There aren’t many things out there that fascinate me more than Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally’s marriage. Part of this is because they’ve managed to maintain a decade-long relationship in a town where that is incredibly rare, but most of it is because they do things like perform folk versions of super-vulgar R&B songs about a suspicious woman demanding to smell her partner’s genitals to see if he’s cheating on her. Keeps things fresh. Any marriage counselor will tell you that.
All of which is to say that I really enjoyed this profile of the couple, which details the history of their relationship in between passages about farts and cussing at motorists. My favorite part was the story about Offerman’s proposal. Or rather, his fake proposals. Plural.
Soon thereafter, the couple took a trip to Paris. Offerman brought three disposable rings fabricated by Will & Grace’s costume designer in order to joke-propose to Mullally three different times. In succession, he dropped fake rings down a Parisian grate, from the top of the Eiffel Tower and off the Pont Neuf, the city’s oldest standing bridge. “I thought it was hilarious,” says Mullally. “But the rings got progressively bigger, and for a moment I thought the last one might be real.”
You know that quote about how Ginger Rogers was a more impressive dancer than Fred Astaire because she did everything he did, but backwards and in heels? That’s how I feel about this paragraph. Yes, Nick Offerman staging three fake proposals in romantic locations all over Paris that ended with him dropping increasingly larger rings is very funny. But Megan Mullally considering three elaborate sham proposals “hilarious” is amazing.
Oh, and if you were wondering if the real proposal featured a bunch of animals having sex, the answer is yes.
As for the proposal itself, Offerman says, “We were heading down this path over a bridge by a Japanese garden, and all the ducks, insects and frogs were furiously copulating around us. I feel like when our coupling is at hand, nature responds with a very positive reverberation. And I was right; she said yes.”
Love is a beautiful thing.
