What Do You Mean, You’re Engaged?
What’s a man to do? Money aside, he must propose with a ring, right?
A friend of mine recently announced her “engagement.” I stared, incredulously, at her bare left hand, suppressing the word vomit. (What do you mean, you’re engaged? Where’s the ring?) I later learned that the girl’s “fiancé” had given, in lieu of a ring, his word for the time being. He was supposedly saving up for a “big rock.” Hmm. Talking this over with a group of male friends, I soon realized how differently men and women see the concept of engagement. When it comes to marriage, the Beatles tried to explain to us. “All you need is love,” they said. But for many women, a little blue box tied up in white ribbon is what really seals the deal. Or at least proves her fiancé worthy to her friends.
For Harris, it was a little diamond ring he found in an antique shop in California. Stout says she didn’t mind one bit. “I loved it and it was beautiful,” she says. “He told me, when we get married and I graduate, I’m going to give you a wonderful ring. I was fine with that.” Unfortunately, her friends didn’t feel the same way. They eagerly grabbed her left hand, wanting to see how big the ring was and what it looked like. Their reaction: a simple “Oh.” “I felt like I was always defending him,” Stout says. “You could see it in their faces and high-pitched voices.”
A few weeks after her comedy club mishap, Stout got a call from Harris, who lives five hours away, telling her to expect a special delivery. The surprise: Another diamond sparkler. Harris had sold $13,000 worth of modifications on his precious Infiniti G37 S to get her a bigger ring. Another ring, another man confined to the pressures of society. Despite Stout’s initial happiness, the way her friends reacted to it put a damper on her relationship with her fiancé, as if “somehow the size of the ring is a direct indicator of how much you love each other or something,” Jessica says. “I don’t know why people stress it so much.”
Blame it on De Beers. Gender expert Susan Shapiro Barash says the jeweler’s marketing of the phrase “A Diamond Is Forever” has had a significant impact on how engagements are supposed to go. “There is an expectation that you will get a diamond ring and that you will set a wedding date,” says Barash, a professor of gender studies at New York’s Marymount Manhattan College with almost a dozen relationship books under her belt. “We all feel that, without a diamond, we somehow haven’t sealed the deal. That’s not really the case. But men are certainly aware that’s what culture expects.”
Women are stirred up by herd mentality, Barash says–“almost in a club” when it comes to being engaged. They are very influenced by how their friends view their engagement rings, and things can get competitive when a woman invests herself in the same mentality and behavior as her soon-to-be-married friends. “Everyone is looking for similar experiences,” Barash says. “For women, planning the [wedding] is a process, and the whole thing means a great deal. Men don’t feel like that. They think, ‘I’m marrying you, isn’t that enough?’”
Dmitry Sandal, 38, of Evanston, Ill., was married to Alena Tsimis, 37, in September 2008. He spent weeks picking out the perfect engagement ring, and several more waiting for the perfect moment to propose. That couple already was in a committed relationship and living together, but Sandal says an engagement ring was the way to make things official for Tsimis. “I don’t think \[a ring is\] important at all, but I’m okay with that because I know it’s important to her.” He noticed that shortly after he popped the question, Tsimis’s friends were anxious to see her ring, but it wasn’t something he thought about beforehand. “I just was really focused on what she would like, I wasn’t thinking about anyone else,” Sandal says. Now that they have been husband and wife for nearly two years, he’s happy that she’s happy.
But Sandal’s wedding band is a different story. “I have a really hard time getting used to my ring,” he says. “When I come home, I take it off all the time. I go to sleep without it, and when I go out, I put it on again.” He’s not the only man who is uncomfortable wearing a ring, regardless of intentions. In a culture that can be “sexist,” where women are expected to establish their “wifehood” from the beginning, men have more discretion in whether to appear married. But expert Barash points out that men don’t place the same emphasis on their wedding band as women do on engagement rings, partially because there is a much greater investment in women’s rings.
While Sandal wanted to buy his fiancé a ring she would be happy with, he says he didn’t feel the need to spend so much that he would be paying it off for decades. “I do hear of people buying rings so expensive, and thinking, I can go on vacation for that amount for next five, 10 years,” Dmitry says.
So is there any chance that men could start displaying their soon-to-be-married status? Barash thinks not. “As long as we live in a patriarchal culture … men won’t wear engagement rings, but they do cough up enough money to buy them.” Turns out Lennon may have gotten it right after all. “Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game.” And that sometimes means breaking apart that Infiniti you hold so dear.