Every fairytale has a few hiccups along the way, and in this scenario, it was a significant spelling mistake.
Jonathan Travaglio, a Toronto resident, decided to propose to his long-time girlfriend, Zara Bagramian, on January 23 with the help of a little snow, his brother, brother-in-law and a neighbour.
Travaglio told Narcity he was planning to propose to Bagramian for a while, and he decided to pop the question last weekend.
The couple were set to go for a walk and when they came back to their highrise apartment, he would point down to the field below where she would see "marry me?" in massive red spray-painted letters in the snow.
His brother and brother-in-law were in charge of writing out the surprise message before they got home, but they made one teensy, but vital, error.
Instead of writing "marry me?" his brother wrote "merry me?"
Travaglio says one of his neighbours spotted the error from their window and came down to let them know they had made a mistake.
Unfortunately for Travaglio's brother, he had to spend 30 minutes on his hands and knees scrubbing the spray paint from the snow and re-drawing the letter A.
"He eventually got it to work, but you could definitely see in some of the photos that there's a faint 'E' behind the 'A'," he said.
Still, it all worked came together in time for Travaglio to pop the big question.
When they got home from their walk, Traveligo says he directed her towards the window and said, "There's something outside. It's pretty cute. Check it out."
"She went to the window, she gave it a read and she's like 'Yeah that's cute. That's awesome,'" Travaglio said.
He said he then started to kneel and pulled out the ring box when she caught him in the window reflection and thought he was joking.
"She saw the reflection of me kneeling, I think, because she immediately said 'Yeah ok Jonathan' as if I wasn't proposing or I was just making a joke."
"But when she turned around she saw the box and she was completely shocked and surprised, and of course, she said yes."
Another person in the community spotted the question written in the snow and shared a picture of it to a local Facebook group, writing, "Hopefully, I'm not spoiling anything."
Almost 50 comments were made on the post asking for an update on the proposal.
Travaglio says the neighbourly attention online was "very fun" and that so much speculation was happening in the comments that he decided to let them have fun for a bit longer and provided an update the following day.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.