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A video of a man from Hanover Park in Cape Town recently proposing to his girlfriend on a minibus taxi has gone viral.
Leslie de Bruin (46) and Jennifer Smith (42) have been dating for a year and on 19 June, Leslie decided it was time to put a ring on it.
Jennifer told YOU she met Leslie last year at a friend’s 40th birthday braai.
“A week or so after we met at the party we fell in love and started dating. We’ve been together ever since,” Jennifer tells YOU.
The proposal wasn’t a complete surprise, as Leslie had taken Jennifer window shopping for rings a few weeks ago. Still, Jennifer didn’t know he was planning to pop the big question so soon.
“He took me to a couple of jewellery shops in Wynberg and told me to pick out what I liked,” Jennifer recalls. “We just looked at a couple of rings but I thought we would return at a later stage to purchase it together.”
But Leslie’s plans were already in the works. “I bought the ring on Friday (19 June) and decided on the same day that it was now or never,” he says.
“After buying it, I was at home listening to music and I told myself, ‘Today is the day.’ I went to my mother to tell her that I’d be proposing.”
Leslie wanted to propose to Jennifer when she left work, and hopped into the back seat of a taxi she’d be taking home from Athlone, where she works.
“I realised that I couldn’t find her so I hurriedly went outside and got onto a taxi outside her work that she’d have to take home.”
While Leslie admits that he hadn’t planned the proposal, it’s a memory he’ll forever hold dear.
“I just said to her, ‘You know you make me happy and I can’t live without you. Don’t you want to be my wife?’ And she said yes,” he adds excitedly.
When Jennifer got to the taxi, Leslie was waiting, ring in hand. And when he popped the question, the other passengers cheered.
“I was so
shy and surprised to see him leaning over that seat with the ring in his hand
but I said yes,” she says.
“I was so surprised by the entire thing that I put out my right hand for the ring instead of the left,” she chuckles.
Leslie, a divorced father of two, says his children adore Jennifer and she’s had a great impact on his life in the past year.
“I love her so much. Having her in my life has been such a blessing and that’s why I want to spend the rest of it with her,” he says.
“Leslie has really changed me for the better,” says the bride-to-be. “There were times when I wanted to give up but he gave me hope.”
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