It’s about that time of year again where everyone’s favorite form of a question is a pun. Poster board sales are skyrocketing, bros are doing favors for other bros, and dudes are finally being polite around their crush. As Kurt Cobain would say, “it smells like teen spirit.”

But here’s the thing: teen spirit smells a lot like dry Sharpies and sounds like screaming girls…every day for at least a month. And it sucks. Every guy in the school is being bombarded with the same few questions regarding who will be asked and when it will happen. That’s a lot of unwanted pressure for a high school kid, especially for one who’s still trying to stay afloat senior year before school’s out for summer.

Now the real problem is, not sitting through everyone else’s few seconds of glee, but the moments leading up to your own promposal. And don’t go ahead and tell yourself you won’t prompose, because your girlfriend who claims she doesn’t need one since you’re already dating, definitely wants one. So these moments leading up to the hardly momentous occasion are crucial. The first step is planning it.

Perhaps this is the worst step. This really gives an inside look to how short your creative leash can be. And NEVER go with your your initial idea. Chances are it’s terrible and she’ll say yes because she’s obligated. Which is sad. Instead, ask her friends for ideas. You should do this because you don’t know your high school girlfriend of three weeks that well. Now once you’ve collected a little knowledge about her, come up with a pun. This is important. Not one promposal in the last 400 years has been completed without a pun. Then, devise a way to incorporate your mediocre joke into the question. Doing such, apparently is the equivalent of God personally inviting her to the dance.

Next, you’ll want a poster board. This is a basic entry-level proposal, and it’ll get the job done, but it’s 1,000% underwhelming. A better option is something that’s getting a bit more popular which is publicly embarrassing your intended date over the school’s intercom. This is a bit more uncommon, and will make everyone go nuts. Why does everyone go nuts? No one knows; it’s an anomaly. It’s merely a question with only one answer (which is obligatory) that 95% of seniors ask, or are asked. For this, you must be pretty tight with administration, so your chances of pulling this off are pretty slim.

Another option is to gather a small group of friends and create a chain of poster boards and have them enter the room of your intended date. This is kinda cool, however also a little annoying. Your target will be impressed that you pulled it off and doing this in a full classroom increases your chances to scoring a date (because of the spotlight factor).

These are the most common promposals that I’ve witnessed. Personally if I had the money, I’d take her to the moon and do it there because that promposal is out of this world.