I recently found The Vom, dedicated to “Deconstructing the wedding website we love to hate.” Code name for that awful wedding website? TheVom.com. I might hate TheVom.com, but I love The Vom so I invited the editor to share a guest post here on Offbeat Bride. Enjoy!

Expert Proposals

By Sharon, editor of The Vom

One of the things I hate so much about TheVom.com is the way it creates these unrealistic expectations about what weddings should be like. Case in point is one of their “5 New Proposal Ideas.”

4. The Expert Proposal
Don’t be ashamed to enlist a little help. New companies like Go Get It! will create an ultra-romantic, perfectly personalized, and elaborate proposal — for a fee, of course. The bigger you dream, the better.

Excuse me while I get a hankie. That kind of sincerity makes me tear up, remembering back to when I was a little girl and I dreamed of one day meeting a man who would outsource his marriage proposal. Sniffle.

I checked out the website for Go Get It, which proudly proclaims “We don’t plan Events… we create Fairy Tales.” [I love the nonsensical Arbitrary Capitalization from Go Get It. -Ed.] Some of these “unique” proposals include blasting your song through the speakers of the Rockefeller Center skating rink or flying your special lady to LA and hiring actors to pretend to be her adoring fans. You know, fake paparazzi, just like in the the “Fairy Tales.”

But aside from the disingenuousness of such a thing and the gobs of money they encourage you to spend (I couldn’t find numbers on the site but putting on a fake Broadway show can’t come cheap), what gets me is this idea, perpetuated by TheVom that a real proposal must be some elaborate display of romanticism involving stretch limos and roses. My proposal was on a dirty San Francisco street corner. About 40 seconds after I said “yes” we got panhandled. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Beyond all those things, TheVom.com offers over a dozen articles with proposal tips. What disturbs me about this is that apparently people are reading this garbage before they’re even engaged. I feel sad for the poor women reading these articles and wondering “Is he going to blindfold me and take me on a secret rendezvous? Will he take me to the beach and spell it out in the sand? Will he whisk me away to Paris?”

Nothing is going to live up to that. Or live up to their designer cakes, Vera Wang wedding gowns, destination weddings, and all the other over-the-top elements that TheVom lauds and encourages. I checked, but I couldn’t find any articles on coping with post-proposal let-down.

There’s more where this came from over at The Vom.