I started looking into diamonds two years before I proposed to my now wife and went really down the rabbit hole of the chemistry, history, and marketing behind diamonds.
Lab-made was a no brainer, I got a flawless and huge stone for the price I would have paid for a crappy 1ct from DeBeers. My only regret is that whatever I paid for the diamond will still be way over-market in a few years but well, had to get married at some point. I guess I'll get her a golf-ball-sized diamond for our 10th anniversary.
Why and how became diamonds a necessity of marriage in the US? Did your fiancé really expect a diamond, and would have she be disappointed by something that has only worth to you?
It's all kind of arbitrary, some things catch on. Rings as signs of commitment and everlasting love go as far back as ancient Rome. Precious metals like gold for the actual ring symbolize the same thing because they don't rust. And DaBeers had the right messaging at the right time to popularize diamond, a white stone that matches a wedding dress, is clean and pure meshing well with Christianity in the US, and was already mythologized as the hardest and unbreakable.
It's the same symbolism for why it's popular for guys' wedding rings to be made out of super strong, super hard metals.
People give DaBeers too much credit for what was an extremely natural extension to the engagement ring. Advertising only gets your foot in the door, it does have to be a reasonably good idea for it to take on a life of its own.
Hmm that sounds a bit shallow and materialistic tbh.
But I have to say I'm an outlier anyway, I've never been married and I prefer polyamorous relationships. And I've never had real money to speak of. So I'm not really the right type.
I do know the families with a big house and fancy dinner parties with Sunday silverware. But I tend to stay away from those settings :) I don't fit in and I don't even own a suit or dress shirt that fits.
> Hmm that sounds a bit shallow and materialistic tbh.
It is. But the diamond cartel's marketing (at least in the US, I won't speak for other countries) has been so good since well before I was born that diamond = love, romance, relationship, marriage. For many, many, many people, there's an inextricable link between the two.
It's super lame. But it's how it is. Hopefully that's already changing.
It is shallow. Women want tribute or some sort of proof that you care. This is the true meaning of romance. Romance is essentially a man paying some sort of tribute to a woman mostly in the form of time, effort and/or money.
I'm sorry, I come from an English speaking part of the world that uses swear words quite differently. (As is very common in pidgin English variants.)
The parents post was objectively sexist, and objectively highly sexist. Calling that out must be ok, apologies I dropped expletives, it's a cultural difference.
That said, it's very telling that the post says using expletives to call out sexism is bad, but there's not a similar chastisement of the sexism itself. (Which garnered no comment.) Is decorum more important than cleaning out obvious and odious sexism from HN?
A lot of women want some sort of tribute as proof of your love. It's common in the animal kingdom and diamonds are debeers method of capitalizing on it for humans.
If debeer didn't exist, something else would exist in its place, because the root of this is not debeer. The root is female nature.
It's better this way to artificially jack up the price of diamonds. Because then you can find people who are selling the diamond at an undercut price and satisfy the female instinct. Is the diamond mined? How would she know?
Otherwise if debeers didn't do this, women may influence the culture to latch onto some other form of tribute that can't be made artificially. Gold let's say.
There's nothing funnier to me than reading Americans explain their worldview.
Just kidding, I doubt this has anything to do with nationality. I'm sure you guys have plenty of women that don't expect a cartoonish diamonds-and-gucci tribute from prospective partners.
No I believe in equality where I’m from. Men also want tribute from women. That’s why millions of men are receiving diamond wedding rings from women in America.
I believe in equality to the point of delusion. It is more important to be inclusive than it is to be honest about the truth. That’s my world view.
I've been following these guys for a decade now (maybe more??) and I was always blown away by their skills and aesthetics. Devine has been a huge influence on my own artistic style and finding xxiivv.com on some random chan during high school, and getting lost in it, was a big mind-changing event. Glad to see they're still sailing around the world.
There is no such thing as a word for "1700s" in most European languages.
Also in English it sounds weird, as you have to pronounce it "seventeen-hundreds" whereas the correct pronunciation is "one-thousand-seven-hundred".
So 1700s is unsuitable for formal writing or speaking and doesn't map naturally to most languages of Western civilization.
But yeah, I guess the author finds it hard to subtract 1 in his mind :) I could go off about the typical US-centric arrogance that I see on this site, but I think it's already pretty funny as it is.
Seventeen-hundreds doesn't sound stilted at all, to this native English speaker. I would use this even in a very formal context, and certainly no one would bat an eye. One-thousand-seven-hundreds is almost certainly incorrect in English -- I would actually find this to be a very clear marker of not speaking English very well. Are you a native speaker? I find your claims rather bold and quite frankly incorrect.
Also, curious to find out (from elsewhere in this thread) is that Finnish does not typically use centuries. Rather, they use a construction that maps directly to 1700s (1700-luku). I would be careful in accidentally applying your own cultural bias when accusing others of the same ;)
In Swedish it's also very rare to count centuries. We say 1700-talet. Also 2000-talet (pronounced either tvåtusen-talet/twothousand-talet or tjugohundra-talet/twentyhundred-talet) would mainly refer to 2000-2100. To refer to 2000-2009 we say 00-talet (nollnoll-talet/zerozero-talet).
Lab-made was a no brainer, I got a flawless and huge stone for the price I would have paid for a crappy 1ct from DeBeers. My only regret is that whatever I paid for the diamond will still be way over-market in a few years but well, had to get married at some point. I guess I'll get her a golf-ball-sized diamond for our 10th anniversary.
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