Prom, held on May 4th this year, is arguably the biggest social event of the year for junior and senior students. The junior class starts raising money for the dance their freshman year, and the seniors went through their turning paying the previous year.

Prom has a huge place in America’s public high school culture, as a culmination of the whole year and a symbol of teenagers being teenagers. It is a night for the students to get all dressed up, go to a nice dinner, and dance the night away with their friends. Some extravagant prom-goers may even decide to rent a limousine for the event. Whether you have a date or a group of friends (or both), figuring out who to go with is important and often stressful.

Please, do not make this worse with promposals.

More often than not, they are obnoxiously over the top and unnecessary, to the point of embarrassment for both people involved. The focus put on the “perfect promposal” leads askers to plan these outrageous acts that could have just as easily been done with some flowers or food.

Generally speaking, most people would prefer not to have the kind of spotlight a big promposal puts on them – the pressure to say yes because the person asking went through all the effort is unfair, and it potentially causes other people to try and out-do everyone else with bigger and bigger acts.

Sometimes, yes, promposals are cute and funny and not horrible – when it is made personal to the person being asked, and often when they already know who is going to ask them and how. But with the desire to make it a surprise, which many people are not fond of, and excessively extravagant, these instances are few and far between. Thankfully enough, the trend of unnecessary promposals seems to have died out, or at least calmed down in recent years.

Because yes, prom is a big deal. For seniors, it marks the end of their time in high school (especially given that the class of 2019 is graduating just under four weeks after prom). For juniors, it is the culmination of their efforts the past three years to raise money for the event. But at the end of the day, not everyone goes to prom, and promposals that are designed to be big and not to be personal are a no.