Why couples are skipping the engagement ring
As relationships evolve, some people are choosing to ditch traditional symbols
Rebecca Vipond-Brink never wanted an engagement ring.
For her first marriage, Vipond-Brink, a freelance writer and editor in Chicago, had a $6,000 ring.
“I hated every second of wearing it, because we had a really tough time financially and I was walking around with thousands of dollars on my hand. And I thought we could get rid of so many problems if I could just take this off and not have it anymore,” she said.
When Vipond-Brink got married a second time in 2015, she wanted her finger bare of an engagement ring. “I would much rather put the money toward the wedding or the honeymoon or our bills or whatever,” she said. “Anything seems like a better expense than a ring.”
The national average price paid for an engagement ring reached $6,163 in 2016, according to wedding brand The Knot. But for some, the diamond engagement ring is losing its lustre.
And for a variety of reasons. For Vipond-Brink, her financial priorities changed between her first and second marriages.
“Engagement rings have no legitimate utility,” she said. As far as marking the commitment in a relationship, living together has become the de facto engagement ring. About a third more U.S. adults were in cohabiting relationships in 2016 compared to nine years earlier, according to the Pew Research Center.
“Once you move in together, then people begin to treat you as an indivisible couple,” said Stephanie Coontz, historian and author of the book Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage.
While relationships have changed tremendously in the past decades and centuries, the engagement ring has been among the last relationship markers to evolve.
In the 15th century, Archduke Maximillian of Austria gifted his fiancée the world’s first diamond engagement ring, though the expensive practice did not initially spread among the general population, Coontz said.
“By the 1950s, you got kind of a cookie-cutter approach to marriages. Everybody was wearing white. Everybody’s supposed to have a diamond ring,” she added.
Engagement rings also served as a status symbol during a time when most women got married before 21.
“Even though the nature of marriage and the nature of relationships has changed immensely over the last 40 years, becoming much more egalitarian, these kinds of symbols have been the last to die out — the man who’s supposed to propose, the woman who’s supposed to be full of delight and joy and the woman who’s supposed to show off the ring,” Coontz said.
Even as some couples are skipping the engagement ring or choosing a stone other than a diamond, Coontz said symbols such as the engagement ring are still sticking around.
“We have just transformed what these relationships are, and I think you’re seeing more and more variation in the types of wedding ceremonies that people go through, the types of things they do before marriage, the types of marriages that they work out,” she said. “I would certainly expect that more people will depart from the old tradition, but it seems to have very long legs.”