than a shadowy frame of darkling sky and water and dripping boughs about Helen. He seemed to see through things with an extraordinary clearness; she was revealed to him certainly, as the cause and essence of it all. He was indeed at his Heart’s Desire. It was one of those times when there seems to be no future, when time has stopped and we are at the end. Kipps, that evening, could not have imagined a tomorrow — all that his imagination had pointed towards was attained. His mind stood still, and took the moments as they came.

Like the romantic that he is, Kipps has unconsciously chosen an ideal setting for his proposal. The old castle, the woodland and the river by night all lend their magic to the occasion. But the ravishing natural backdrop is not an essential requirement. When the time is right it can come anywhere, and both lovers will recognize and rise to the destiny that is to make them partners in the fullest sense.

In the most intense experience of coming together, true lovers can even dispense with words to plight their troth. Scott Fitzgerald shows his genius as the world’s leading romancier when he gives us the moment without the words at the engagement of two of his Jazz Age lovers in The Beautiful and Damned:

But oh, Anthony’s face as he walked down the tenth floor corridor of the Plaza that night! His dark eyes were gleaming — around his mouth were lines it was a kindness to see. He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years. He knocked, and at a word, entered. Gloria, dressed in simple pink, starched and fresh as a flower, was across the room, standing very still, and looking at him wide-eyed.

As he closed the door behind him, she gave a little cry, and moved swiftly over the intervening space, her arms rising in a premature caress as she came near. Together they crushed out the stiff folds of her dress in one triumphant and enduring embrace.

. . one of those immortal moments whose light is enough to see by for years’ — that is the ideal of the proposal, so that in time to come the shadow of a smile, the memory of a body, a melody or a scent on the breeze are enough to recall that unique and life-changing emotional climax.

For a marriage proposal is both an end and a beginning. It’s both a blinding flash of illumination and the recognition of something obvious that has been there all along, all your life as it seems, the need for the other person. All this in one moment — no wonder that it has been so written about, so treasured up. It’s something no one would want to forget. As the heroine says, in Rebecca again,

. . . there should be an invention that bottles up a memory like a perfume, and it never faded, never got stale, and whenever I wanted to I could uncork the bottle, and live the memory all over again . . .

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