A picturesque engagement in Central Park is exactly what one woman got when she was proposed to by her girlfriend on Saturday.
A video of the scene even made the rounds on social media when it was posted by another user. However, the now-engaged couple reportedly received massive amounts of hate for their public pronouncement.
Linn Ekebom, 28, became a fiancée when her partner, 29-year-old Shannon McGee, got down on one knee at Manhattan’s famous park alongside a surprise flash mob performance of Bruno Mars’ “Marry You.”
“I wasn’t sure if I was gonna address but it has been bugging me,” Ekebom said in a 3-minute TikTok post on Sunday.
“Yesterday my girlfriend propose to me at Central Park. It was amazing, it was cute, it was well thought out, it was cringy, it was embarrassing,” the Finland native continued. “It was all that good stuff that a proposal is supposed to be, and I had an amazing day.”
She went on to explain that once she and McGee got back to their hotel, they saw that their proposal video had gone viral.
At first, the two thought that it was a “sweet” gesture that someone had filmed the engagement from a different angle.
“But then I heard what the original creator was saying [in the video’s background],” she said. “This is not the way to do it,” someone could be heard saying in the apparently now-deleted original video that went viral, according to the Mirror.
While she was “fine” with the trolls bashing her proposal, she didn’t like how mean people were being and urged others to “be considerate” on social media.
“The younger generation has started to become the older generation on social media with no regard for other people’s feelings,” Ekebom vented without getting specific about what the couple faced from haters. “All of the misgendering and nasty comments aside, this creator posted the video and it went viral before I had a chance to tell my friends and family about our engagement.”
Since Ekebom hails from Finland — she now lives in Tampa, Florida, where McGee is based — she stated that, because of the time difference, she didn’t want her overseas family to see her engagement online before she had a chance to tell them herself.
She said she had planned to FaceTime her family and friends the next day.
“I was horrified that that was how my friends and family were gonna find out,” she said.
In a follow-up video, Ekebom said they were finally back home in the Sunshine State after their NYC getaway and thanked people for their support. She also discussed the fact that while the event was a public proposal, it allowed people to have opinions about it.
“A lot of people were filming and I wasn’t even aware because I was so focused on the amazing gesture of my fiancée,” she said. “But I stand by my stance. Be kind and respectful.
“We are all humans, and it’s important that we try to be nice to each other.”
