I guess he couldn't afford to rent the Jumbotron?

Here's another episode in the Adventures of The Guys Who Live To Make Total Jackasses of Themselves. It's a very long-running series (this particular ad is several years old) and has included such classic, unforgettable moments as:

--The time The Guy gave his girlfriend a ring to interrupt her singing the praises of her Egg McMuffin, or

--the time The Guy tried to work up the courage to propose, but could not distract his Intended from her Progresso soup with the Big Chunks of Potato, or

--the time The Guy held up the football game because both teams had to stop and admire the rock he was handing to his Secretly Mortified Future Wife in front of 100,000 people, or

--the time The Guy drove his girlfriend all over town hoping she would finally get her head out of her ass long enough to notice the airplane with the streaming "will you marry this pathetic, cowardly, fat excuse for a man?" banner.

In this particular installment, The Guy proves himself a bit too classy to propose at a burger joint, or maybe too poor to hire the scoreboard or an airplane (though it looks like they may be in Europe here, can't really tell for sure.) At any rate, he's not happy enough with the fact that the woman he's with can tolerate being with him. Or, he's decided that being with him is not in itself quite mortifying enough. So he stands in the middle of the square and screams "I LOVE THIS WOMAN!" at the top of his lungs (because everyone really cares. And needs to know. Odd- when I was dating the woman I would eventually marry, just letting HER know seemed good enough.) Long-suffering girlfriend, who quite some time ago learned to mask her distress at her boyfriend's boorish behavior behind a "No Really he's Adorable and Hey I'm Pushing Thirty" smile, responds by repeating the mantra which has been engraved into her brain since the day she realized that It's probably not going to get any better than this guy- "I love this man. I love this man. I love this man." Yes, you keep telling yourself that, honey. Quietly, so no one else can hear-and wonder "why?"

(And I just can't shrug off the suspicion that yelling "I LOVE THIS WOMAN" very loudly was a ploy to distract this girl from noticing that the rock is somewhat smaller than she might have hoped, and that yelling loudly didn't cost this guy a dime.)

My dream is to be at a major sporting event when The Guy proposes to someone on the scoreboard-- and gets rejected. Because there has to be a woman out there, somewhere, who does not appreciate being put on the spot by awkward, passive-aggressive, classless little boys like this.