1. Skip to content
  2. Skip to main menu
  3. Skip to more DW sites

5 declarations of love that'll move you to tears

Antje Binder ct
February 10, 2017

Grab the tissues. Even those who've written off Valentine's Day will need one for these moving declarations of love. After all, who could turn down a marriage proposal involving 1,000 roses?

https://p.dw.com/p/2XDPj
Woman holding red roses
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/R. Weihrauch

They were the glamour couple of the 1960s. Gunter Sachs was a playboy with the top button always undone on his Oxford and too much money in his pockets - the son of industrialist Willy Sachs and Opel-granddaughter, Elinor von Opel. Brigitte Bardot was a femme fatale, and sex symbol, and the embodiment of a new type of woman in the 1960s.

No matter where the dream couple turned up, they were surrounded by paparazzi. Together they made St. Tropez on the French Mediterranean the jet setters' Mecca.

Proposal with 1,000 red roses

It was there on the Côte d'Azur that the pair met each other. After just a few short months, they were engaged - and not without a big gesture. Gunter Sachs had 1,000 red roses dropped from a helicopter, raining down on the house of his beloved, Brigitte Bardot. They married a few hours later in Las Vegas, not even bothering to change their clothes for the ceremony. It was Brigitte Bardot's third marriage and Gunter Sachs' second.

As swift and intense as the romance was, it just as quickly came to an end. The marriage lasted just three years, but the couple maintained a friendly relationship even after their split in 1969. It even seemed that they loved each other more after the divorce than during their years together.

'Til death do us part

In 2011, Gunter Sachs committed suicide after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Brigitte Bardot was devastated, telling the magazine "Bunte" that she still loved him endless - 45 years after her first declaration of love for Sachs.

It was a goose bump moment. For more moving declarations of love, click through the gallery above.