I’m not someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about my dream proposal, in large part because a proposal isn’t necessarily something I actively dream of. (This isn’t a pick-me thing. It’s an I think I might be deeply terrified of commitment—like even more terrified than I am of dying alone—although I do tend to think that as a society we’re too quick to pathologize an aversion to lifelong monogamy as “commitment-phobia,” but we don’t have time to unpack all of that right now thing.)

If I were to plan my dream engagement, however, there are two things I would want it to include: this yellow diamond Tiffany engagement ring that I have saved in a folder on my phone titled “THIS IS THE ONLY ENGAGEMENT RING YOU WILL EVER ACCEPT,” and a boner.

Yes, engagement boners are very much a thing, which is to say that men are really out here popping boners when they pop the question. And—aside from it being somewhat inconvenient and/or potentially embarrassing from a sharing engagement photos with loved ones–perspective—it is utterly endearing.

I first heard about this somehow almost wholesome phenomenon at a bachelorette party a few years back when the bride-to-be drunkenly revealed the real reason we’d never seen any pictures from her engagement: they’d been photobombed by her fiancé’s hard dick. For years, I assumed this was a hilariously cute, one-off experience unique to this happy, horny couple.

That is, until engagement boners started (literally) popping up all over TikTok. While it’s impossible to say when the very first engagement boner to grace the internet made its debut, the first one to come to my attention dates back to 2022, when one newly engaged TikToker posted a video of her fiancé down on one knee with a very prominent (and fairly sizable) erection on full display.

Naturally, the boner stole the show—as poorly timed erections are wont to do. Fellow TikTokers rushed to congratulate the bride-to-be on both her engagement and the presumed size of her groom’s apparently above-average penis. As one commenter memorably put it: “WHOSE HORSE IS THAT?”

But beyond praise for the sheer size of the scene-stealing bulge, a number of women were also wooed by the apparent romantic enthusiasm the boner seemed to reflect. As writer Priscilla Page wrote on the app formerly known as Twitter: “Would honestly be pretty disappointed if I ever got a boner-free marriage proposal.”

More recently, another viral engagement boner prompted a similar response on TikTok. “If my man is not crying with an erection at the same time while asking me to marry him, I don’t fucking want it,” creator @selatakes declared in a video from April that currently has over 3.3 million views.

But while dicks may be even more coveted than diamonds these days, is an engagement boner really the romantic testament to a man’s undying devotion and horniness we think it is?

Short answer: Not exactly.

In good news for anyone who’s been on the receiving end of a flaccid proposal, it doesn’t necessarily mean your fiancé-to-be was any less sexually excited by the idea of screwing your brains out till death do you part. In fact, according to the experts, an engagement boner probably has less to do with actual horniness than a fairly complex cocktail of physiological phenomena that just so happens, in some cases, to result in an erection.

“Erections are born out of a really complex biological and psychological process,” says sexologist Gigi Engle, an expert for 3Fun. “They really can happen spontaneously—and sometimes at really inopportune times—when we’re flooded with dopamine and adrenaline in high emotional states. It’s basically a reflexive response. Your brain sends a signal to the body to get ready for sexual activity because it misinterpreted the stimulation it received as sexual.”

In other words, when a guy is on one knee about to ask you possibly the biggest question he’s ever asked anyone, his overstimulated man brain gets confused and is like, “Hey, seems like there’s a lot going on right now—should my dick be hard just in case?”

“It just means you’re really, really hopped up on emotions,” says Engle. “You’re not necessarily horny in this situation, you’re just excited and your body is having a response to that excitement.”

However, as a romantic, I’m certainly not here to tell anyone their fiancé’s engagement boner was the product of anything other than pure, unadulterated horniness for you and only you till death do you part. But if it comes down to a dick or a diamond, I’ll take the diamond.