There’s almost an art to revealing an engagement on social media, but the language of an engagement announcement is now being used to celebrate and lament everyday occurrences in a new Twitter meme.
The format is simple to replicate. You start off by writing the phrase “I said yes” (a common refrain in engagement announcements to confirm your answer to the question, “Will you marry me?”). Follow it with a bunch of emoji; there’s no set rule, but the meme usually includes some kind of heart emoji and diamond rings. And then you top it off by writing something that has nothing to do with getting engaged.
In the earliest iteration of the meme, @jzux wrote, “someone asked me if i was sad.” That response has been retweeted more than 111,000 times in the past week.
Several people used @jzux’s format to celebrate the other small parts of life. Those responses often leaned into existential dread or anxiety-driven tendencies like stretching yourself too thin, being a student, not finishing that paper, and how we respond to others.
The ubiquity of saying yes to something also led to everything from missing a TV show to acknowledging that you cry when reading romance novels. Sometimes, you just want people to know you’re proud of a celebrity. It could be a celebration in the purest sense of the word.
One person even found a way to celebrate a much different version of an engagement ring.
On the other hand, the meme’s adaptability made it the perfect launching tool for brands, who co-opted the meme for their own devices about 24 hours after @jzux posted the original. If a brand has a somewhat Very Online presence on Twitter, chances are it has posted a version of the meme.
For the most part, those responses stuck close to whatever the brand was selling, although many of them opted for the slightly varied “we said yes”; essentially every top tweet with that phrase is from official Twitter accounts for various brands.
Hulu, however, decided to take it in a different direction. In its tweet that read “We said yes,” it responded with “Someone asked if we’re always horny on main.”
The tweet from Hulu raised many eyebrows—and Hulu hid many of the replies—but one of the better responses may have come from none other than Dionne Warwick, who asked, “Who is your supervisor?”
The engagement announcement is usually a time for joy. But if the “I said yes” meme is any indication, even amid the existentialism of it all, maybe it’s not such a bad thing that we’re finding other things that should be celebrated on the same level as an actual engagement.
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