Why Joshua Tan’s 22-Year-Old Med Student Fiancée Initially Said No When He Proposed

When Joshua Tan first showed 8days.sg photos of his engagement photoshoot hours before he announced the good news on Instagram yesterday (Dec 30), the first thing we asked him was this: Photos very nice leh, she knew about the proposal, right?

That triggered a round of laughter from Joshua, 29 , and his 22-year-old fiancée, Zoen Tay. She started scrolling through her photos, showing us a pic of her looking not-quite-impressed at Joshua, who was down on one knee. She even looked like she was mouthing the word, ‘No’.

“I didn’t know anything about it and he planted a bunch of decoys that managed to fool me completely!” the medical student sighed. “He told me that we were going for a photoshoot, which isn’t unusual for him, because we’ve done like two other shoots together before. Joshua’s also always springing surprises on me, so I didn’t find it out of the ordinary.”

What was a tad strange though was how, before the shoot, they had gone to a shopping mall, where Joshua gave her his credit card and told Zoen that she could pick out something that she wanted to wear for the shoot and that there was “no limit on how much [she could] spend”.

The good news for Joshua’s credit limit was that Zoen picked out something that cost less than three digits, and they headed to the Botanic Gardens for their shoot with their friend Jaegen. It started off just like any other shoot until, halfway through, Joshua launched into a romantic speech.