If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it
Beyonce, Single Ladies
Is Beyonce’s famous line sexist or what? What does it mean to put a ring on it? What if you put a ring on it and then wanted the ring off it?
Do you ever wonder about how certain cultural rituals developed? While marriage is a worldwide phenomenon, the customs around it vary tremendously by culture and era. If I had another professional life to live, I could enjoy being an anthropologist studying marriage and family. Here, I want to talk about engagement rings, their history, and what is going on with the whole idea.
While engagement ring customs are not universal, there are universal aspects of marriage that include similar customs that govern courtship, rules about betrothal, and, of course, rules about how a promise to marry can be ended. The customs vary but they often have a lot to do with assuring true intention to follow-through.
In an era where marriages are founded around the principles of intimacy and deeper connection, I believe that a central role that commitment is to secure romantic attachment. When there is intense attachment to another but unclear commitment, it makes most people anxious about the potential loss of the partner. When commitment is clear and mutual, commitment promotes a sense of safety in the connection and the future of the relationship. People relax and invest when there is a sense of both present and future safety. (And when there is not, they buy gold without diamonds in it, at least, economically.)
Some customs around romantic relationships represent the giving and receiving of emblems of commitment. These emblems serve the purpose of signaling security in commitment. Enter the ritual of engagement rings.
Matthew O’Brien, who usually writes about business and economics, wrote a piece awhile for the Atlantic about engagement rings: The Strange (and Formerly Sexist) Economics of Engagement Rings. It’s an excellent piece. O’Brien notes how this custom is relatively recent, taking hold after a marketing campaign by N. W. Ayers on behalf of De Beers (a big diamond company). This is fascinating, though it makes me feel about as warm and fuzzy as knowing that greeting card companies started some commemorative days I am emotionally attached to and celebrate. By the way, did I tell you when World Commitment-Related-Blog Day is? It’s coming up, but I have not set the exact date. I have to design a line of digital cards, first, that you can send to friends, for a fee, of course. If you’d rather just keep your schedule free from another day where something is celebrated, just send me 5 bucks and forget the card. US funds are preferred. Old diamond rings, no longer being used, are acceptable as well.
O’Brien points out that there used to be laws about the breach of a promise to marry (similar to how their used to be laws about the breach of promises made in marriage). These laws allowed women to sue men for failing to follow through on marriage plans. Apparently, since even many decades ago, it was not uncommon for a couple to have sex before marriage, and virginity was highly prized when one became married, males could be forced to compensate females for reducing their value by having sex with them but failing to follow through on the promised marriage. Note the logic here. Women were more likely to give something of value to men in the context of the male promising commitment to the future.
You may have noticed that times have changed in a few respects here. O’Brien cites work by a legal scholar Margaret Brinig that supports the idea that the engagement ring (expensive engagement rings—with Diamonds, thanks to DeBeers’) became an actual custom performing the same function as the breach of promise laws just as those laws started to disappear. So, the legal obligation was replaced in some parts of society with an economic promise of forfeiture should a male not fulfill a promise about marriage he had made. Hence began the custom of the woman keeping the ring if the man bailed. These days, you’ll see plenty of debates in advice columns about if and when a ring should be returned based on how a marriage has been called off. O’Brien seems to think this debate is over, but I’m not so sure it is. He considers it somewhat obvious that the woman would give the ring back to a man who did not follow-through on a promise to marry. I’m not so sure. I know some people hate the gender stereotype stuff—and often for good reasons—but this is an area where there has been some rationale historically related to differences in men and women. In the rest of this post I want to raise some questions, explicitly, and then give an example of something that seems complex to me.
Q: Why don’t women, historically, give something expensive to the man in case she changes her mind? Is this sexist in the pejorative sense of sexist = bad or is it sex-difference based in some rationale sense, whether one wants to think it good or bad, because of differences between men and women? (I’ll come back to that question next time.)
Q: In the following vignette, should Tyra give the ring back to Sam?
Sam and Tyra started dating when they met at age 26. They got engaged at age 27, and he gave her a really nice ring at that time. Now they are 32. So, the engagement has gone on for 5 years. I think this is a new trend, by the way, long engagements. For some, endless engagements reflect a desire to tell others they, as a couple, are more committed than average. That is, for some, it’s not as much a plan to marry as a way to signal this higher level of commitment to others—“we’re off the market but we may never really walk the aisle.” But for others, like Sam and Tyra, engagement meant they shared a serious intention to marry.
Moving ahead. Now Sam and Tyra are 32, have been cohabiting for 4 years, and they are still engaged. Sam starts to fall for a woman at work, and the gravitational pull toward this new woman just grows and grows. After some anguish and a lot of effort to work through untangling their lives, he achieves enough escape velocity to move on. There is a lot of inertia to cohabiting (and even more so with engagement), so it can take a lot of energy to move on.
Tyra is feeling VERY burned. Of course, the burning could have happened just as easily either direction, but in this case, Tyra felt that the engagement and the cohabiting were sure signs they were going to get married. As I’ve written in various places, the former is a lot stronger signal of commitment than the latter. Anyway, Tyra plans to keep the ring and she wishes it were bigger still. Way bigger.
In his article, O’Brien suggest that women should generally give rings back in this day and age because they are increasingly likely to be the ones with the good jobs, and therefore, do not really need the collateral of the ring. While not stated, I would imagine he and many others would also not consider Tyra to have given anything more away than Sam has by them having sex and no longer being virgins.
At any rate, Tyra doesn’t feel like Sam owes her for her no longer being a virgin. She feels that this aspect of their relationship was mutual and not something to blame him about. And, while she's deeply hurt about him leaving her for another woman, that's not the biggest reason she feels he owes here, either. What she realizes she is most upset about is that Sam has, in her view, wasted years on biological clock. You might say she is "ticked" off. Tyra wants children and Tyra wants a nuclear family to raise those children in. Tyra has read a great deal about the biological clock and knows well what her odds are and how they have already changed. Thus, Tyra does believe she has lost something of value because she’s lost some of her window on one of her most deeply held life goals. So, does Tyra keep the ring? Should they have talked about the meaning of the ring in the first place, and what happens if things don’t go according to plan?
Next time, let’s look at the sex difference thing a bit more. If I have your number, I’ll give you a ring when I post it.