So You’ve Decided to Propose With 2.3 Million Tons of Rock

The first sign of trouble was the silence. Pharaoh Khufu, Fourth Dynasty, Son of Ra, Lord of the Two Lands, stood on a viewing platform squinting at his life’s work, a 147-metre-tall declaration of affection that had taken twenty-seven years and the entire GDP of Lower Egypt to construct. He was proposing, via the medium of architectural absurdity, to Queen Meritites. He’d unveiled the final capstone this morning. She still hadn’t said anything.

“It’s… big,” she offered, after a silence you could have stored grain in. Khufu’s vizier, Hemiunu, a man whose primary job for two decades had been managing the logistics of this crushingly earnest limestone rom-com, made a small sound of despair. This was meant to be the culmination of *Project: Eternal Affection*. The internal audit from Year 12 alone had run to 400 papyrus scrolls, mostly detailing the granite-to-bread exchange rate and the alarming number of man-hours lost to infected splinters. The King’s Chamber contained not a sarcophagus, but a meticulously carved granite box intended to hold the bride-price: 4,000 head of prize cattle, payable on acceptance, with an IOU from the Royal Treasury tucked inside.

This was the failure of a one-man-committee to read the room. Khufu, bless his solid-gold heart, believed in spectacle. Meritites, a woman of sophisticated taste and a known appreciation for things that were not actively crushing the landscape, just wanted a nice necklace. The whole project had spiralled from a disastrous conversation where Khufu, asking what she wanted for their anniversary, had received the answer “Oh, just something that will last forever.” He’d taken that with a terrifying literalism. Now, a structure visible from the Sinai Peninsula was asking a very public question, and the silence was getting louder. Below them, 100,000 workers held their breath, waiting for a thumbs-up that would trigger a kingdom-wide three-day festival. Instead, Meritites was looking at the pyramid the way one looks at a particularly ambitious insect.

“I think,” she said, choosing her words with the care of a priest dissecting a sacred ibis, “that I’d like to see other people.” From the workers’ village below, a single, heartfelt “oh, for fuck’s sake” drifted up on the afternoon breeze. Vizier Hemiunu quietly began updating his resume, making a note to add ‘crisis management at geologically significant scales’ to his list of skills. Khufu, for his part, just stared at the gleaming limestone. It would take his mortuary priests another decade to repurpose the structure for his actual tomb, a process involving the hasty conversion of the ‘Bridal Chamber’ into the ‘Queen’s Chamber’ and a lot of awkward chiselling-out of very specific pet names from the Grand Gallery. He never did remarry. Apparently, the dating scene in Memphis was brutal once you were known as the guy who proposes with a wonder of the ancient world.