Engagement ring apologetics

Posted by admin on Nov 3, 2009 in Issues & Ideas | 1 comment

For an individualistic society seemingly obsessed with challenging the status quo, it’s surprising how socially unacceptable it still is to defy certain traditions.

Take the engagement ring custom, for example. Recently engaged, my fiancé and I decided we would both wear an engagement ring, on our right hands, which will be transferred to our left hands upon marriage. To us, the choice is a natural outflow of the values of companionship and equality we have consciously fostered throughout our relationship. To others, the decision is completely alien.

On countless occasions I have found myself apologetically defending our decision. Typically the exchange begins something like this:

“Why is your engagement ring on the wrong hand?” Somebody questions.
“Well it’s on the right hand, actually,” I respond.
“But it’s supposed to be on your left hand, that’s the wrong hand.”
“Well it’s not on my left hand, so clearly it’s on the right hand.”

Beneath these delightful ambiguities of the English language lies a deeper line of reasoning. Basically, we want our marriage to be grounded in themes of equality, love, friendship and meaningful covenant. We haven’t seen these themes strongly reflected in the tradition perpetuated around us.

To start, our culture expects the man to drop a serious amount of coin on a ring. In what some connect as a modern adaptation of the bride price/dowry tradition, he offers this ring to the woman in exchange for her hand in marriage.

More recently, it has become nearly mandatory that this ring be diamond. “A diamond is forever,” right? Depends who you talk to. It was a diamond company called De Beers that invented this advertising slogan, in the mid-twentieth century, not so long ago.

The tradition took well in a society increasingly comfortable with materialism and the acquiring of all things shiny and sparkly. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has borne witness to impassioned debates regarding how many months’ salary should be spent on the engagement ring, or the expressions of “let’s see the rock.” Pity the male who couldn’t afford, or didn’t think his girlfriend would really want, a giant rock – such a failing would be seen as a reflection on his worth and the worth he places on his bride-to-be. If that’s not enough, the engagement ring is only the beginning – the wedding-industrial complex is a formidable force that can overtake even the most modest of wedding intentions.

Not only is this tradition highly unbalanced; the “eternity” this ring is supposed to represent becomes mired in meaninglessness as the divorce rate grows. A divorce rate approaching 50 per cent – and Christian marriages are no significant exception – doesn’t make the “eternity” or “forever-ness” of the diamond engagement ring tradition very credible.

So we looked to other traditions to see if they would prove more hopeful, and found some interesting things. In Spain, upon receiving an engagement ring, women will immediately run out and buy their husband-to-be a pocket watch – so he won’t be late to the wedding. In many countries – Germany and Norway, for example – the engagement ring is worn on the right hand. In Brazil and Chile, both partners wear an engagement ring.

So with these thoughts in mind, we’ve taken the engagement ring tradition and made it our own. We had our rings custom designed – diamond free – and though we didn’t plan it this way, they came to the identical price.

“Usually one ring is quite a bit more expensive than the other,” the jeweler commented, not specifying which gender’s.

What is interesting is who supports our ideas – younger men, a few enlightened young women, and many older women or couples that have been there, done that marriage thing, and sometimes the divorce thing too. It’s often from women my own age that I encounter defensiveness, indifference, even the challenge to “apologize” for my deviancy. Perhaps these young, unmarried or recently married women don’t want their “right” to a big diamond engagement ring challenged.

While the word apologetics may seem misplaced in this context, it’s not any less appropriate than the Christian redefinition of the word. Somehow, etymologically, we moved from apologetic: “regretfully acknowledging or excusing an offense or failure,” to apologetics: “reasoned arguments or writings in justification of something, typically a theory or religious doctrine.”

Well our theory is this: if we want to have any hope of building a successful marriage based on equality, love, friendship and meaningful covenant, we need to start from the right place.

An engagement ring tradition borne from a culturally outdated dowry/bride price tradition, bred through a jewelry company’s clever advertising ploy, matured in a society that sells its soul to materialism, and propagated through the rampant rate of divorce, is needless to say not the right place to start.

So while my fiancé jokes about his ring being the “One Ring,”(at 20 grams it must be pretty close,) we both know we are off to a good start, with neither of us fearing nor anticipating the tyranny of the other. What will make our marriage meaningful is not the size of the diamond engagement ring, how many months’ salary it cost, or how much money, time and stress went into the wedding planning – “what do you mean you’re seating us at the same table as them” – but what we put into it, the time we’re taking to think through the cultural constructs of marriage that so many take for granted and consciously decide how we want our marriage to be from square one.

I encourage anyone else who’s thinking about embarking on the marital adventure to put some serious thought into the details we take for granted – it’s worth it.