For our international readers, this is very uncommon behavior among Americans (taking out mortgages for a diamond ring) and it seems unlikely since it would require one of the two members of the marriage to own a house as a single person, which is also uncommon among Americans.
Spending too much on a diamond ring is common though
It's very common for people to purchase engagement rings on loan. I had a friend who sold jewelry back in the 00s and he said it was pretty rare for someone to pay cash for engagement rings. Most people got 12-36 months loans.
It's possible this changed between 09-13 because of the recession, but I'd bet it's very common now that the economy is doing really well.
This might not be a mortgage, in the sense of being a lifetime payment. But it's a (semi-)secured loan.
Not just American, it's pervasive in Europe as well. France is a little unusual in that engagement rings are commonly made from non-diamond gem stones such as rubies, emeralds and sapphires.
Weddings are becoming insane in the UK. I went to a friend's wedding a while back where they had a carved piece of glass showing the seating plan for the dinner. Cost hundreds. They divorced a couple of years later.
The cynic in me would like to see a graph of cost of wedding as a percent of total annual income compared to divorce rates. I have a theory those two things are correlated.
Doesn't really matter how you spend the money. It is a signalling thing. The money must be burnt. With limited resources it ensures you can't repeat engagement with multiple women...
This is BS. You can't use biological evolution to explain high level cultural behavior. It also implies that females have no agency and just run on instinct like frogs. The real reason they want diamonds is culture.
> You can't use biological evolution to explain high level cultural behavior
If you can use math to explain physics, physics to explain chemistry, chemistry to explain biology, biology to explain psychology, psychology to explain sociology, and sociology (plus history) to explain culture, then it would be fair to say you could use math to explain culture.
Of course, there's a lot of big gaps here, but the point is: trying to tie culture to biology is not without merit.
IMO, males and females both run on instinct through chaos crafted channels of superstition we call "culture". Like water running down a mountain in streams, it's not the channels which explain the waters movement downward (that's gravity), they just define the means through which it happens.
It's like trying to use molecular physics to explain the immune system.
It's not just impractical; it's impossible to know enough of the variables to derive one from the other.
In practice "evolutionary" explanations are constantly used to make something intuitively plausible for which there is no evidence sound scientific and convincing.
A more concrete reason it's not true in this case: diamonds as engagement gifts from men to women are a recent cultural phenomenon. For most of human history this was not the case, and there were/are large cultures where the tradition is a dowry instead (more or less the reverse) or nothing at all.
It's not science. Human brains are very recent in evolutionary terms. What a frog or a peacock does is a result of many orders of magnitude more time under natural selection than the age of modern humans. People guess that this or that behavior is because of natural/sexual selection and pass it off as science with no proof just because the word evolution was mentioned. It takes a very long time for something to become an instinct. Given how much human brains are capable of, I just think the most Occam's razor answer is culture and mimicry rather than somehow some {{uniquely human behavior}} having been important enough to survival to become an instinct across the board.
No, not even close. In fact, I suspect that outside the people that programmers on HN and other upper-income cohorts hang out with, it's extremely rare.
FWIW, my wife has a $600 artificial diamond ring that she picked out at Walmart.com. It's one of her most prized possessions (not because of the cost, but because of what it symbolizes) and she frequently points out to people how inexpensive it was.
I distinctly remember her saying that if I were to pay 2 months salary for a ring it would be a sign that I was too dumb to marry. For that kind of money she'd rather have a new car.
> I distinctly remember her saying that if I were to pay 2 months salary for a ring it would be a sign that I was too dumb to marry.
Great attitude and totally on-point, responsible finances are one strong pillar under a relationship, if you blow through your cash on baubles you will eventually end up stressed.
Absolutely not. I bought a moissanite ring because my fiancé would never accept a diamond, but I wanted to give something that would be just as flashy.
Tell that to my girlfriend. The first thing her and her friends do when someone they know gets engaged is zoom in on the pics to see the diamond and talk about.
A decade ago, I bought a $4K diamond as an engagement ring for my now-wife (I didn't know about moissanite then), and my colleagues gave me so much shit since I was spending significantly less than 3X monthly salary. Thankfully, my wife agreed with me. We remain happily married :)
