Engagement Ring – To Keep, Or Not To Keep?
It is always a very sad affair when the engagement of former lovers arrives at an abrupt end. Undoubtedly never an intended outcome, it seems the situation is often made doubly worse by the dilemma of who gets to keep the engagement ring. An old friend of mine found herself in exactly this predicament when a long engagement came to its bitter conclusion after 5 eventful years. Having always been very pleased with her engagement ring, she was loathed to even offer its return to her now ex-fiancé, while he demanded it back due to its recently redundant significance, as well as of course, its hefty price tag.
Traditionally given as a form of contract confirming the acceptance of a proposal, the engagement ring today still represents the impending union of two people. Although it is no longer legally binding in the UK, societal expectations and perhaps conditioning, make the acquiring of an engagement ring almost as consequential as it always was. If, as is now quite often the case, the couple in question no longer wishes to proceed with marriage, who should become the sole beneficiary of the engagement ring? In the past, it was almost always without question that the engagement ring was returned to its rightful owner – the giver, unless of course they wished for it to be retained by its recent wearer. Nowadays however, many people on the receiving end of the proposal believe the engagement ring is rightfully theirs, having been intended as a symbol of the love in that relationship. After all, how many of us would want to be proposed to with the same ring that was used in a previous and failed engagement?
There is perhaps no universally correct outcome to this problem. Essentially the engagement ring belongs to both the people in the relationship; its intention is to bring no one but them together in marriage. When sadly the engagement is no more, perhaps the best course of action to take would be for the two recently single parties to decide on an unhappy, but necessary settlement. If both individuals wish to possess the engagement ring as much as each other, maybe another significant artifact belonging to their relationship could be used as currency for a negotiation. In the case of my friend, her messy separation finally ceased when both her and her ex came to a begrudging compromise – she walked away with the engagement ring, while he got the cat.
Pia Chaudhuri