Woman Dumped Her Boyfriend After He Faked A Proposal As A 'Prank' — His Response Said Everything
Experts say pranks can be a sign of emotional abuse. And well…
Joaquín Corbalán / Canva Pro Sometimes, there's nothing better than a good practical joke. They lighten the mood and can even make us feel closer to the people we love by allowing us to laugh together.
Of course, pranks have an underbelly. They can just as easily be cruel mechanisms of subtle aggression — or, in the case of one woman on Reddit, not so subtle.
Her boyfriend faked a proposal as a prank, and it ruined their relationship.
In a since-deleted Reddit post, the woman wrote that she and her boyfriend of five years always had a playful relationship. "Andrew has always been a 'prankster' and makes jokes with me all the time, and I do it to him too," she wrote. "But today he took it way too far."
Her boyfriend planned an elaborate public marriage proposal, then revealed it was all a joke.
As marriage proposals go, he pulled out all the stops. It was truly something out of a movie, especially the element of surprise that came from them not having discussed marriage yet in their relationship.
"In the morning, he woke me up at 7 a.m. and told me to wake up because he wanted to take me to the spa," she wrote. Once at the spa, he revealed another surprise — a dinner at a fancy restaurant.
"We had a beautiful and romantic dinner and just a nice time in general," she wrote. "We were talking about a house we were planning to move into." Then, suddenly, he was on his knees in the middle of the restaurant.
"[He] took a box out of his pocket, and my heart stopped beating," she wrote. He gave a speech about how I was the most beautiful girl in the world and how he wanted to live with me forever, ending with' Will you marry me, my princess?' Of course, I said yes!"
When she opened the ring box, all it contained was a slip of paper reading, "You've been pranked." Her boyfriend burst out laughing and said, "I'm not ready at all to marry you yet!" as if she should have known better. The incident left her humiliated and devastated.
Experts say pranks are often a sign of emotional abuse — and this case proved no exception.
As anyone with any self-respect would, she immediately dumped him — and that's when the real drama began. "He cried and then turned angry and demanded me to stay and told me I was 'a [expletive] for leaving him like this after everything he has done for me.'"
Things escalated even further in the ensuing days. She ran into his mother at a mall, and she publicly berated her, yelling, "How could you do this to my son?" making a full scene.
Then, she began getting horrific texts from not only her ex-boyfriend but his friends and family members. "And they are NASTY messages," she wrote. One said, "No one would give a flying [expletive] if you died," and others called her offensive names and accused her of betrayal.
Experts say pranks frequently rise to the level of emotional abuse and often reveal abusive tendencies in the person perpetrating the prank — as this situation clearly shows.
Psychologists say pranks can become abusive because they often trigger past trauma and erode trust through humiliation. It's one thing when a prank goes awry and does this. But since the punchline here is basically shattering this woman's psyche for his own amusement, it's pretty obvious that humiliation was the intent in the first place.
Many Redditors saw the obvious here — that she'd majorly dodged a bullet. Many felt he was simply dropping the mask, and she made the right call by running. "This is why I don’t date guys who say they want a girl who can ‘take a joke,'" one Redditor wrote, "because most of the time that’s code for cruelty."
Thank goodness she didn't give him another chance. Because if he's this cruel as a joke, imagine what he'd be like once they were actually married to each other.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.