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There are times when the kindness of a gesture is undermined by its ostentatious nature — when the fancier your method of approaching another human being, the less it appears to be about them and the more it appears to be about you.

This is the risk inherent in any marriage proposal that winds up on YouTube. No matter how charming — and some are really, really charming and ooze genuine love and affection — when you seem to be begging for your proposal to go viral, it can take on a sense of being external rather than internal, performative rather than intimate.

But what often saves proposal videos from maudlin distastefulness is that they have goofiness, but they also have heft: you're often looking at people who love each other very much, whose families and friends are participating in some extravagant overflow of affection. They represent the culmination of something important, and that mitigates their tendency to feel like stunts.

With high school students perhaps concerned that they're missing out on the fun because it's a tiny bit early to get engaged, there seems to be an uptick in recent years in extravagant (and widely shared) prom proposals. Yes, that's prom proposals.

Now look: when I was a rosy-cheeked girl back in the time of butter churning and the building of the transcontinental railroad, we didn't refer to asking someone to the prom as "proposing." There was no such thing as a "prom proposal," as far as I knew, because being asked to the prom basically involved a dialogue that either went something like "Did you want to go to the prom with me?" "Yeah" (for singles) or "We should think about getting our prom tickets" "Yeah" (for couples). If a girl had said, "My boyfriend proposed to me for the prom," we would have had no idea what that even meant, I think.

I generally believe that the so-called "younger generation" at any given moment is just as smart, good, interesting, engaged, bright, and wise (for their age) as any other generation was. And I believe that now. And I don't believe they're being ruined by their phones or the internet or whatever is this week's THEY'RE BEING RUINED! candidate.

Having said that, I cannot tell a lie: I think their propensity for extravagant prom asks, which they call — ack ack — "promposals," is ... weird. And probably not a good idea.

First of all, I'm not sure all girls find this experience pleasurable. This girl looks a tiny bit mortified, and the song is too short (you couldn't even write the "Chapter One" parts, guy?), and bow ties with t-shirts smacks of lack of effort.