Putting a Price On Love
Who can put a price on everlasting love? What’s the value of an eternal commitment? How do you calculate the worth of “Till Death Do Us Part”?
These are unanswerable questions.
Yet these are also the questions that run through a person’s mind when they shop for an engagement ring.
It doesn’t matter where you are in life, if you’re planning on getting married, you’re either expecting to propose with a ring, or expecting to receive a ring. The ritual of engagement rings crosses class divisions.
At the same time, the ring itself broadcasts society’s wealth disparity on the fingers of women everywhere. A couple’s financial position directly correlates with the size, quality, and price of the chosen ring. We may as well put a label over our head with the number of zeros in our bank account.
And we are constantly reminded of this fact. From Jennifer Lopez’s $1.8MM 16-carat emerald cut diamond ring to Kim Kardashian’s $2MM 15-carat cushion cut diamond ring, over-the-top engagement rings frequently make headlines. Closer to home, every high-school acquaintance also announces their engagement on social media accompanied by a flood of photos of the ring used for the deed.
If these individuals showcased their other purchases - clothing, handbags, cars - the way they flaunt their engagement rings, they would be vilified in the name of conspicuous consumption. Yet we find their expensive and highly public engagement rings socially acceptable because they were purchased in the name of love.
But why?
In an age where we claim to be less materialistic, why do we need an intrinsically worthless mineral on someone’s hand to cement our relationship with them? And equally important, how can we put a price on the undying devotion that an engagement ring is supposed to signify?
I’m not married, nor do I have plans to change that status in the immediate future, but I was recently invited to my first wedding. This turned my mind to the tradition of engagement rings.
I’ll be honest, I don’t get engagement rings.
I see marriage as the union of two equal partners. So from that standpoint, the concept that one partner (usually a man) needs to go out and purchase a very large and expensive piece of jewelry to prove his love to the other person (usually a woman) feels like a cultural step back.
So why are engagement rings heralded as the ultimate expression of love in every rom-com I begrudgingly watch on planes? And why do even my most empowered female friends openly discuss the engagement rings they like and expect to receive?
I decided to journey into the world of engagement rings to try and understand how a decidedly anachronous convention continues to prevail in modern times.
THE STORY OF DIAMOND ENGAGEMENT RINGS: A LESSON IN MARKETING
Normally this is the part of the article where I admit that my research into the nuanced history of engagement rings convinced me of their cultural significance. But I won’t, because engagement rings don’t represent any of that.
Yes, the idea of wedding rings is technically old. Ancient Egyptians believed that your left hand ring finger had a vein connected to your heart so wedded couples took up the practice of exchanging braided reed rings and wearing it on their fingers.
But modern-day engagement rings, specifically diamond engagement rings, are a manufactured phenomenon started by the diamond industry.
By the early 20th century, the De Beers company had a virtual monopoly on the diamond trade and owned the majority of mines in South Africa. They had more diamonds than they knew what to do with, but the price of diamonds kept going down because the gemstone was falling out of popularity.
So Mad Men style, De Beers’s advertising agency tied diamonds to the one thing that would never go out of fashion: love. Magazine ads started showing men proposing to their girlfriends with diamonds and movie stars started appearing on the big screen receiving and wearing diamond gifts. The message was clear: the best way to show your love is forever is with a diamond that is forever as well.
Nevermind the fact that pretty much any rock is “forever” - granite is also “forever” - the campaign actually worked. Diamonds became linked to marriage proposals and the demand for diamonds skyrocketed.
But the catch in all of this? Diamonds aren’t actually rare.
Even during the 20th century when DeBeers’s marketing campaign was taking off, De Beers maintained such a large inventory of diamonds that they could manage market prices by controlling supply. Nowadays, with the rise of lab-grown diamonds, we can literally compress carbon to make diamonds ourselves.
Yet diamonds remain the ultimate symbol of love, and the practice of proposing with a diamond engagement ring is still the dominant cultural practice to this day.
For me, the genius of De Beers’s marketing is that it embedded in the cultural psyche this idea that the love a man has for a woman is directly proportional to the size of the diamond he gets her.
Buy a small ring and his love is small. Buy a big hunk of rock and the love will truly be eternal. So men everywhere rushed to buy bigger and bigger diamonds just to prove how strong their love is.
But at the same time, there are boundaries. Even if I believe my love for someone is infinite, I can’t just give them the Crown Jewels. If I were to give a $5,000 ring to my partner, they would find it romantic, but if I were to give them a $50,000 ring, they may question my general sanity. So what is the appropriate price for a ring that adequately demonstrates one’s adoration?
WHAT IS THE RIGHT PRICE FOR THE RING?
2 months’ salary.
At least, that’s what De Beers wants you to think. Not only did De Beers link inextricably diamonds to marriage, they also tried to standardize how much men should spend on the ring. But knowing that people from all different income levels get married, De Beers cleverly anchored the ring price not to an absolute number, but to a percentage of salary. This way the company wouldn’t risk setting an expectation too high and lose a customer - or set a price too low and not extract the full value.
Luckily for wallets and bank accounts everywhere, De Beers wasn’t fully successful in swaying public opinion in this endeavor. According to jewelry industry insiders, “that guideline has sort of been tossed out the window.” While estimates for actual engagement ring spend varies, in general they range from $3K to $5K - or ~2 weeks of salary.
But just because that’s what people actually spend on engagement rings, that doesn’t mean it’s the price women want or expect their partners to spend. Maybe De Beers wasn’t as unsuccessful as we thought and we have lots of disappointed fiancés getting proposed to with underwhelming rings. Or maybe times have truly changed and men are needlessly overpaying for rings when their girlfriends would have been happy with far less.
I know there isn’t a “right answer” for the price tag of an engagement ring - every couple’s situation is unique. However, I was still curious about what women generally expected for a ring price in relation to their partner’s salary. If De Beers is telling us to spend 2 months’ salary on an engagement ring and men are actually spending 2 weeks worth, where do the expectations of women actually fall?
I surveyed 300+ women with that very question. I presented each woman a scenario in which their imaginary long-term boyfriend planned to propose to them. I then asked each woman what the minimum dollar amount they expected their boyfriend to spend on the engagement ring.
The catch was that I randomly assigned women to one of five groups, each with a different salary for the boyfriend: $25K, $50K, $100K, $250K, or $500K. I wanted to see whether the engagement ring price depended on salary and by how much.
After digging through the responses, here are some of the results.
1. Women’s expectations about their engagement ring price does depend on their partner’s salary.
Across all income levels, the average expected ring price was $4,800. At each salary level though, the average ring cost was different. The higher the salary, the higher the expectations for the ring.
If the imaginary boyfriend made $25K a year, women expected the ring to be at least $1,300. But if the boyfriend made $500K a year, the expected ring price jumped to $16,000.
2. Many women don’t expect an expensive ring and some women barely expect a ring at all.
54% of all the respondents expected a ring worth $2,000 or less. This means that even for women with high-salaried boyfriends, many of them had low expectations for the ring.
20% of women were even fine with a ring less than $250, essentially saying they don’t need a ring to get married.
3. On average, women expect around 1-2 weeks’ worth of salary.
Previous studies show that people actually spend around 2 weeks’ worth of salary on the engagement ring. So how did our survey about expectations compare?
From our survey, people making $25K & $50K are expected to spend around 2 weeks’ worth of salary on the ring. As the salary goes higher, women’s expectations don’t rise proportionally.
For men making $100K and $250K, women only expect a ring that is one weeks’ salary. And then for men making $500K, the proportion of salary actually goes up to 1.7 weeks.
4. People who are/previously married have the same expectations as people who have never been married.
While there was a minor variance, it turns out that people who have already been proposed to have roughly the same expectations as people who have yet to say “I do.”
5. Women younger than 35 expect a more expensive ring than women 35 and older, driven by higher expectations for boyfriends that make $500K.
Women younger than 35 expected a much more expensive ring on average compared to women 35 years and older.
Digging into how this played out across different boyfriend salary levels, the two groups of women have roughly the same expectations for boyfriends $25K - $250K. But for boyfriends making $500K, younger women want a lot bigger bling.
BUT WHAT DOES A RING MEAN?
What women expect men to spend on engagement rings is in line with what men actually spend on engagement rings. And it’s definitely not 2 months’ worth of salary.
But even 1-2 weeks’ worth of salary is still a lot of money to pay for a shiny rock. So just why are engagement rings so important? Wouldn’t it be better if that money went towards a downpayment on a house, into a 401K, or even for a vacation?
I decided to call a few female friends to understand what an engagement ring meant to them.
The answers I got back surprised me. My friends all openly admitted that there was no “rational reason” to want a diamond engagement ring. Some of them even admitted that they know diamonds are a marketing scam dreamt up by the diamond industry..
But they didn’t care.
Two themes kept coming up.
The first is that engagement rings are a status symbol. Yes, it’s just a mineral, but it’s also their mineral to be shown off to the world. It reflects their style much like the clothing they wear. But the engagement ring is better because it tells the world that there is someone else in the world who loves them enough to want to spend the rest of their life with them. The engagement ring shows off someone else's love on their finger.
The other recurring theme was around sacrifice. The engagement ring is so appealing precisely because it is so impractical. Any successful relationship is about putting the needs of another person above your own. Engagement rings are the ultimate relationship symbol because they are completely selfless. Only the person receiving the ring derives any benefit from it.
So in the end, are engagement rings an antiquated tradition concocted by marketeers?
Yes.
But is it also a symbol of enduring love precisely because it is so useless?
Yes.
I don’t know if I’ll ever truly understand the importance of engagement rings, but I guess that’s the point. I don’t need to understand, I just need to love someone enough to want to buy one because it makes them happy.