The Lure of the Engagement Ring

by Kelly Bare

Late last year, a 19-year-old Marine wounded in a firefight in Fallujah asked doctors to amputate his injured finger instead of cutting off his ring. “That would mean destroying my wedding ring,” the soldier told the Associated Press. “My wife is the strongest woman I know.”

Call me cold-hearted, but if I were his wife, I would have preferred a whole husband. I asked jeweler Herman Rotenberg of 1,873 Unusual Wedding Rings, a store in New York City’s diamond district that has be-ringed the betrothed since 1947 (and actually carries more than 4,000 styles of wedding bands), what he thought of the soldier’s reaction.

“That’s a very rare story, but I could see it under those circumstances,” he answered.

Rotenberg was a psychotherapist before he married into the jewelry business, holds a masters in social work, and says he has “seen everything under the sun” in his 22 years selling wedding rings. He finds that men are much more sentimental—and choosy—than one might expect. “They come in wanting the simplest ring, and they go out with the most complicated,” he observes. “They’re very particular, obsessive in the best way.”

Today’s grooms want all the bells and whistles, he says: detailed finishes, mixed metals, even rings adorned with optical illusions. Rotenberg worked with one customer, a surfer, to design ocean waves that appeared to move when the ring was turned.

This attention to detail takes on even more weight when you consider that the history of the groom’s band as we know it is about as short as that of the diamond engagement ring. Until the mid-1940s, most men didn’t wear wedding rings at all.

In “A ‘Real Man’s Ring’,” her 2003 article in the Journal of Social History, Vicki Howard notes that “while wedding bands for men were not a completely new phenomenon in the United States around 1940, neither were they ‘tradition.’” She writes that “male wedding bands made brief appearances in the Western world at different times,” but it took an earth-shattering event (World War II) plus a friendly commercial shove (a wartime campaign by the Jewelry Industry Publicity Board) to make them a fixture.

By 1947, Fortune magazine was reporting that the percentage of “double-ring” (as opposed to single-ring) wedding ceremonies in the U.S. had increased from 15 percent at the end of the Depression to approximately 80 percent.

It’s easy to see why the practice took root when it did, flourishing parallel to the nascent engagement-ring trend. For a man heading to Germany or the Pacific, the band on his finger identified him in a way his dog tags couldn’t. “Couples about to marry may have seen that tokens of love and commitment could provide some relief from the pain of separation and potential loss,” Howard writes. “During wartime, a man could wear a groom’s band as a symbol of what he was fighting to preserve.”

Which, of course, brings us back to the Marine in Fallujah. If neither his ring nor the diamond engagement ring and wedding band his wife is probably wearing are “timeless” symbols, they surely are more than just valuable objects. A sociologist would call them “invented traditions,” but they fit so neatly into our desires that we can’t imagine life without them.

So now it’s a three-ring circus: her diamond, her band, his band. But how many hoops to jump through, where to buy them, how much to spend—and what they really mean—is up to you.