“Do you wanna marry me? We can go to the courthouse tomorrow.” That is the line a woman says a man called across a Walmart parking lot while she was getting into her car with her snacks, seconds after one of the two boys with him had asked her the same question on his behalf.
Kelly, who posts as @kellybrooke.m, told the story in a video posted on March 1 under on-screen text reading “I got proposed to in the Walmart parking lot last night???” She says she is recording with the encounter “fresh off the press, 30 minutes on the brain,” and her caption is three words: “life isn’t real.”
She had finished a shift and stopped at Walmart because it is on her way home. “Sometimes I want a snack after I’m done working,” she says. She went through self checkout, paid, and stayed to chat with the employee she calls her favorite Walmart cashier. She stops in often enough, she says, “that they know my name and get excited to see me.”
While the two of them were talking, a man and two young boys walked past and told them to have a great night. Kelly assumed he was “lumping me in with the Walmart employees.” She said it back, and so did the cashier.
When she walked out and got into her car, she noticed the same man loading groceries into his car, parked on the opposite corner from hers, so the two of them were facing each other. A woman sat in the car next to Kelly’s with her window cracked. Kelly heard the man say something that included the word “marry,” so she leaned back out of her car and asked whether he was talking to her. By then, she says, she thought he might believe he knew her, which would have explained the goodnight inside the store.
He did not answer. One of the boys did: “Do you wanna marry him?” The man then repeated the question himself and added the courthouse offer. At this point in the video Kelly backs away from the camera with both hands on her head, then drops to the floor and sits cross legged in the middle of the room.
Her reply in the parking lot was shorter. “That’s a really interesting way to ask a girl out. Have a good night.” She got in, closed the door and started laughing. When she looked to her left, she says, the woman in the next car was laughing just as hard. Kelly opens the video by thanking her “for your solidarity in that moment.”
She had turned the car on and was about to reverse when she saw one of the boys walking up to her door. She puts his age at “maybe 13 max.” “I’m not gonna ignore a 13 year old standing outside of my door,” she says, so she rolled the window down. He handed her a business card. A typed correction on screen, “the guy*,” makes clear the card was the man’s.
Kelly is firm about how she wants the story taken. “I do not want to demonize this interaction,” she says. “At the end of the day, this guy didn’t do anything creepy. He didn’t pressure me, he didn’t coerce me. He just asked a question and gave me his phone number.” She is telling it, she says, because it is “so outlandish and funny to me.” She does not say whether she plans to use the number.
What Kept a Parking Lot Proposal Funny Instead of Frightening
Kelly’s own list of what the man did right works as a checklist for anyone thinking about approaching a stranger they would like to see again.
Ask once. He asked his question, she answered with “Have a good night,” and he did not ask again or argue with the answer. That single ask is what she means by “he didn’t pressure me.”
Stay where you are. In her telling he spoke from his own car on the far corner of the lot while she stood at hers. He never walked up to her door or stood between her and the driver’s seat, and she was able to end the conversation by getting in and closing it.
Give your number instead of asking for hers. A card handed over leaves the next move with the person holding it, and she can make that decision later, at home, with nobody waiting on an answer. If you do not carry cards, a name and number on a slip of paper does the same job.
Two parts of his approach are worth doing differently. When Kelly asked, “Are you talking to me?” a child answered for him, and a child also delivered the card. By her account she rolled the window down because she would not ignore a 13 year old, which is a reason that has nothing to do with the man. Answer the direct question yourself, say your name, and hand over your own card.
The timing is the other part. He had already passed her once inside, under the store lights, while she was relaxed and chatting at the registers, and all he said there was “have a great night.” The real question came after she was alone at her car. If you want to talk to someone, the moment when she is already mid conversation in a public spot is the easier one for her.
For anyone on the receiving end, the order Kelly did things in is worth copying. She asked her clarifying question from beside her own open door. She gave one polite line that closed the subject. She got in and shut the door before she let herself laugh. When the boy came over, the engine was already running and she lowered the window instead of opening the door.
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