From bended knee to Kijiji

WhereWher do engagement rings go when the knot isn’t tied?

When Tyler* proposed to his girlfriend of seven years in Hawaii with a carefully chosen engagement ring— and she said yes— he didn’t expect to be putting it up for sale on Kijiji two years later.

But an age gap of five years and diverging career paths that often left him and his fiancée on separate continents, eventually took their toll. Tyler, 35, felt the pressure to start a family. His fiancée wanted to head back to school. A year into their engagement, it became clear it wasn’t working.

“We decided not to go further with getting married. She went to med school and… I wanted her to pursue that,” says Tyler.

The end of their engagement posed a whole new problem: what to do with the ring?

And that’s how Tyler found himself posting an ad on Kijiji a few weeks ago for a gently used but undeniably beautiful 0.9- carat Halo diamond engagement ring. And while the ad attracted plenty of attention, Tyler started to notice an uncomfortable pattern in the responses he was getting from potential buyers:

“They’re afraid to ask, almost. They want to know the history of it ( but) they kind of tiptoe around the area— how come this didn’t work?”

“A lot of people don’t want the bad vibes that go with a broken engagement,” says Tyler.

According to the analytic experts at Kijiji, Calgarians surpass the national average when it comes to the sale of diamond engagement and wedding rings on the digital classifieds site.

While such rings account for just three to four per cent of Kijiji’s overall jewelry inventory in Canada, in Calgary that share is closer to six or seven per cent.

Around 4,200 engagement and/ or wedding rings were put up for sale in Calgary last year. That’s up from 3,071 the previous year. And while the numbers seem to be increasing, there’s still a sort of stigma attached to such rings.

Calgary marriage counsellor Debra Macleod says that while people are too obsessive in general about engagement rings— particularly about the size— she understands why people are reticent about buying a second- hand ring. “You buy a patio set from Kijiji,” she says, “not the sparkle that symbolizes your love and whole life together— you don’t get that secondhand.”

Macleod says engagement rings are “emotionally loaded” objects and that can be a lightning rod for conflict when a relationship breaks down. She advises both parties in the relationship to conduct themselves with self- restraint and avoid doing anything that they’ll regret down the road.

But what should you do when selling a ring is the only way to start recovering your losses from a failed relationship? One ad poster ( who asked that we not reveal her name) said in an email that she kept her ring in lieu of proper child support:

“The reason why I’m selling it is because the guy I’m with is wishy- washy about staying and being a dad... I honestly thought that he was the one I’d spend my life with. I didn’t think he would be a dead beat dad and boyfriend.”

Unfortunately, the one other thing all of the ads have in common is that the rings offered up for sale are frequently marked down significantly from what the owner originally paid. Tyler’s designer ring cost around $ 8,200 - $ 8,300 with all the alterations he had done. He’s currently asking $ 4,700 for it on Kijiji, which is already $ 1,000 less than what he originally asked for when he first posted the ad four weeks ago.

Shawn McIntyre of Kijiji says that while more and more people are becoming comfortable with the idea of buying an engagement ring secondhand, a lingering discomfort may be reflected in the discounted prices.

“Some people will always have that stigma, that they’re buying an emotionally charged item that was bought for somebody else,” says McIntyre. “It makes it very difficult to resell something like that on the secondary market.”

Luckily for Tyler, he’s in no rush to sell the ring. He can afford to hold out for a better offer. But given all that’s happened, it’s perhaps not so surprising that he’s come to hold a less than romanticized view of engagement rings.

“I don’t want to say this the wrong way, but it’s probably one of the worst investments that you can possibly make.”