Reply to Why do some women think it's acceptable to get engaged without a ring?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My step dad wouldn't buy my mother an engagement ring. He was a doctor and had plenty of money. She went around telling people she didn't want one, didn't believe in wasting money on jewelry, etc. But she desperately wanted one -- she hated the fact that she didn't get a diamond ring. Felt humiliated by it, actually. She wore an ugly Black Hills Gold ring he bought her on a vacation out West with her wedding ring, telling everyone it was "special because of what the trip meant to us." They fought the whole time on that trip, lol. She just wore that thing because she was ashamed of not having an actual engagement ring and it was her only option.

He'd bought a big diamond for his first wife, and refused to do it again.

Unsurprisingly, their relationship was a sh!t show.

But times are different now, and the diamond industry has lost it's grip on us. [/quote]

Do you think things would have been different if he'd purchased an engagement ring for her?[/quote]

No. He was a bad person, and so was she. But the ring thing wasn't even a lack of generosity on the part of my stepdad, it was an aggressive defense mechanism: "I'll marry you because I'm getting something out of it, but I don't love you like I did my first wife and don't you dare expect much of anything." She shouldn't have married him, obviously. But people do dumb things when they are desperate.

But after growing up with that nonsense, I made sure my DH bought me a huge diamond. [/quote]

Yes, this is my issue with no rings. If a woman really and truly doesn't want a ring, that's 100% fine and I think that all the commenters on this thread who don't have rings are like that. But if the man doesn't want to give a ring and the woman just goes along with that, then you have a problem. [/quote]

Well wait.

What if the man doesn't want to give a ring because he thinks the money is better spent on a down payment for a house. And he has a conversation with his girlfriend and she agrees the down payment is more important. Maybe she still wants a ring but they decide to do something much more modest than she originally had in mind because when they looked at their finances, they decided spending more than five hundred or a thousand dollars on the ring didn't make sense.

To me, that's a healthy relationship with give and take where both people's opinions are respected and there is good communication and compromise, and no ultimatums. To me that couple set themselves up to make good choices moving forward.

But I sense some on this thread would look at that and judge the woman for "giving in" to her boyfriend's "refusal" to buy her a big ring.[/quote]

PP here and I think it goes without saying that you cannot see the inner workings of the heart of a woman getting engaged, so there is no way for an outsider to know whether or not she is compromising on something she shouldn't. I personally think a down payment is a million times more important than a pretty ring so I'd do the same thing. In fact I'd probably get something that cost 100 dollars or less, or just nothing at all. But I do see men complaining about women who want fancy rings, but then are happy to go and buy themselves nice cars. Spending money on a ring or anything else a woman might want from him is somehow the only time he complains about materialism. And then his fiancé will brag about how non-materialistic she is because she is fine with a ring from a gumball machine. That's when it gets suspect. [/quote]

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