There is no doubt that buying rings can be stressful. So I give you the five stages of buying rings.
Stage 1: Sticker shock.
So there’s this completely arbitrary rule floating out in the universe that you should spend three months salary on a woman’s engagement ring. Now setting aside the question of whether or not that means before or after taxes, that’s a lot of flippin’ money to spend on a ring! I don’t mean to belittle people who spend that kind of money or who want a large size stone, but when you’re talking about spending three months of salary on a ring twice it can give you ulcers. Just to really paint the picture for you that would have been almost ten grand for just my ring, and then you have to wear it! Everyday! I would be walking around town with almost 10 K on my finger! I couldn’t do it, and Jen couldn’t do it.
We also found a three stone design for a ring that we really loved for a wedding band. The very nature of this ring would curse it to be a more expensive ring. We talked about it and decided that we really liked spending the money and effort on the wedding ring. The engagement ring was important to us, but the wedding ring is the ring that represents the promise of a life built and shared. It made much more sense to us to put our money into those rings. (Again let me say that this is what was right for us, not a mandate for what everyone should do)
Stage 2: Blood diamond guilt.
For those of you who don’t know about blood diamonds (also called conflict diamonds) they are stones where the proceeds go to fund war operations in various countries (mostly in Africa). Thus the name blood diamonds. I’d never given much thought to blood diamonds, but as I was preparing to have jewelry that I would wear everyday it started poping up in my mind. How was I going to know if I was looking at blood diamonds? It’s not like they show up at the store with a big sign that says “hey I helped kill a poor old farmer and his family”. I found a couple of things helpful in educating myself. There is a thing called the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme. The KPCS was set up in 2003 to help prevent conflict diamonds from entering into the international diamond trade. How well it works is (like most things) up for debate. If you assume that it works you can visit the site Diamond Facts. They have a list of countries that participate in the KPCS and give you some information about what to ask jewelers when buying diamonds. Any jeweler that is operating within the KPCS should have documentation for every stone in their store that they can show you. Also major jewelers should have their conflict diamond policy on their website.
