Cirque du Marry Me: A Wedding Proposal You Can't Miss

Would this be the best day of your life? Or the worst? It depends on whether you can stomach the Shake It song (which I can't, though I wonder if it's a clever reference to the Shake Shack-best burgers this side of the Mississippi-right off-camera, there in Madison Square Park.)

It also depends on how comfortable you are having, oh, millions of YouTubers glued to your most intimate moment, not to mention, how many more bloggers around the world snarking away at how he popped the question.

Well, actually, intimate it's not. But does that matter?

Personally, I think it's sad that a man getting down on bended knee and professing one of the most profound commitments he'll ever make, is so ho-hum that we have to keep inventing ways to outdo it. And I find the circus theme a little unsettling-because with all freakish cheating scandals lately (visions of rampant tattoos and super-sized boobs), marriage is becoming more and more like three-ring entertainment.

Also, I have the feeling that this groom-to-be might be more in love with the camera than with her. I asked Dan Ariely, PhD, a Duke decision scientist whose new book, The Upside of Irrationality, just hit the shelves, to watch the video. Is this crazy? "It's really not intimate," he agrees with me. "It's partially for him and her, and partially for the public."

"On a larger scale," he says, "it's interesting. As we record everything around us, we're inevitably undermining how we experience the moment. It's like when you continuously tweet, you can only pay partial attention to what's actually happening right then, because you're thinking about how to broadcast it. He could have done that whole proposal without taping it."

I do admit though, I enjoyed watching. If a man's going to publicly ask for your hand, this is the way to go. Our guy here put a lot of effort into it, and he's got some great touches-like his "I love you" T-shirt, flanked by the boys' "He loves you" sartorial chorus. It's touching, too, the way at one point, he comes over to her, kneels down, and whispers conspiratorially in her ear.

"I watched her body language and it's pretty positive," says Andrea Syrtash after I sent her the link. Syrtash, has interviewed thousands of daters and also has a new book out, He's Just Not Your Type (And that's a good thing.) "The girl is laughing and smiling," she says. "This guy went to circus school and he's a filmographer, so I'm sure she's known him to perform this way. And that probably attracts her to him. You'd be able to see if it was making her uncomfortable."

In fact, you want to see "uncomfortable," check out this live TV proposal gone wrong on "The Almost Late Show" in Chicago.