The 7 Most Psychotic Ways People Tried to Prove Their Love

7 People Keep Using Massive Fires to Profess Their Love

Clifford Cohen wanted to marry his sweetheart, Ruth. He came up with the idea of spelling out his marriage proposal with hay bales, which, in fairness, is a fantastic way to determine whether your partner is marrying you for love or socioeconomic status.

Using 80 bales of hay, Clifford spelled out "WILL YOU MARRY ME RUTH?" creating a minor amount of confusion by leaving out the comma. The plan was to fly his sweetheart over this monument of love at night while a friend illuminated the hay bales with his car's headlights, because nothing drops panties faster than some nighttime hay-spotting. However, the friend with the car never showed up.

In a desperate move to save the special moment, Clifford's brother, Iric, set the bales on fucking fire. The fire quickly spread out of control, consuming the field around it. You know, as fire does.

Luckily, no part of bathing an entire field in an ocean of flames struck Ruth as being totally insane, and she agreed to marry Clifford. Meanwhile, Iric, the Cyrano de Bergerac of this story, got arrested, because of course he did.

This sort of thing is, as it turns out, surprisingly common.

In Shenyang, China, a student named Dim Xiong Chien wanted to propose to his girlfriend, and he wasn't going to settle for a mere hay conflagration. His plan was to take his prospective fiance on a romantic walk through their college campus, culminating in a brilliant impromptu fireworks show lighting up the night sky as he popped the question. However, in what is perhaps the least subtle omen in recorded history, his girlfriend completely forgot to meet him. Not one to be discouraged, Dim went off to find her, but decided to set off the fireworks first to get her attention. Luckily, there's no possible way she could have failed to spot his signal of love, because the three enormous boxes of fireworks Dim ignited and subsequently left unattended set fire to half of the goddamned campus.

The flames of Dim's passion burned down the school's athletic building, as well as causing massive damage to the surrounding grass and trees. The unstoppable inferno took firefighters over an hour to thwart. Dim wisely chose to save the proposal for a later date, but his plan was outed in the surrounding media chaos, presumably because he needed some kind of explanation for randomly setting off pounds of fireworks in the middle of the night. His girlfriend later admitted to reporters that, although she loves Dim, a marriage might prove difficult, because her parents think he is a goddamned idiot. This particular event is unlikely to change their opinion.

But at least in those cases, the damage was unintentional ...

6 A Police Chief Burns Down His Ex-Girlfriend's Apartment Building So He Can Save Her

John Tuchek was the police chief of Lanesboro, Minnesota (our use of the past-tense to describe his occupation will soon make sense). Tuchek was pining big time for his ex-girlfriend, and convinced himself that he could win her back if she had a chance to see what a selfless, caring person he was. So he concocted a plan wherein he would set fire to her apartment building and rush in to save her from the raging hellstorm, because John Tuchek is not a man who believes in half-assing his dangerous obsession.

The details of Tuchek's plan were as follows:

Step 1: Start a fire behind his ex-girlfriend's apartment building.
Step 2: Return to his patrol car to report it.
Step 3: Rescue his burning ex-girlfriend.
Step 4: Delicate, silvadene-covered make-up sex.

It may shock you to learn that Tuchek's plan fell apart almost immediately. First, he couldn't get reception on his phone, so he had to drive a bit to call in the fire. By the time he returned to the blaze (which, we might add, was consuming a historic building built in the 1890s), the fire department had already arrived, because for whatever reason Tuchek didn't think anyone inside would have the presence of mind to call for help while flames destroyed their home.

Also, John Tuchek, Champion of Romance, forgot to take into account the presence of gas lines, which are a thing that run through buildings. Apparently blinded by visions of his impending heroism, Tuchek had managed to start the fire more or less directly next to the pipe carrying gas to the upper units, which predictably exploded and belched remorseless hellfire onto two additional historic buildings. After all was said and done, Tuchek had caused over half a million dollars in damage and went straight the hell to jail.

5 A Couple Role-Play an Abduction in Public, It Goes How You'd Expect

A Portland couple, Nikolas Harbar and Stephanie Pelzner, decided to spice up their sexy role-playing by injecting a little bit of danger. So they staged an erotic kidnapping. On a very special Valentine's Day, Nikolas restrained his nude girlfriend with duct tape and threw her in the back of his car. To add to the sexiness, he left her there while he just ran ordinary errands. Apparently her fetish is to be trussed up in a Subaru while waiting for her kidnapper to buy stamps.

Now, it is important to note that this pretend kidnapping was done in public, where the difference between risque sex game and violent abduction is impossible to determine. So, one vigilant member of the general populace, burdened with that exact confusion, spotted the bound and naked Stephanie lying in the car while parked at a grocery store and called 911.

After dispatching nine patrol cars to comb the city looking for them, police finally tracked the couple back to their home, and after hearing how this was all some kind of funny sex thing, arrested them for disorderly conduct (which is a term here meaning "being naked and stupid outside").

4 A Man Tattoos His Girlfriend's Initial on His Penis, Gets Neverending Erection

You might recall the story of the man who injected his penis with cocaine to thrill his girlfriend. But let's face it -- a cocaine-injected penis is for casual sex. A penis engraved with your lover's initials is forever. At least, that's the unbelievably terrible life chant of one 21-year-old Iranian man who had his girlfriend's initial carved into the flesh of his child spigot.

In addition to the initial, the anonymous man also had his penis tattooed with a phrase translating to "good luck with your journeys," which, as you may have noticed, is a whole lot of writing to have stabbed into your genitalia. This seems like a poor choice of words as far as a message to your girlfriend every time she sees your naked penis -- it's essentially saying, "Good luck with this dick! xoxo"

Despite what we can only assume was the overwhelming gratitude of his girlfriend, the tattoo had an unusual side effect -- the man soon noticed that his typical morning boners were lasting well into the day. Finally, his boners wouldn't go away at all. It turns out all that wiener-branding resulted in a condition called nonischemic priapism, which basically means that blood can no longer exit his penis. However, he heroically refused any treatment, which is a phrase here meaning "he declined to have a shunt jammed into his dick to drain all the blood." So now he just walks around all day in a perpetual state of uncontrollable semi-hardness, which basically means he'll be stuck in eighth grade for the foreseeable future.

3 A Man Mails Himself to His Girlfriend for Her Birthday, Nearly Suffocates

Can you imagine your significant other's reaction if they opened a tantalizingly enormous package on their birthday only to find that it contained not a personal massage robot or a big-screen television but a full adult human? Maybe you can, which is one of many excellent reasons why you don't mail people unless you're doling them out in increments to encourage a ransom payment. However, Hu Seng was unburdened by such matters of common sense, which is why he squeezed himself into a box and mailed himself to his girlfriend.

Hu's plan was as straightforward as it was terrible: He had a friend tape him and a little stuffed toy into an ordinary box, then had it delivered across town, where his girlfriend would open it up and coo with surprise and delight as he came tumbling out. Hu figured it would probably be about a 20-minute trip, which is an assumption he believed in so strongly that he bet his life on it.

Delivery drivers don't exactly conduct their day-to-day business with as much urgency as we'd like them to, so expecting a box weighing over 100 pounds to be transported across a city in less time than it takes to watch an episode of True Blood was wildly optimistic. There was a mix-up with the address, which caused Hu's big ol' box of stupid to be delivered three hours later than he anticipated, a setback that was made exponentially worse by the fact that he'd neglected to put any airholes in his cardboard tomb. When his girlfriend finally opened the box, she found Hu passed out inside and had to call paramedics to come revive him.

2 A Man Takes His Ex-Girlfriend's Teacher Hostage for Flunking Her

Twenty-five-year-old Alexander Kuptsov wanted to get back together with his 17-year-old ex-girlfriend, which already sounds less like an opportunity for romance and more like a feverishly handwritten notebook soon to be confiscated as evidence in a horrible crime. Kupstov was a former Russian army commander, so he decided to harness his internal reservoir of military training and expertise to concoct a brilliant plan to rekindle their relationship. Instead of doing whatever that might have been, Kupstov stormed his girlfriend's classroom and took her English teacher hostage.

What we will generously refer to as the "logic" of his plan was to dazzle his former sweetheart with a display of strength against the teacher who had recently flunked her, and then the two of them would skip town and ride off into the sunset. Astoundingly, she wasn't interested, which deflated Kupstov so completely that the only demands he could think to make to police were for pizza and soda (he eventually tacked on the king's ransom of $1,500 and an SUV, but at first all he wanted was a child's shame lunch).

Police eventually stormed the classroom to drag Kupstov to prison, and his girlfriend presumably still doesn't know English.

1 A NASA Intern Steals a Safe Full of Moon Rocks to Woo His Mistress

Married NASA intern Thad Roberts was looking for a way to impress his fellow intern and lover, Tiffany Fowler, and make millions of dollars in the process. Instead of completing his internship, becoming an astronaut, and writing a powerful memoir about his voyages into space, Roberts opted for the comparatively easier route of stealing a shitload of moon rocks and selling them on the black market.

Roberts knew that a bunch of moon rocks were being kept in a 600-pound safe in the corner of one researcher's lab, so he snuck in with Fowler and another intern one night to try to bust those orbs of space fortune loose. However, the safe proved to be too tough to crack, so Roberts did the next best thing: He and his NASA-betraying cohorts put the safe on a dolly and wheeled it out. Later, at a hotel, Roberts and Fowler put moon rocks under their blanket so that they could have "sex on the moon," which sounds awesome in theory but in reality just translates to "contaminating priceless scientific samples with four minutes of jagged, uncomfortable intercourse."

Roberts set up a sale with a Belgian mineral collector to begin paving the road of his new life with illicit spacebucks, but the collector was immediately suspicious and contacted the FBI to let them know that someone had probably just burgled NASA. The FBI agreed and showed up to escort Roberts to prison for six years. It is unclear whether NASA immediately took the rocks back or had them locked up in a decontamination vault to remove all the stank first.

For more romantic fails from Chris Fox, see The 5 Most Ridiculous Lies Ever Told to Impress a Woman.

For more things you shouldn't try at home, check out 6 Romantic Movie Gestures That Can Get You Prison Time and 5 Romantic Comedy Gestures That Would Get You Slapped.

Are you on reddit? Check it: We are too! Click on over to our best of Cracked subreddit.