Cheap engagement ring? Would you be bothered?

[hacky]

This is pure curiosity as I've been thinking about this for a few weeks!

My original engagement ring is a small solitaire diamond and our original wedding rings were lightweight because we were both 20 and didn't have much money. For our 5th wedding anniversary we upgraded our wedding rings to heavier weight gold then for our 25th anniversary DH had a watch and I upgraded my engagement ring to a bigger solitaire diamond.

My rings now look like I always wanted them to look but no-one else noticed the change! I love jewellery and now we have more disposable income I love that I can wear rings that I love looking at. My rings are very classic, plain gold wedding band, half eternity with channel-set diamonds and my lovely bigger solitaire!!

That's a lovely ring @Tarkan - love those ones that look like a diamond flower!

I have a cheap engagement ring and I love it. Ten years on and it's holding up perfectly. We were skint at the time and I don't like big jewellery nor trust myself with expensive jewellery. So it suits me perfectly. Its quite a unique ring too and makes me so happy.

Is she going to be able to have a baby without him?

Thank you! I've had it around 9 years now and I still love it as much now as when I first got it. The setting just around the centre diamond is in a star shape too which I love.

Mine was £45 from Freemans catalogue 37 years ago. We didn’t have a pot to pee in. Paid it off in instalments. I didn’t care we chose it together and I still love it.

I'm divorced but I also chose my engagement ring as it felt strange to leave a decision about what I was going to wear for years to another person. I went for an emerald cut diamond solitaire and my then fiance said that it was too expensive, so I bought it myself - it was about £2000 then, 30 years ago and I paid out of an inheritance I'd had. He could afford it, but he was cheap. Of course, if I hadn't been so young and stupid I'd have realised that was a pretty big red flag and legged it with my gorgeous diamond. But I didn't, so I married him.
Buying it myself was very useful when we divorced and I got to sell it for more than I'd paid and then treated myself to a antique art nouveau designed diamond and 18ct gold ring, which I've worn (on the same finger as that's the one where it fits best) for the last 20 years.
Materialistic, probably.
Do I care? Like fuck I do. I do fnd these threads with the competitive cheapness hilarious and very different to the engagement ring threads on style and beauty.

Not at all. My engagement ring contains a reset family stone, so can’t have cost the earth, although the stone is valuable. It isn’t fashionable (it’s a pale sapphire in gold) or blingy but it’s very ‘us’ and I love it. We aren’t hugely into stuff and status symbols, and I don’t think the cost of a ring is an at all effective gauge of someone’s love or stickability.

Nothing. My marriage isn’t transaction tit for tat and we often treat each other without requiring something in return.

Re the person saying I couldn’t have a baby without him, sperm donors are pretty cheap and fairly readily available 😂 so yes I certainly could.

And he'd be okay with that, would he?

I still don't understand why he had to get you an expensive ring but you didn't have to get him a thing

He didn’t “have” to get me anything, he chose to, because he loves me and wanted me to have something special and nice that I could wear forever. I accepted and thought that him making sacrifices to save up for it was a good indicator of a man who’s willing to sometimes put me before him. So far I’ve been right.

I think it’s quite sad how some women fall over themselves to insist everything is “equal”, they’re usually the ones married to selfish shits who insist on splitting costs 50/50 while the wife picks up the bulk of the childcare and housework. It’s almost always women losing out in situations like that. Mine absolutely pulls his weight in our household without tit for tat.

I’d want a ring that was expensive for that particular man.

So no I wouldn’t want a 30k ring if they earn £20k per year.

Depends so much on life circumstances and age.

My engagement ring was £230 - been married 18 years this year. My best friends was 11k. They got divorced after 16 months! The ring makes no difference and if that sways your decision to marry someone you shouldn't marry them.

In the end it is about thoughtfulness and sometimes that goes hand in hand with the value. In my culture both wear engagement rings so works both ways. There is no universal definition of what is cheap and what is expensive.

Yes I would, actually.
Full stop.
(Happily married for 20 years).

@YaWeeFurryBastard I am a diehard feminist to my core... but I agree with you. The reality is that we're still in a society that massively overvalues men's contributions and prioritises men, and quite frankly, seeing how a man behaves around the process of getting married is such a good indicator of how he will behave in the future and that he is willing to put his wife first. Because sadly, it's so often true that women are so busy bending over backwards to ensure they pay their way and act as total equals, they don't notice that their male partners are sitting back and making much less effort.

I often think about the pair of boots that DH, at the time just a BF, insisted on buying me. At the time, I was skint. I knew he didn't have a lot of money either but we weren't at the point in our relationship where we were completely open about finances. He insisted on buying the boots because he could see I loved them. What I didn't know is that he basically lived on baked beans for the next 2 weeks to afford them. I only found out years later, basically in passing because even then, he didn't think it was a big deal. The reality is that that is who DH has always been - someone who often puts my wants and needs ahead of his. And of course it goes both ways - I often prioritise him and his needs. We are mutually kind to each other.

Hmm… are you a journalist by any chance?

That reminds me of an old film where each person secretly sacrifices the thing they value most, to do something lovely for the other - he sells his watch to buy her pretty combs for her hair and at the same time she sells her hair to buy him a chain for his watch!
Can't remember what the film was now.

It completely depends on if it's a can't be arsed this will do cheap or a thoughtful one

I didn’t even have one. At the time (ages ago) dh thought ‘getting engaged’ was desperately uncool. We just set a date for the wedding.

However he bought me a lovely ring right after the birth of dd2, which TBH meant a great deal more to me.

No, the worth of something is not how much it costs. A ring which has been bought carefully and lovingly with the recipient in mind knowing it is something they will like is much better in my opinion than a generic flashy expensive ring bought for effect.

If you think it wasn't that expensive to buy, try trading it in. It's second hand value if it is a small diamond will be pretty low and not much above the scrap gold price.

I think my engagement ring was about £200 and we bought it after he popped the question. My wedding ring was £19.99 from Argos. All 29 years ago now

I have a very nice ring now as engaged, but I'm older. When I married the first time we had no money so bought a cheap ring from h Samuel

@LeatherJacketWedding I'm not, but I always expect that comment when I start a curious thread

I'm not even engaged yet.

For honest context, this is off the back of me telling my DP that I don't care about a ring at all, I'd be happy with a ring for £50 (if and when he does propose). I've made this comment when the subject comes up.

But now I keep having this strange feeling when I see people with super expensive rings gushing about it and posting them all over social media and just had a hint of a moment the past few days that made me wonder WILL I be bothered if I get the cheap ring I've always said I wouldn't mind.

It's the effect of social media that makes me want to delete it all.

So there's the honest context for my curiosity!