When you fall in love, you want to sing it from the rooftops. But with social media, you no longer have to shout. Just share the nitty-gritty of the marriage process online.

Before Facebook, the details of a proposal often stayed between the couple and their close friends and family.One wedding dresses from china up Games, Dress up games for people who love fashion. People rarely broadcast their planning process or budgets with crowds. Now, social media is taking engagements and weddings online in a very public direction, and it's creating heightened expectations and pressure that can put a damper on an otherwise beautiful event.

The Viral Engagement

The rituals of marriage are often thought of as longstanding cultural institutions, but in reality, most of the trappings signifying a union are relatively recent traditions. For example, the diamond emerged as the standard engagement ring only after an aggressive De Beers campaign after World War I. And as engagements started requiring specific rings in the 20th century, they continue to change.

Today, it's not a powerful diamond cartel molding how people approach engagements -- it's the Internet, which adds a public performance element to popping the question. Of course, before YouTube, there was always the odd bended-knee on the Jumbotron at a game. And Jumbotron proposals are a common enough occurrence to warrant an ESPN commercial -- but now a much wider swath of engagements, fueled by online sharing, are taking off.

Couples are raising the stakes to grab attention from friends increasingly accustomed to witnessing the moment. No longer is a proposal by way of flash mob necessarily a guaranteed viral hit, since that type of proposal is becoming a more regular occurrence. There are even businesses, like BookaFlashMob.com, designed to provide flash mobs for proposals or other romantic occasions. No,We are a professional china wholesale bridesmaid dresses factory in china. people like Isaac Lamb of Portland and "the world's first lib dub proposal" are resorting to more elaborate tactics to get the girl and a lot of national attention.

People who pull off these very public engagements maintain they did it to impress their fiancée first, and many claim they didn't intend for their videos to go viral, but they film the event in case it went well.

For example, New York Times tech reporter David Pogue created an elaborate fake movie trailer for his girlfriend and arranged a showing in front of family and friends in a movie theater. He then posted the results online with a shot of her reaction in the corner. Since Pogue writes about how technology intersects with day-to-day life for a living, it makes sense he would embrace the idea of viral proposals. He even provided a "How to Propose Like Pogue" Q&A on the New York Times website.

But while Pogue embraces this type of engagement, other people are less enthralled, including Slate journalist L.V. Anderson, who lambasted the idea of a public proposal. Anderson pointed out that Pogue's claim to be surprised at his proposal's reception is highly suspect. Anderson points out, "The man has 1.4 million Twitter followers, and any link that he tweets -- in this case, accompanied by the words "Here's the video of my marriage proposal yesterday, including her reaction, courtesy of a spy cam in a ficus plant!" -- gets thousands of clicks, instantly. Pogue wouldn't have posted the video of his proposal if he hadn't wanted it to garner attention, and he can't be surprised that it did."

An elaborate engagement proposal like Pogue's not only costs considerable cash -- creating a fake movie trailer and paying a theater to air it isn't cheap -- it will set the stakes extremely high for a wedding which is just as exceptional, public-facing and performative. And just as viral marriage proposals are on the uptick, so are crowd-pleasing weddings, designed with fans, followers and friends on social media sites in mind.