This Over-the-Top Marriage Proposal Is a Giant Red Flag

There’s a lot of scoffing and scorn out there for theatrical marriage proposals, but viral videos or hidden cameras are usually harmless. Cheesy and annoying to observers, perhaps, but ain’t no thing between the betrothed. In Japan, however, we are faced with something quite different.

In a new Dutch documentary about the power of, uh, walking, we learn the story of Yasushi Takahashi, a Japanese “GPS artist” who goes by Yassan, who in 2008 traveled 4,349 miles through Japan just to propose to his beloved. But Takahashi wasn’t logging those miles simply to reunite with a long-distance lover. Rather, Takahashi actually quit his job and spent six months trekking the distance, mostly on foot, just so a GPS tracker could record his movements. The result is a marriage proposal delivered via the infantile scrawling of a GPS map.

“I wanted to write the world’s biggest proposal, and I found GPS drawing was the way to do it,” Yassan said of his feat.

Yassan’s legwork is officially the world’s largest marriage proposal, and also holds the Guinness Record for the world’s biggest GPS drawing, covering 7,164 kilometers.

Yassan is known for his GPS artwork, but marrying (no pun intended) large-scale artistic ambitions with romantic intentions feels slightly disingenuous, though it’s difficult to say whether it’s the art or the sentiment that’s so off-putting.

Do not be fooled by this twee video. Takahashi’s painstaking stunt is for the sake of the stunt itself — the proposal isn’t about her or their relationship or love. It’s an ominous showboating move, a dick-measuring contest of one, a Drudge siren alert for bombastic narcissists.

Having an obsessively detail-oriented husband is not romantic. It’s a plot device from a Lifetime movie.