If a guy proposed to me with a ring, I’d have to conclude that he didn’t actually know me at all (which doesn’t say much for our chances at marriage…)
I don’t want an engagement ring. Those stupid raised settings get caught on everything – stick my hand in a drawer, practically yank my finger off. Put my arm in my coat sleeve, practically yank my finger off. I use my hands all the time; I couldn’t even function like that.
There’s also the whole blood diamonds thing, which I want no part of. I don’t think diamonds are all that extraordinary anyway, and am quite :rolleyes: at how the monopolies have artificially inflated the price.
Hey, I’ve had three significant relatinships in my life. One lasted more than twenty years. We parted, fairly unhappily on my part, when she left for another guy. No financial stuff involved. Just went our separate ways.
The next one lasted three years. She cleaned me out, financially. I mean she took everything I had. I’d trusted her, made everything joint, and was left with nothing but debt and my next paycheck.
The third, well, it’s blissful. And if I’d asked her to “prove” that she wouldn’t cheat on me, or rip me off, well, it wouldn’t be so blissful. So no, I didn’t need more than a handshake. Thank God.
My husband proposed without a ring, although he was planning to get one. He knows he has no sense of what I like in jewelry, and was afraid to buy one without my choosing it. I ended up choosing the setting and shape of stone, while he chose the diamond itself. It’s a very nice ring. I get complements from strangers on it, particularly women/girls behind checkout counters.
All that said, I was very, very ambivalent about getting an engagement ring. I like jewelry, but the idea of walking around with a giant expensive blingy thing all the time was somewhat off-putting to me. Mr. GilaB flatly insisted on getting me one (with a somewhat-implied pressure to then wear it all the time), and I wasn’t opposed enough to fight him on it. I would have been completely fine not getting one. I do wear mine all the time, mostly to make him happy, although I haven’t hustled to repair it and make it wearable again since one of the baguettes fell out two weeks ago. (Finding that baguette on my apartment floor several days later did make my evening, though!)
If the person being asked hasn’t figured that out yet and the two people have known each other for more than a week, (s)he needs to up the caffeine intake.
I did not have a ring when we first got engaged. When I told other people we were engaged but didn’t have a ring, they acted like the engagement wasn’t real or verified… which is pretty insulting. wtf did we need a ring to prove we intended on getting married?
I’ve seen some platinum and diamond blingy engagement rings in Cosmo and they are so not me. It seems with some settings it would be easy to lose a stone, and they would be a pain in the ass to have resized.
I just want to point out, that an engagement ring is not required to be a prong-set Solitaire. It can be anything you like and would wear. “Engagement ring” =/= some particular style of ring.
When the hubby and I ‘got engaged’ (meaning he finally gave in to my constant carping about how one day he was going to realize I was the best thing that ever happened to him and then he was going to marry me), there was no ring. We already had a daughter, almost a year and a half old. My mother was terminally ill, and I knew that our marriage would make her happy, so I said “OK, if we’re going to get married, we’d best do it quickly while my mother is still alive to see it”. So we had a 10-week engagement. Because of my mother’s overwhelming medical bills (lung cancer sucks!), we had to pay for the wedding ourselves. My mother contributed $100.00, my hubby’s mother ‘made’ my wedding gown out of a clearance-sale prom gown. I did the bouquets myself. Etc.
Our wedding rings were $9.00 gold electroplate thingies from Ames department store.
Eventually, over time, as we accrued some wealth of our own, I bought him a real gold band; he bought me a gold band with five 10pt stones set in it. By the time I was expecting our second child, I was working a commissioned sales job and had a good month, and a friend gave us tickets to the Washington DC Gem Show. He also gave us some advice: ‘Go on the last day; spy up several rings you like; wait until a couple of hours before it’s all over and make offers. They’d rather sell it cheap than insure it to ship it back home’.
That’s how I got my ‘engagement’ ring (which came a couple of years after the actual wedding!), and my ring is an 18k gold ‘squared’ band, 1/3ct oval solitaire flanked by 1/4ct pear-shaped solitaires. It’s beautiful, and unique in that it’s not the ‘traditional’ one-solitaire-set-in-gold thing.
My hubby’s younger brother, OTOH, popped the question to his first wife with a 1/2ct solitaire; she told him to take it back and get a full carat, or don’t bother :rolleyes:. You’d think he would have gotten a clue.
My husband proposed without a ring. After we got engaged, we went to a few jewelry stores and saw nothing interesting, so we decided to have something custom made. We went to a few independent jewelry stores and every single one said they did custom work, but they were lying. They all had stock settings and “one from column A” ideas of what custom work was.
Because we had jobs, we were doing this on the weekend, and we actually had other things to do, like living, and in the meantime some of my co-workers were harassing me unmercifully about my ring. They weren’t joking, either. I would come in on Monday morning and they would be at my throat. Didjagetyourringyet? And they would look at me as if I was totally pathetic. It took a couple of months, and by that time, somebody actually asked me, “Hey, weren’t you engaged? What happened with that?” The aggravation was unreal.
And after I got the ring, which is the most beautiful thing ever (and 100% custom), it was “Have you found your dress yet?” Holy shit, the vultures never stop.
For the record, I would have married him without the ring. But once I said I was going to get a ring in due time, I had compromised my sanity. Hey – I was excited about being engaged. What did I know? :smack:
I didn’t want a diamond or a wedding, but my husband insisted because he “wanted to do things right”. So I wear my ring, but I couldn’t tell you what carat it is.
I think our first real fight was when he had bought me some expensive jewelry. Though he had known for years that I don’t wear it and I don’t see the sense in spending money like that, the jewelry commercials were still able to warp his mind.
Married dude here…I didn’t have a ring when I proposed, because I wasn’t planning on proposing yet. The moment felt right. The next day we went ring shopping together, bought a very nice (and inexpensive) engagement ring that we both loved.
As far as I know, Mrs. Omens doesn’t have any regrets with how it all happened.
If a woman can’t evaluate a guy’s responsibility after dating him long enough to consider marriage, she’s an idiot. If she wants to evaluate whether or not he’s wealthy, if that’s important to her, well, let’s just say I question her character. If she wants to be rich, she should go out and get rich on her own. It’s 2001, ya know? Sisters are doing it for themselves.
I’d have married my husband standing in a hole in the ground, ring or no ring.
That said, that he loves me enough to give me a beautiful ring, and a beautiful wedding means the world to me. But I’d have married him without all that stuff and we’d be just as happy.
I am not married, but let me just say this. You can ask me to marry you without a ring. If I say no, I can assure you that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the jewelry or lack thereof.
I’m not a big fan of diamonds. And having seen the movie Blood Diamond, I am not really very happy about the idea of supporting the sort of underground crime that goes along with mining and marketing diamonds.
I also think it’s impractical. I happen to be of the opinion that a wedding itself is impractical. Let’s say you spend $20K on a wedding + a ring, honeymoon, the whole enchilada (which is probably a modest estimate). If you took that 20K and put a down payment on a getaway beach house for me, I would be happier than a pig in poo… and would be happy to meet you at the courthouse for a quickie “wedding”, maybe throw a keg party for a few friends AT my new beach house.
I lose jewelry. Rings go down the drain. Diamonds fall out of their settings. But a beach house, I cannot lose. (DISCLAIMER: This is Florida, so a hurricane could wipe out my theoretical engagement beach house. That said, that is what insurance is for and you can always rebuild.)
I knew a guy who had to get a bigger diamond to get his wife to say yes, she thought the one he picked was too small. He was a jerk so I guess his wife was perfect for him.
When we married, we could not afford a fancy bit of jewelry, so we didn’t buy any. Just plain gold bands.
I did buy a nice anniversery ring with diamonds, but by that time we could easily afford the luxury.
To my mind, it is a simple question of what to spend on luxuries. I happen to like diamonds; they really do have a nice sparkle to 'em. No doubt fakes sparkle just as nicely, but there is I think nothing wrong with indulging in a luxury even if irrational - if you can afford it. The harm lies in being ‘required’ to purchase luxuries you can’t afford because of social convention.
I got the ring first, and spent about a week’s salary. I would not have proposed at all if I didn’t think she’d say yes without it- I just wanted her to have the “movie moment”.
I made a point of getting a “clean” diamond (from India).
Thank goodness Mrs. Taco didn’t require someone fancy when I proposed. I didn’t have two nickels to rub together back then and there was no way I could have afforded ANY ring much less something expensive. In the end her “engagement ring” ended up being a ring that was my Grandmother’s. And even then it wasn’t anything to write home about.
Since then, I’ve gotten her a few rings with diamonds, but not anything you’d think of when you think of a typical engagement ring.
28 years this year, so I think we did something right.
We got an engagement ring after we decided to get engaged (together, no formal proposal), to prove to my mother that we were in fact engaged so my grandmother wouldn’t complain as hard about us living in sin. Now that we’re married, I don’t even wear it.
I think they’re unecessary BUT, if my husband had started a discussion of engagement rings by telling me how stupid and what a waste they were, without thinking about whether it was important to me, he wouldn’t be my husband. That attitude is far more insulting to me than the idea that someone might want a ring as either a symbol of the relationship or an indication of the other party’s seriousness.