Songfacts®:

• "Marry Me" is the fourth single from Train's fifth album, Save Me San Francisco (the one with "Hey Soul Sister"). The song finds vocalist and chief songwriter Pat Monahan imagining proposing to a girl he's not even spoken to yet. He explained to PopEater: "'Marry Me' is more fantasy than it is 'Hey, marry me.' It's 'What if I did this?' What if I took this chance in this love-at-first-sight moment and said, 'Hey, I know you don't know me and I'm just getting a coffee, but I think that we're supposed to spend the rest of our lives together'? Wouldn't that be incredible? Just because I think that men – I don't know how women work, but men, the ones that I know, we tend to fall in love several times a day – with that woman who gave me that cup of coffee or 'Did you see the producer of the show?' We just are like that, and it's just interesting to think that it's got to be a universal thing among men."
• Pat Monahan got together with the producers David Katz and Sam Hollander to write the title track of the album, but their sessions also sparked "Marry Me," which started off as a song called "Stay On Me."
  
  "It was absolutely beautiful and had the same longing melodies," Hollander said in a Songfacts interview, "but it just didn't raise its hand. Then Pat went back in and flipped it to 'Marry Me,' and the emotion went a step further.
  
  When Jonathan Daniel, Pat's manager, played it for me, I had chills. I could not believe what Pat did with it. Sometimes you get those surprises. Sometimes a song never lives up to the demo in the room, but that one far surpassed it. He deserves the credit. That's his heart - he's a big-hearted guy with a really deft lyrical touch."
• The country star Martina McBride performed the song as a duet with Pat Monahan during an episode of CMT Crossroads, portraying a couple who are dreaming of each other, coming together at the end. It went over so well, they record their duet version for McBride's 2011 album Eleven.
  
  McBride and Monahan performed it again at the 2012 ACM Awards in Las Vegas while Christina Davidson and Frank Tucci tied the knot on stage. The newlyweds originally met under tragic circumstances, both having lost their first spouses in 2009.
• The video, directed by Lex Halaby, opens with a montage of real married couples telling the stories of how they met. When the song starts, it turns into a storyline where Monahan falls for a waitress, played by Anna Camp of True Blood and The Good Wife.