Gherkin Street

By Milton Montgomery:

This morning I was unfortunate enough to witness a rather unashamed public display of affection (“PDA”). This particular PDA was a man proposing to a woman via the “big screen” at a well known venue while the crowd watched on. Unfortunately, she said “yes”.

This is despite an era when we are debating whether you should be allowed to smack your children, especially in public (because in private you almost never get caught). Yet, we continue to indulge perpetrators of PDAFs!

Exactly what is the basis for a pubic wedding proposal? It can only be because you think she will only say “yes” due to the weight of public expectations bearing down on her. What a great basis on which to get married. I give it two years, tops.

The alternative is that you like people looking at you and the public proposal is a great way to get that sort of attention. Bring on the psychologists!

I refuse to believe that it is a case of such unending emotion that you just have to let the world know about it. Newsflash, we don’t care!

Have you thought about how you are going to top your proposal? How many people are you going to invite to the wedding – two million? Is your love so deep and undying that your ultimate expression of that love, namely making love, will need to be witnessed by a global television audience – say during the final at Wimbledon? One love. Let. Foot fault. “C’mon!” New balls please!

What gives you the right to shove your feelings down our throats? Did it occur to you that several people in the audience lost their fiancés in horrible car crashes just the week before your proposal?

More importantly, why is it people are allowed to express the emotion of affection publicly but we tend to spurn them for other emotions. If that bloke had gotten up on stage and said “I'm leaving you expletive because I know you’ve expletive been sleeping with your expletive lawyer behind my expletive back”, would the audience have looked upon him with such joy? Incidentally my son, she has. Trouble is mate, she has a team of lawyers. They play rugby against each other every Wednesday.

That’s just it. Public displays of killing, Iraq war notwithstanding, are not well received at all. Public displays of anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, curiosity and acceptance don’t exactly get much by way of applause either.

Provided it was not chemically assisted, a public display of euphoria might be acceptable. Something like winning a major sporting event or seeing Paris Hilton being trotted off to prison for example. Perhaps even a quick “Woo hoo!” at a funeral if it was your arch enemy’s burial service.

Mind you, people can publicly hate each other for years. Most of them are called married people. But, can you name one couple that indulge(d) in PDAFs that are still together after a decent length of time? You can’t can you? That’s because they don’t really love each other, they love attention whereas people that hate each other don’t give a flying expletive about their audience.

Nobody really minds a good public row between once-were-lovers. It might be a bit uncomfortable for a while but then it makes your own life seem much better. Not mine of course, I already have everything.

Still, just once or twice Id like to see “Stella – will you divorce me?” plastered all over the scoreboard or “Juliet – be someone else’s!” written in the sky. I think the crowd would go very quiet but I'm sure there would be plenty of people there who didn’t mind that at all.

Personally, I believe that any PDA that lasts longer than five seconds should be a criminal offence. Seriously, there is no show of affection that need last longer than five seconds. Not a publicly displayed one at least.

So, if you are considering a PDA think again. If you are still not convinced, remember the old saying I just created, “Public displays of affection are like masturbation, it might be good for those doing it but it makes for a very poor spectator sport.”