That Viral Photo of the Guy Proposing at Someone Else’s Wedding Is the Exact Moment Love Died

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Been thinking a lot about this photo of a man proposing to his girlfriend today. We all have. Because weddings are great, aren't they? They are big parties people throw to boast about the fact that they've found a tiny scrap of love in this dark and horrible world. A glimmer of hope in the ocean of despair. "I fuck this," people say, proudly, when they are getting married. "I am going to fuck this forever. Now I want you all to have some champagne my dad bought wholesale from a big Costco." Everyone says cheers. The dad says, "This is good champagne, this—to think it only cost me £8 a bottle." The dad is really hitting the champagne now. "It's not about the quality, it's about the cost." He's slurring now, he's swinging at the ushers. "DO YOU KNOW," the dad is saying, "HOW MUCH A BASTARD WEDDING COSTS?" He is taken behind a big marquee by a waiter to calm down. Someone's nan falls over dancing. Someone else is sick. Weddings are excellent.

This wedding does not look too excellent, because there is a dude in the middle of it, proposing to his girlfriend. I mean, that is not the done thing, at a wedding. Vomiting, or crying, or howling bouts of nip-to-the-toilets inter-bridal party sex: that is accepted. Eating a just enormous—a just inhuman—amount of cake: OK. Proposing to someone in an orange dress while you are wearing an overlarge turquoise dress shirt: no. Bad. No.

Zoom in and focus on the bride's face. Peep that rictus grin. Here, let's CSI zoom-and-enhance that sucker:

There are a lot of emotions going on here. This is a face of a hundred emotions. The most primary one, though, is a very pure form of hatred. A very clear and clean form of hate. There's some real venom there. I get the vibe—and this is guesswork, because they have not yet developed still cameras that capture noises—I extremely get the vibe that this bride is currently hissing. And if I was to guess what she was hissing, it would be: "Human beings are a disease."

Related: Watch our documentary about the American divorce industry, 'Heartbreak Hustle'

Now let's look at the wider photo and dissect:

i. There does not appear to be anybody else at this wedding. I am very serious about this. If you squeeze the contrast and perk up the levels, you will see there are two people at this wedding other than the bride, groom, and future bride/groom: the photographer, the specter behind the flash bang, and some guy who's too involved with his pasta dish that he cannot even be bothered to turn around and look at the proposal happening literally right in front of him. That is not a good turn out.

ii. Pasta Guy is my man. This is a dude I can relate to. Because are we all not exhausted by the concept of love? It is in every film and every book. People are slow motion kissing in the rain all the goddamn time. Have you read a paper recently? It is people having babies and getting married. It is people saying how joyous life is when the chemicals in their brains tell them this horniness is for real. But Pasta Guy is like: "Fuck this garbage!" He has tucked a napkin into his shirt to protect his only tie. "This linguine is exceptionally legit! I am not turning away from this to watch some woman get proposed to!" Pasta Guy is possibly—and I don't want to say it—but possibly a hero for the ages. This man should be given the Victoria Cross.

iii. The dude who just got married has the kind of goatee beard a bassist from an exceptionally mediocre college metal band rocks when he gets his first job in accountancy. Obviously: congratulations on getting married, my man. I'm sure your day was special and your love is pure and true. That said: who wakes up on their wedding day, looks in the mirror at that goatee beard, and goes: 'Yep, that's the one for me.' Look how much effort his bride has made. 'I'm just going to rock a beard Fred Durst would be ashamed to wear in the 2000s,' he is thinking. 'I'm going to wear a beard that says, 'I took—and still do take—The Matrix Trilogy extremely seriously.'

iv. There is no actual evidence that this woman accepted this proposal, based on her face. Her face could be saying anything. It could be saying, "Oh my goodness, this is brilliant." But it could also be containing a quick-trigger spray of vomit. We do not know.

Consider the two dudes in this photo: we are going to call the turquoise one Larry and the married one Carl Johnny John-John Jr. Judging by what appears to be a fucking starfish lapel badge, Larry and John-John are tite. How does "tite" differ from being "tight"? It is titer. Throw in the fact that there are no other humans at this wedding and it is safe to assume that Larry is the best man. Throw in the fact that this is the best man and you can assume they talked about this on the stag-do.

The stag-do, I think it's safe to assume here, was these two men, sat on the roof of a caravan, throwing their empty beer bottles at dogs.

Again, that's not a slur. We all have fun in a different way. But can you see these guys flying to Latvia for "one last night of fun"? No. One of them almost certainly had to wake up early to fix a large piece of machinery. Another has definitely killed fish with dynamite before. The stag-do was a simple affair, where these words happened: "Yo, so bro, so yo, I'm gonna propose to Jeanette"—I am assuming his girlfriend's name is Jeanette—"I'm gonna propose to Jeanette at your wedding." And the dude whose wedding it was—it was his stag night, remember, he was probably eight Coors Light deep by now, surrounded by the corpses of stray bottled dogs—said: "This is a good idea."

Let's revisit the face of the bride.

Nobody told this woman that this was happening. "But she's smiling," you're saying. "She isn't screaming, like, at all. How do you know she is mad about this?" Look at the eyebrows. These are not the eyebrows of a human being at peace. These are the eyebrows of someone facing a room with four other people in it—Larry, Jeanette, Photo Specter, Pasta Guy—fully aware that they don't care how special her day is. She spent months planning this day—years imagining it, in scrap books, and on Pinterest—and what is the most memorable moment? The most memorable moment is someone else getting proposed to by a man in a fucking turquoise shirt.

This photo says a lot about human nature. This photo is the exact moment that social etiquette gets cracked in two. This photo is, when you think about it, the exact last moment the love of these two people was simple and true. Because since it went viral—it is a viral, this photo, it has gone viral—everyone has gone in studs up on the couple for getting engaged at someone else's wedding right in front of a despairing bride. What does going viral do to the human mind? It addles it. What does going viral do to blossoming young love? It sullies it. Could you love a woman who was the source of a meme? You could not. Could you hug a man who proposed to you so insensitively that it made news headlines in other fucking countries? It would be difficult. Larry and Jeanette will not get married. They will drift slowly apart, sleeping ever further away from each other in their turquoise-peach bed, their hands fumbling for one another in the darkness but failing to find peace. He will work later, fixing a machine. She will take the bride for cocktails and a "bitch sesh" and the bride will just be furious that she has to deal with this shit. Larry throws a beer bottle at a dog. "I wish I never got upvoted to the front page of Imgur, Carl Johnny John-John," he's saying. "I wish I never did it." The night closes in. The dark is cold and empty. "Love is dead," he's sobbing, now. "Love is dead and the internet killed it."

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Editor's Note, 1:00 PM EST: The bride, who is "Jeanette's" sister, told the New York Daily News that she was totally cool with the planned proposal.