Dating : My Engagement Ring Made People Uncomfortable

It was a family member who first asked if it was a real engagement ring.

What’s the alternative, I now wonder. A fake engagement ring? A promise ring? This family member didn’t verbalize what they thought it might be instead, only that they were confused about what this minuscule bauble really meant.

I stumbled through my explanation. Yes, of course it was a real engagement. We were getting married, after all. How could it be anything else?

Call me naive (I definitely was) but until that moment it had never occurred to me that other people would have a reaction to my engagement ring. A reaction to my engagement itself, sure, but not my ring. I’d never registered that people fawn over engagement rings that belong to complete strangers. Somehow I had made it through my childhood and teenage years as a young American female without internalizing the idea that engagement rings are a status symbol and or a cultural fascination. How I managed this, I don’t know.

What I can tell you is that I did not find this hole in my knowledge to be in any way convenient.

Over the course of our seventeen month engagement (like I said, glacial pace), it became more and more obvious that the general consensus was that my engagement ring was a disappointment. When people heard I was engaged, their gaze would immediately gravitate to my left hand. Then they’d see it, or I’d reluctantly extent my appendage for inspection. Nine times out of ten, their expressions of confusion and pity were completely unhidden. They were visibly uncomfortable, unsure of how to proceed. In retrospect, I can’t blame them. This was not something they’d ever encountered before, a very tiny, underwhelming engagement ring. Some people said nothing, just gave a tight smile. Some people would squeak “oh, how…nice.” There was nothing to gush about, no questions to ask, no need to turn my hand in the light to make the stone glint. It was simple, plain and apparently a letdown.

On top of this, neither my mister nor I knew anything about being engaged. At least, we didn’t know anything about what was culturally expected of us as engaged people. We found it to be rather awkward, all the congratulations for not really having done anything. My mister and I are both the eldest in our families and we’d seen exactly one engagement go down. (It went down quite badly, I might add. After four years, we were not surprised to hear they were divorcing.) One star out of ten on Yelp, is what I’d say about being engaged.

But then, finally, we became not engaged any more. Or rather, we wed.

My engagement ring was joined by a wedding band about four times thicker. If anything, this makes the moonstone gem more diminutive.

It was after we married — all the wedding shenanigans behind me — that I came up for air and finally truly saw the cultural fetishization of engagement rings.

And this realization sat like a stone in my stomach.

I don’t know why it took me so long to catch up with the rest of society, but as a newly married lady suddenly my eyes were gravitating towards women’s left hands. Engaged women, married women, young women, old women. I looked at them all. At the time, I worked as a barista so I saw a lot of left hands and a lot of engagement rings. There was many an opportunity to compare my ring to theirs, many an opportunity to become jealous. I started looking at engagement rings online. I started to Pin them, gosh darn it. It became a little bit of an unhealthy obsession.

People continued to be confused by my engagement ring and I, in turn, continued to be ashamed of it. For a short time, I stopped wearing it.

Maybe — I’d say to myself — maybe we’ll “redesign it” for an auspicious anniversary. Maybe for our fifth anniversary, since that was the least far away auspicious date I could come up with. We could add a halo of speckled grey diamonds around the moonstone, or triangles of labradorite on either side, along with a thicker band.

I was trying to play catch up. But catching up to what, I’m not sure.

I like jewelry well enough. Mostly earrings, because they stay out of my way, but I like the aesthetics of rings on fingers. If aesthetics were all I were after though, I could have gotten myself more rings. I could have worn the opal Art Deco ring I already had in my jewelry box.

The sting, I suppose, was that it felt like I had failed. I was a people pleaser (now I’m a recovering one) and when people saw my ring they were not emphatically pleased as I had seen other people be about other people’s engagement rings. I had also let a fleeting opportunity disappear, it seemed. I’d had that one chance to demand something grand, something I would have never otherwise bought or requested. Something that was expected to be bigger and better than any Christmas present or birthday gift. My engagement ring was supposed to be the showstopper of gifts from my significant other, the glittering symbol of our love. But I had neither selected nor felt worthy of such a thing.

I could tell myself that engagements are sexist, or a waste of money. I could tell myself that diamond engagement rings are a marketing gimmick. My husband loves me, ring or no, and I was thankful that he had not spent several months worth of his small, part-time bar-back and part-time cheese monger salary on a ring. More money for travel, or to save for kittens.

None of that made me feel any better.