Last week’s talk about custom engagement rings got us thinking, “why are engagement rings so expensive in general?” Whether it’s professionally or personally, we’ve encountered so many people that suffered financial setbacks or had to save well over a year ahead of time for their engagement ring. Doesn’t that seem a little extreme to anyone else?
The crux of this thought comes from the typical sentiment that an engagement ring must cost at least two month’s salary. We’ve seen variations on this: the one month rule, the three month rule, it doesn’t matter. What does is asking the question of how we came to consider that line of thinking commonplace at all? It implies that, if you aren’t willing to put yourself in debt to get married, you aren’t:
- Ready for a commitment
- Financially ready for marriage
- Truly in love with your partner
Is anyone else picking up some condescending undertones here?
After some digging, we found some articles from BBC and recent news contender Hubspot that shed some light on this subject. It turns out that this “rule” started off as a marketing campaign by The De Beers Diamond Group of Companies. The implicit goal being to link the idea of diamonds to emotional connection. Starting rather simple in the 1930’s with just one month’s salary for a ring, and finally cultivating in the 1980’s with this gem of an ad, logged by The Advertising Archives. Diamonds, which are actually not rare at all, had little to do with most engagements before the 1930’s. The wedding band was a tradition that can be followed back to the Middle Ages, but before then, diamonds on engagements rings were seen as a sign of affluence, a treat for the wealthy. De Beers’ game involved rewriting the cultural opinion of the tradition so that the working class and lower would be pressured to join in, even if they couldn’t afford it.
Now, let us be clear: there’s nothing wrong with getting a lovely diamond ring for the person you love the most. You’re not a bad person if you plan to buy one, or want one. No one is saying go out and propose with a plastic ring found at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box so you can ‘stick it to the man’. Diamonds rings have become a wedding staple because –yes –the thought that someone would spend so much time and money to hand over a symbol of their commitment does have genuine gravitas to it. It’s warm and endearing.
But if you want to buy an expensive ring, it should be because you choose to and not because you feel pressured by a marketing campaign that was so astoundingly effective it changed how we as a society feel about marriage.
