The coronavirus pandemic has forced many people to get creative with some of life’s milestones.
Quan Le had planned to propose to his girlfriend, Morgan Reynolds, in Italy this May, but his romantic plans were ruined because of COVID-19 lockdowns.
Instead of letting his idea be completely ruined by the virus, he decided to make it arguably even more special. He proposed using the Nintendo game Animal Crossing.
Le shared a video to Facebook, as verified by Storyful, of his unique proposal. In the footage, Le and Reynolds, in their Utah home, can be seen reacting to the game as they move their avatars around their virtual island.
At one point in the video, Le’s avatar presents a box to Reynolds’ avatar. As she opened it in the game, her boyfriend got down on one knee in real life.
Most will be able to guess what came next. Le asked: “Will you marry me?”
Visibly overcome with emotion, Reynolds leans back in shock and covers her face. She then can be seen nodding and kissing her now-fiancé.
While the elaborate proposal seems like it must’ve taken months to plan out, it actually wasn’t Le’s first choice.
He “tried to plan restaurants, hikes and have a pretend housewarming to spring the proposal,” he told Storyful. “But we had stay-at-home orders and restaurants temporarily closed.”
“So that’s when this idea popped up as my plan F,” he continued. “I spent a month sourcing and setting up the island for the one proposal.”
The video, Le said, was taken on May 9 and posted on June 14.
This happy news has clearly been a welcome reprieve from a sea of upsetting headlines. The original post has received more than 1,000 comments and shares, and nearly 5,000 reactions on Facebook.
“I’m sobbing,” one Facebook user wrote, while another chimed in: “Plan F was awesome. Way to be f–king creative.”
A new-and-improved Animal Crossing game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, was released around the same time North America was undergoing its first wave of the novel coronavirus, just in time for people to pick up a Nintendo Switch and hunker down in quarantine. It’s no surprise, then, that Le isn’t the only one to use the game in this way.
In March, young couple Sharmin Asha and Nazmul Ahmed had a virtual wedding held entirely in the video game, Insider reported. They had to cancel their April 12 wedding plans because of COVID-19.
“I let our best friend know that, ‘Hey, so I have this secret event planned out,” Nazmul told the publication. “I just sent a picture of the N and the S on the beach, and my friend started freaking out because she immediately got what I was trying to do.”
He invited Asha to his virtual island to surprise her. She arrived, Insider says, to a trail of arrows leading to the beach.
“He was hosting all of our friends on his island too and they all kind of like stood on the sides of the aisle,” Asha said. “He put some roses down on the floor for me to pick up and a dress to put on and everything. It was honestly all very, very sweet.”
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