14 DAY TRIAL // Couples nowadays are looking for ingenious and unusual ways to declare their love in a marriage proposal, and popping the question using a puzzle is definitely an imaginative way of making the moment more surprising and unique.
That's how a man from Toseland, Cambridgeshire, proposed to his girlfriend when she arrived home from holiday. Joe Boast and Carly Rutter have been together for four years and he felt it was the right moment to ask her the big question.
The 28-year-old man wanted the moment to be special and decided to pop the question through a personalized puzzle because of his fiancée's passion for board games. So, he presented her with a jigsaw of their faces and asked her to solve it together. At first, Carly didn't understand the purpose of the game, and given that she was rather tired after the vacation, she even became irritated at one point.
However, her bad mood disappeared when Joe gave her the final jigsaw puzzle pieces and she put them together to discover that they spelled out “Carly Suzanna Rutter, I love you. Will you marry me?”
“I didn’t realize until the very end because he’d hidden those pieces, the last bit with the question on. I probably didn’t give him the best response because I was just angry he’d given me more puzzle pieces. But, obviously once I realised what they said, I was so happy,” the 25-year-old bride-to-be said, according to Metro.
Joe, who now works as a primary school teacher in north London, also wrote a romantic poem on the jigsaw, but saved the last three lines until the end, so Carly only discovered the question when the puzzle was complete.
He proposed to his sweetheart at his parents’ farm and had asked them to leave the house to give them some privacy. The funny part is that the poor parents ended up on a five-hour bike ride from St. Neots to Bedford and back again – which means they cycled around 50km (30 miles).
Now, Joe and Carly have started planning for their wedding, which will take place next April. The couple even participated on a national competition to get £3,000 ($5,000/€3,700) of food for their wedding. They both come from big families and on their big day, they dream of having dinner in a large tent at the family farm.
“It’s hard to budget for a wedding and buying a house, but everyone has to do that. But we’d like to be able to cater for the whole of our families. We want to get them all in the tent,” Joe said.