Why I Hate Engagement Rings

According to recent surveys, nearly 30% of Americans have at some point videotaped themselves having sex. While this is good news for voyeurs everywhere (and our amateur sex tapes might have been a better propaganda item to drop over Iraq than the threatening leaflets the Bush administration eventually OK'ed), it also takes the 'conspicuous' part of 'conspicuous consumption' to an entirely new level. For better or for worse, we are becoming Generation "Look at Me, Look at Me!"

In my eyes, shady videotapes are proof that we're more comfortable now than ever with the risk of being exposed to public ridicule. I'm not trying to suggest the Romans wouldn't have recorded their orgies if they could have, I'm suggesting that things we once considered private now lie in a strange gray area.

How does this all relate to engagement rings? It's the reason I hate them. As mentioned in Slate's wedding issue, people only started wearing diamond engagement rings in the 1930's. It was a lonely spinster (no doubt working late one Christmas night, because that's what unmarried women did back then) who came up with the line, "A Diamond is Forever." The theory was that diamonds, like marriage, were a "'til death do you part" sort of deal. Now, of course, the reverse is often true of marriage. But diamonds have stayed steadfast.

Despite their reassuring permanence, engagement rings perturb me. Maybe it's because neither my mother nor my grandmother had one, so I don't associate rings with some tearjerking romantic tradition. Mostly, it strikes me as crass to ask your fiancee you buy you a hunk of gleaming ore as proof of his love ("Baby, I think men with large...credit card debt...are so attractive...") I know that's not how wearers of engagement rings see it - and after all, they do have the population advantage.

But what's more awkward that those locker room non-conversations when one woman sidles up to another, sneaks a sideways glance at her left hand, and reassures herself that her own ring is bigger, better and shinier? It suggests that her boyfriend's love is more pure, or at least that his tax bracket is a few percentage points higher. Thank God, she thinks to herself. Not because it changes her feelings towards him - after all, isn't he the man she loves? - but because now she doesn't have to hide anything. For this reason alone, I would no more want to wear an engagement ring than tattoo my salary on my forehead or exchange homemade sex tapes with other recently-engaged friends.

Then again, while the woman with the smaller ring may feel awkward at, say, a champagne brunch on the Upper West Side, the woman with no ring suffers the worst fate of all. How can she explain this choice without making her fellows feel guilty and judged? Or worse yet, leading them to believe that her fiancee is broke, unemployed, or clueless? If you're opting out of the ring, it's probably best not to mention your engagement in public at all. Let the wedding be a surprise!

The truth is, although my grandmother never got an engagement ring, she does scramble after gems. Indian women obsess about their jewelry. They lie, steal and extort just to show off their taste. Sometimes they resort to heinously gaudy fakes. It's a relic of the days when they had nothing else to call their own and no professional opportunities. A woman's jewelry, gifted to her by others, was her only true measure of worth. To me, living your life by the light of another's carat is old-fashioned. Modern women should have a more self-centered (not to mention equitable as far as the guys are concerned) way to establish status.

Before I conclude, I have to admit that I'm biased. In terms of price-to-value relationship, most precious jewelry doesn't make my cut. If instead of engagement rings we exchanged week-long vacations in the rainforest, or books by famous authors, I'd probably accept the competitive nature of the interaction (does Costa Rica mean a better relationship than Belize? Does the girl who gets a vintage first edition of Remembrance of Things Past have a rosier marital outlook than the one who gets a mass-market paperback of The Da Vinci Code? What if neither speaks French?)