Category: Society

My fiance and I went to dinner at Florencia 13 with a married couple we’ve been friends with from almost the start of our time in New York. After fielding questions on our impending wedding the discussion turned to wedding rings. The rebuttals were hotter than the mole enchiladas, as it was quickly evident we both have very different philosophies on the husband and wife relationship status in a marriage as well as the commercial development of wedding culture in the US (and in Western culture for that matter). My wife-to-be and I take a very relaxed, centered and (we’d like to think) realistic tact towards getting married and sharing our lives together where our friends have a very strong attachment to very recent materialistic process of weddings and a public social structure of marriage life. Within my point we feel the explosion of wedding rings (in both size and price) and commercialization of wedding events themselves have created a culture where the meaning of a couple’s marriage is lost in the production of a single event for family, friends and friends of friends which is some how equating grand expenditure with the quality of love and future life for the couple.

My wife-to-be was born in Asia, immigrated to America very early in her life and has grown up with philosophy most Easterners carry on marriage; that the core bond of the family above all else regardless of social status or financial legacy. I was born and raised in California, under a hardworking and stable family structure with an equally similar but less outspoken bonds of the family unit. The wife of my friend is born of a Russian immigrant family and holds more of the abstruse wedding customs and hierarchical structure found with a very Christian Russian upbringing. With very different backgrounds we don’t agree on the structures of marriage and especially the value of material possessions place with the inception of one.

I decided to give my fiance a very old and unique family heirloom as her wedding ring. It’s one of a kind, and despite the smaller than socially normal diamond, its priceless for its history and artistic character. Because of it’s age, I’m certain this diamond is conflict free, something that most wedding couples, despite the piece of “certified” paper that comes with today’s diamonds can attest. My friend went the traditional route, connecting with jeweler, recommended by a fellow married man, to find the best stone and ring that screams the value of his love and faith, to those that catch eye of it’s glory. Is that really what a wedding ring signifies? Do we really need hardware to convey our love? In a time where over 50% of Americans are getting divorce is “2 months salary” really a smart (financial) decision when placing value on a social contract? Who came up with this financial figure as a benchmark to express my love? And is the tradition that only women get diamonds antiquated in today’s “bling” culture?

First let me start with history of the wedding ring I researched. The Ring, a circular crafted piece of jewelry represents eternity. It has no beginning and no end, like time as it’s essence is returned to itself, like life. The finger ring was first created and later worshiped as a symbol of love by the Egyptians. When the Egyptians were conquered by the Greeks, the ring for symbolic love was wore on the third finger of their left hand; believing that the vein of that finger directly traveled from the heart. Subsequently the Romans, continued the tradition and Christianized the process of eternal love with the commencement of a religious ceremony.

The first rings were made of hemp, but the temporary nature of the material vs the implied meaning did not father the cohesive symbolism intended. Longer lasting materials were developed from leather, bone or ivory crafted to represent eternal love. With the development of metallurgy, metal rings were naturally developed, however, the trend took a very long time, as metal jewelry, especially pieces set with precious stones were primarily worn as expressions of wealth.

In Rome, iron was first used as the metal of choice, and with a more permanent symbol of marriage came legal and more enforceable social rules of marriage. For instance, a woman that accepted a marriage ring, became property of the man and protected her rights as the primary female in the family. Gold and subsequently silver (17th century Europe) rings were given later by the groom to show that he trusted his betrothed with his valuable property.

Irish folklore is at the heart of perpetuating the history of the gold ring, stating it was bad luck to not be married with anything but. Quite often when couples couldn’t afford gold, a temporary gold ring was used for the ceremony and then replaced by the original after the vows were agreed upon. The Church of England (1662 Book of Common Prayer) did not bind couples to the style, size, or metal type, so long as one was used.

Diamonds were first discovered and used in 9th century BC society in India (Book of Diamonds) as religious icons, magical gems to heal aliments and as good protective talismans for battle. Is wasn’t until the Renaissance period (14th -17th century) that gemstones were incorporated into jewelry such as necklaces, crowns, bracelets, crowns and even wedding rings. The wedding ring was typically adorned with birthstones and even then, it was only the aristocracy that could afford them. The ruby, its red like the heart and sapphires, its blue like the sky above were used symbolically in wedding rings during this time and then (it’s been reported) on Aug. 17, 1477, Mary of Burgundy became the first bride-to-be to receive a diamond engagement ring when her betrothed, Maximilian of Austria, heeded counsel that the diamond would impress her. Throughout the Renaissance period, gems in wedding rings grew as a trend, but the diamond wasn’t the premier stone used, even by the wealthy.

Jewelry was almost superseded in the late 18th century by decorative buttons, watches and snuffboxes because of the high cost and limited supply of gems and precious metals for such items. The first non-Indian diamonds were found in 1725, in Brazil and with the complete exhaustion of Indian diamonds near the end of the 18th century, Brazil, began to take up the slack in demand.

The wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution, coupled with newly discovered diamond mines in Africa in 1870, made diamonds readily available and more affordable to the wider public late in the Victorian age. Industrial diamond production of primary deposits (kimberlites and lamproites) only started in the 1870s after the discovery of the Diamond Fields in South Africa. Cecil Rhodes, the founder of De Beers, got his start by renting water pumps to miners during the diamond rush in South Africa and using his profits began buying up as many claims of small mining operators has he could. De Beers Consolidated Mines was formed in 1888 by the merger of the companies of Barney Barnato and Cecil Rhodes, by which time the company was the sole owner of all diamond mining operations in the country. So by 1888, De Beers had a monopoly on all diamond production in Africa, the largest miner and distributor of diamonds in the world.

Victorian culture was busy assigning abstract concepts to material objects of all value. For instance, Kate Greenaway’s wildly popular The Language of Flowers (1885) ascribed a meaning to each specie and variety of flower. A yellow rose meant platonic love, for instance. Such assignations applied to stones as well, which sometimes increased a substance’s value (quoted from Robin Edgerton’s Engagement, Inc.: The marketing of diamonds). The idea that diamonds represented “perfect love” evolved during the Victorian era but was reinforced with a vengeance by the market manipulation of De Beers. It is because of De Beers and their marketing efforts over the last century has the western culture so fully subscribed to the adoration of diamonds for their wedding rings.

In 1919, De Beers experienced a drop in diamond sales that lasted for two decades. In the 1930s it turned to the firm N.W. Ayer to devise a national advertising campaign—still relatively rare at the time—to promote its diamonds. De Beers set out to establish social status for large diamonds through giving a number of Hollywood actresses hefty stones, arranging for glamorous photo shoots, script-doctoring movies to include scenes of jewelry shopping and encouraged fashion designers to discuss the new “trend” toward diamond rings. (The Rise and Fall of Diamonds: The Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion). Between 1938 and 1941, diamond sales went up 55 percent. The diamond began to be injected into relationships between men and women as a reproducible act–a script for life, not just film-and an inseparable part of courtship and marriage.

In 1947, Frances Gerety-who, as it happened, was never married-of De Beers’ ad agency came up with the massively successful slogan “A diamond is forever,” which implied that diamonds don’t crack, break, or lose value. (They do). The sale of diamond engagement rings continued to rise in the 1950s, and the marriage between romance and commerce that would characterize the American wedding for the next half-century was cemented. The slogan became so entrenched that the only proper way to “dispose” of diamonds was to hand them down to a female descendant.

Other techniques De Beers used are familiar today; they sent representatives to high school home economics classes to teach girls about the value of diamonds and feed them romantic dreams. The diamond went from being a status symbol to an emotional one: love measured in carats.

Ten-year anniversary rings were created and heavily advertised in the 1960s after De Beers was forced to purchase large stocks of Russian diamonds. Most of these diamonds were small, white gems of less than one-quarter carat. As De Beers had been pushing engagement rings with larger (and mostly South African) stones, they had to adjust their campaigns. Hence the eternity ring-equally expensive but with smaller stones-was marketed specifically for anniversaries.

In 1967, De Beers contacted advertising agency J. Walter Thompson to popularize the diamond engagement ring in Brazil, Germany, and Japan. While De Beers found limited success in the former two countries, Japan far exceeded expectations. By 1978, half of all Japanese brides received a diamond engagement ring. By 1981, the number had grown to 60 percent; the “tradition” had taken hold. Just how did the J. Walter Thompson agency accomplish this? A basic but general ad campaign similar to that in the U.S-the diamond ring was pitched not as a product but as a symbol.

As detailed in the last paragraph, the wedding ring is still not universally accepted around the world but De Beers is trying. My fiance subscribes to Eastern cultural beliefs and doesn’t feel the social obligation to wear a wedding ring, however, she does it by practice. Those who favor wearing the wedding ring feel strongly that for them the ring is a valuable symbol to affirm their marital status and commitment, as well as a protection from uninformed suitors. Today more than 80 percent of American brides receive a diamond engagement ring (at an average cost of around $3,200) before they get married. Very few of these people think beyond the misty promise of endless love what the ring might actually signify (and in the last decades, how that diamond was sourced).

From Meghan O’Rourke’s article, Diamonds Are a Girl’s Worst Friend:

But behind every Madison Avenue victory lurks a deeper social reality. And as it happens there was another factor in the surge of engagement ring sales—one that makes the ring’s role as collateral in the premarital economy more evident. Until the 1930s, a woman jilted by her fiance could sue for financial compensation for “damage” to her reputation under what was known as the “Breach of Promise to Marry” action. As courts began to abolish such actions, diamond ring sales rose in response to a need for a symbol of financial commitment from the groom, argues the legal scholar Margaret Brinig—noting, crucially, that ring sales began to rise a few years before the De Beers campaign. To be marriageable at the time you needed to be a virgin, but, Brinig points out, a large percentage of women lost their virginity while engaged. So some structure of commitment was necessary to assure betrothed women that men weren’t just trying to get them into bed. The “Breach of Promise” action had helped prevent what society feared would be rampant seduce-and-abandon scenarios; in its lieu, the pricey engagement ring would do the same. (Implicitly, it would seem, a woman’s virginity was worth the price of a ring, and varied according to the status of her groom-to-be.)

Virginity is no longer a prerequisite for marriage, nor do the majority of women consider marriageability their prime asset. Women in Asian countries have never felt the requirements to posses a marriage ring like those under the long monopolistic marketing blanket of De Beers, however, it’s been shown this too is changing. Thorstein Veblen called the economy of “conspicuous consumption of valuable goods a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure”…wealth accumulation and high-bred manners are ways of living and conforming to the norm. This can easily translate to cultural events like engagements, wedding ceremonies and social living. All of which have been elevated in today’s society to social events to be valued by their displays of consumption, rather than for their true social implication – a celebration of a couples love and life together.

When speaking with my friends Russian wife, she’s concedes, that a large diamond rock on that left index finger was a prerequisite to their engagement and is still a symbol of their marriage today. In her New York circle of rich trophy wife charity workers, as well as the Russian social pressures to have married a successful American man, the ring is a consistent reminder to her associates that she’s made it to some unmeasurable level of social status.

The perpetuation of a wedding ring’s virtue through consumer marketing, measured worth, class differentiation and social establishment within the wearer’s respective society has developed into a modern tradition of sorts to the younger married generations. What’s lost is the conception of the symbolism, eternal love and the values a soon-to-be married couple should embrace as they begin to share their lives with one another. I’m happy to pass on history and character and will continue to do so with my family. I hope more couples break back from this artificial norm and look at the core for their union, rather than the superficial.