What is a good way to ask my girlfriend to prom?

May 3, 2006 5:50 PM

What is an excellent way to ask my girlfriend to prom?

I am a senior in high school and need to (in a romantic, inexpensive, and creative way) ask my girlfriend of a year and a half to prom. What are your ideas?

Please, nothing too cheesy.

posted by bd to human relations (27 comments total)

I once heard a bunch of really creative ideas from an LDS friend. This page has one list, but otherwise a lot of it comes down to 'where can you hide a message'?

(One he told me was Alphabits inside Cheerios, where the girl unscrambled his name. I guess the name didn't have any 'o's in it.)
posted by cobaltnine at 6:06 PM on May 3, 2006

Well...since it is your gf...isn't it kinda obvious that you're gonna take her to prom? I mean, can't you just ask her straight up?
posted by radioamy at 6:13 PM on May 3, 2006

Agree with radioamy. It's a prom, not a marriage. Don't ask "Do you want to go to prom with me?" Ask "What should we do for prom night?" She gives you any attitude, and you're like "What, you think I was going to ask someone else?" She gives you more attitude - ask someone else.

Disclaimer: my prom was 27 years ago. I am a fossil.
posted by hangashore at 6:45 PM on May 3, 2006

Anything other than "will you go to prom with me" (which as others have said should be obvious) is going to be cheesy.
posted by justgary at 7:01 PM on May 3, 2006

Send her some flowers. On the card write "Will you go to prom with me?" Flowers are never a bad idea.
posted by Roger Dodger at 7:09 PM on May 3, 2006

I agree that it'll be cheesy.

When I was in high school my best friend and I spray paitned a big sheet with two sentences that were meaningful only to our boyfriends, ended it with "Prom, right?" and snuck onto school gounds to hang it from the bleachers. How about that?
posted by dpx.mfx at 7:10 PM on May 3, 2006

four photobooth pictures in a row, the first three with signs:
"will you"
"go to"
prom with me?"
then the last pic is your smiling mug.

Now here's the tricky part -- go someplace where there's a photobooth. Sneak away (I gotta pee could be a common excuse), do the pictures, and when you return, urge her to the photobooth. "Hey, there's a photobooth, let's take cute pictures of how great we are together so when we're thirty and wrinkled, we'll have something to remind us of when we were beautiful!" Arrive at the photobooth. What's this? It's developing pictures. Hey! Maybe we should see what the pictures are of? Why don't you look first?

It'll take some scouting and some prep work, and I highly recommend you try out the photobooth a day or two in advance to make sure everything goes smoothly. I will warn you that if your girlfriend ever asks my fiance how we got engaged, your girlfriend will discover that you may not be as wildly creative as she might think. I didn't use the signage, though -- just asked her between pictures two and three. She said yes during picture four.
posted by incessant at 7:13 PM on May 3, 2006

For whom it may concern....I tried asking her straight up and she is like "No, you have to ask me in a cute way."

I swear I am not whipped. ;)

Basically, I found out from her friends that it is considered a "big deal" (in a high school girl's book) and needs a creative twist.
posted by bd at 7:27 PM on May 3, 2006

Just because she is already your girlfriend doesn't mean you shouldn't romance it up.

That being said I am drawing a total blank on how I would handle it.

The photobooth is a good idea, kind of a complex scheme but something to think about. My old lady would love that sort of thing.
posted by thefinned1 at 7:31 PM on May 3, 2006

What activities/things does she like? What did you do on your first date? How did you meet? There may be something in there that could give you a "cute" idea.
posted by occhiblu at 7:46 PM on May 3, 2006

On our first date we went to homecoming together (another school dance).

She is really into photography. Maybe I will try the photobooth idea.
posted by bd at 8:01 PM on May 3, 2006

Or you could photograph yourself in front of bits of signs to spell out "will you go to prom with me?" or something? Somehow trick her into taking the photos? Or take the photos of *her* standing in front of signs and then crop them down to spell it out?

Yeah, it does seem like there are some ideas there you can work with.
posted by occhiblu at 8:06 PM on May 3, 2006

Along the photography lines: Custom Jones Soda labels. If you have access to them, get a photo she's taken and add something to it asking her to the prom. In the end, she gets to keep the bottles to remind her what a sweetheart you are.
I had a similar story in high school with a girlfriend who wouldn't take the default "so we're going to prom, right?". This was a number of years ago and the prices have gone up, but the Jones bottles did the trick for me. Be warned that it takes 2-4 weeks so that might be cutting it too close, but you'd get definite points for creativity. Extra if she likes Jones Soda.
If that doesn't work out, I really like incessant's photo booth idea.
posted by Hadroed at 9:14 PM on May 3, 2006

Wow. Now that I looked at the Jones Soda site more carefully, I see that they really nail you on the shipping, and $50 is probably more than anyone wants to spend before you even get to the prom.
Here's a cheaper DIY way to go about it, depending on how photo savvy you are:
1.) Get a regular pack of Jones Soda (or even something else).
2.) Follow the same plan I mentioned above of taking one of her photographs and modifying it to ask her to prom.
3.) Insert your image into one Jones labels (there's a ton of them available on the Jones site).
4.) Take the labels off the soda bottles.
5.) Glue yours on.
6.) Revel in the fact that you are probably the best boyfriend ever, even if you got help from the internet.

(I swear I'm not affiliated with Jones in any way, and that I will now concentrate on being a better boyfriend myself and stop giving away all my good ideas)
posted by Hadroed at 9:34 PM on May 3, 2006

What Rodger Dodger said. I never attended my high school prom. But if I had, I would've wanted flowers involved.
posted by invisible ink at 9:55 PM on May 3, 2006

Asking in a creative way is a big deal now in a way it wasn't in my day (the 1980s). Just last week, my niece, who's a really good athlete, found a pink baseball glove (no idea if it was paper or real) at her door with her name in it, the word "PROM?" and her guy's phone number. Possibly abrupt, but she thought it was cute.

You could always stand outside her house with a boombox over your head. Oh. Wait. 1980s again.
posted by GaelFC at 10:09 PM on May 3, 2006

Hmm... clearly the whole cute thing is a social status thing amongst teenage girls. Why not enlist her friends help? This solves the social status thing - it will be cute, her friends will be envious of what a great b/f you are, and you won't have to work too hard because you can use her friends as your minions.

Now, what to do?

Clearly you get the girl and make arrangements for your evil minions (oops, I mean her friends to set a scene for her to walk into with you).

Could be rose petals spelling prom, could be a walk spray painted (with a rose, and the word prom), could be a performance, like a theatre performance where the actors pause (probably an amateur performance) and say "will you go to the prom with bd"?

Maybe that is all cheesy. I'm a fossil as well.

Okay, less complicated: take her to dinner and hand her a box with a jewerly pendent of a corsage and say will you go to the prom with me? Its nice, its sentimental, its a token of your affection she can treasure, and it could be not too expensive if you get one made of crystal or semi preicous jewels.

Here is another way. You could go spend a day with her and take a digital camera. Get your evil minions aka her friends to plant signs or words somehow. Take pictures along the way. At the end of the day, insist on looking at the pictures together...
posted by zia at 12:55 AM on May 4, 2006

On preview, something quite neat that someone has been doing in San Francisco is spray painting romantic slogans into the sidewalk in small letters using a stencil.

They say romantic and sterotypical things like: "I've waited my whole life for you".

Why not creat a stencil and spray paint it (in the dead of night) either infront of her house (or, if might enrage her parents) at a place she frequently goes or hangs out?
posted by zia at 12:58 AM on May 4, 2006

A friend of mine once registered a whole bunch of free webmail accounts, filling in the sender's name on each with one word of the question "Will you go to Homecoming with me?" He then sent a blank message from each, at intervals of a few seconds—I think they all had the same subject line to tie them together, or maybe the subjects were numbered—and capped it off with a similar message from his real account. Having finished his business with the addresses, he told the rest of us about it so we could reuse them if we wished (registering an additional account or two to add the vocabulary we'd need).

Mind you, this was in '99, when spam filtering was not quite so widespread. If she has a *good* filter, it shouldn't be an issue even now (just don't use the words 'diploma', 'viagra', or 'barely legal') ... but there's no way of knowing. Mind you also, this was a fairly techy girl.
posted by eritain at 1:26 AM on May 4, 2006

Ask her parents for a really cheesy photo of her as a baby, Scan & Print it , attach the print to a plackard reading underneath

I want this beauty to go to the Prom with me.

The baby photo can be cutsie smiling gurgling baby or gross, screaming terror whatever works!
Place the plackard somewhere she will pass going to school in the morning, relatively close to her home, at the first junction or something. None of the neighbours will know what it is, she and her immediate family are the only ones who will recognise it.
It can be fun
posted by Wilder at 5:04 AM on May 4, 2006

Following up on Zia's suggestion--not spraypaint, but sidewalk chalk. Won't enrage the parents; washes off in the first rain.
posted by fuzzbean at 5:49 AM on May 4, 2006

Buy her a bouquet of roses and stick three condoms in the middle of the bouquet. Look her straight in the eye and promise her that prom night will be a night to remember.
posted by nixerman at 8:11 AM on May 4, 2006

Burma Shave using something like the photobooth idea, if you live in burbs.

Make a set of signs with one or two words, put them on pickets and place them in the ground from her house heading out to school. Do the set up way early in the morning before school. Collect them all after school. Don't forget to take pictures and post them here.

If you're worried about her neighbors making off with the signs, just put them along the walk or driveway.
posted by plinth at 8:54 AM on May 4, 2006

Read this thread. Think. Go create something Bond-like.
posted by tommorris at 2:58 PM on May 4, 2006

Have Red/Pink/Her favourite Color helium balloons atached to a scroll with the desired phrasing of the question. Meet for a date in an empty area where it won't get tangled in anything and will still be visible. Say, I have a question, release the balloons, let the message unfold, (also possibly with rose petals at the end of the scroll that will rain down on you romanticly) and have her melt in your arms.
posted by Suparnova at 4:17 PM on May 4, 2006

what is with the rose pedals?

Anyway, this is a hard choice. Whatever I decide, it is going down this weekend.
posted by bd at 5:23 PM on May 4, 2006

Let us know what you decide to do and what the response is!
posted by zia at 6:08 PM on May 4, 2006