Sometimes it’s a truly inconvenient thing, that is being the type of human that overanalyzes just about everything I come into contact with. The latest mind-bending obsession has been engagement rings. To be perfectly honest, I’m not one of those girls that’s been dreaming about her wedding since she could walk, in fact I rarely think about the “big day” (assuming there will be one… sorry future hubby, this girl has got a career to prioritize).
The other day I was in my jewelry making class, and my professor begged a question that really got me thinking. She asked us to tell her the purpose of an engagement ring. Now, as a student aspiring to work in the design field someday, the idea of putting meaning into the work I do has been on my mind a lot lately. And it was a valid question: WHAT is the point of an engagement ring? Think about it! There isn’t a whole lot of solid evidence that proves it is worth the hole it’ll put in a partner’s bank account. Other than simply informing the world that the human wearing the ring is taken, soon to be forever, it seems only to serve for aesthetic purposes. So naturally this train of thought led me to wonder where the idea of the engagement ring originated from and why.
The best answer I could come up with was a painfully old-fashioned one. I can’t help but think that an engagement ring is somehow a means of demonstrating the man’s ability to provide for his future wife. And this answer kind of makes sense when you think about the fact that the theme of engagement rings always seems to be the bigger and flashier, the better. In this way of thinking, a bigger, flashier, more expensive ring indicates that the man is extremely well suited to take care of “his” woman. If this is an accurate summation, then the ring seems to symbolize women being seen as property rather than people (I will say, however, that I highly doubt most men think this heavily about the ring before purchasing, so please do not confuse my words as a weird condemnation of men who buy thier future wives engagement rings!)
That’s not to say that women should forget the notion of engagement rings all together, though. It’s easy to see why a lot of women would feel robbed having been promised this fancy, shiny thing their whole life, just to turn around and realize it might be grossly sexist. Then there is the argument that things like the gender wage gap and offensive portrayals of women in media lend themselves as rationale behind making the man pay a little more because they very likely suffered less discrimination (relatively speaking, obviously everyone is different and has different experiences in life). I think that this unnecesarily deep analysis of engagement rings begs the bigger, arguably paradoxical question of women: how much are you willing to give up in order to take steps towards total gender equality? I feel the need to qualify this question with the acknowledgement that I don’t necessarily think there is a right or wrong answer, here. Things with even heavier implications than jewelry have been contemplated in this way throughout the history of women’s suffrage (i.e. war drafts and, a personal favorite of mine, women’s sexuality and right to their bodies). At the very least, it seems to me like something worth thinking about a little more rather than simply just accepting it as the norm. After all, there are worse things looming over the potential of women’s suffrage than engagement rings (*cough cough* Trump).