Holy Matrimony!

Marriage is about money, as anyone who’s ever taken a college seminar on Jane Austen knows. On the wedding night, the bride’s assets slip into a lace teddy, the groom’s assets put on their silk pajamas, and the two become joined forever in a perfect union. Theoretically, this tender commingling of bank accounts could cost the couple no more than $55 for the marriage license. But these days, before the marriage transforms the couple’s finances, the wedding often threatens to destroy them.

Look, for example, at the changing customs around ring shopping. As soon as we started thinking about getting married, my boyfriend and I found ourselves presented with these old-fashioned roles to play: He’s the stoic breadwinner hunting down the diamond for his bride, and I’m the demure dependent breathlessly accepting the gift presented at my feet. These roles have almost nothing to do with our actual day-to-day lives, of course, but rebelling against them takes a lot of work. Rather than trying to subvert the dominant paradigm and plan the wedding at the same time, most people simply pay extra to make the cognitive dissonance go away. This is terrific for Tiffany’s, but kind of a scam for the rest of us, which is why I’m proud to say that I’m a diamond-free bride.

The groom as tool: De Beers helpfully explains gender rolesHistorically, buying the ring is the groom’s job, and his ability to save two month’s salary—a standard invented in the first half of the twentieth century by the jewelry industry—signifies his prowess as a provider. Since most brides have their own incomes these days, this tradition doesn’t make much sense, but we haven’t scrapped it. Instead, more and more brides simply contribute their own salaries towards the ring. In 2007, 39% of women said they’d help pay for the ring (up 11% over the past two years.) It’s a good thing, because ring prices have skyrocketed: In 2006, the average couple spent $4,470 on an engagement ring, or 25% more than they did back in the simpler days of 2002.

Sharing the cost hasn’t helped alleviate our anxiety about the size and shape of our rings, though. One in four women admit the engagement ring they received was too small or not what they had envisioned, which sounds horribly materialistic until you remember what else the ring is supposed to demonstrate. Cartier might sum it up perfectly in their ad campaign: Under three big rocks, the caption reads “This is what extraordinary love looks like.” It’s impossible to miss their point. A big ring means big love; a little one suggests simply lukewarm affection.

My own engagement ring has no diamond, but it does have a huge replica of a rock. The designer, Alissia Melka-Teichroew, traced the silhouette of a diamond ring onto a piece of silver and then cut it out. It’s a comment on ringness, a meta-ring. It’s conceptual. It cost $99. I love it.

A ring about ring-ness: Mine's the one on the far leftYou’ll forgive me if I sound a little snotty, a little triumphant, a little too cool for school. The truth, of which I am exceedingly proud, is that no one in my life has given me a hard time about my lack of diamond. I’ve gotten a couple semi-skeptical comments — one “So when are you going to get the real ring?” and one “You know, you have a very different attitude about this than most women.” But nobody’s told me that my fiancé priced me out at less than a hundred dollars, and for that I’m very grateful.

Why the anti-ring? Well, there’s the crass financial reason; neither of us saw the point of spending so much money on a piece of jewelry, especially when the meta-ring was so perfectly suited to both of our tastes. There are also a host of ethical reasons, given the well-documented corruption of the diamond industry. "If you really want a typical engagement ring," said my fiancé, "I could always go to Sierra Leone and dismember some small children."

Not long after we got engaged, I found a picture of my ring on Offbeatbride, the website accompanying Ariel Meadow Stalling’s excellent eponymous how-to book about non-traditional weddings. She described it as “the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to anyone who asks about your diamond ring.” In the comments section, someone called her out, wondering why anyone would want to be so rude to people who just want to appreciate your good fortune. I saw her point, but it seemed obvious that the real source of hostility here wasn't the occasional friendly ring-gawper. Every time you open a magazine Cartier’s there to tell you that your man doesn’t love you—and “fuck you” is the wrong reaction?

Good enough for Grandma?: Mead's bookAs Rebecca Mead points out in One Perfect Day, her meticulously-researched book about the wedding industry, ads like Cartier’s are effective. In fact, diamond rings only became widely associated with engagement after the diamond company De Beers began advertising in the 1930s. It took them years to invent the tradition: Even as late as 1939, one-third of brides went ringless. It wasn’t until 1947, when a never-married copywriter coined the phrase “A diamond is forever,” that diamonds become a crucial part of betrothal. It’s a hard slogan to argue against. If a diamond is forever, and you’re dismissive of diamonds, doesn’t that suggest you’re saying fuck you to forever?

Jodi Kantor seems to think so. In her New York Times review of One Perfect Day, Kantor appeared to take Mead’s criticisms of the industry personally, arguing that her own wedding was tasteful and referring to the book as “dour” (which is up there with “shrill” and “hairy” on the Top Ten List of Ad Hominem Responses to Feminist Arguments.) Kantnor hastily pointed out that she didn’t disagree with the book’s general thesis; she just believes our current wedding excess can’t be too bad, because it makes people happy. “Do grandmothers cry just as hard when a bride is married, as Mead was, at a courthouse while wearing office clothes?” she asks. Read that again: The New York Times’ reviewer just accused a journalist of making her grandma sad by not spending enough money on her wedding. It’s a perfect example of the way the industry has coached us to conflate what we buy with how we feel.

The industry is only so powerful, though, as the story of the male engagement ring demonstrates. In 1926, with revenues threatened by the rise of department stores, jewelers began marketing rings for men—“mangagement rings,” as my fiancé wistfully calls them. They positioned these rings as historically macho, advertising them with pictures of be-ringed Conan the Barbarian types charging into battle and naming them things like “the Pilot,” “the Executive,” and my favorite, “the Stag.” But there was an essential problem with the male ring: it didn’t fit with traditional engagement gender roles. Men were supposed to be bestowing the rings, not wearing them, and all the ringed barbarians in the world couldn’t convince the public otherwise.

Bling it on: Does wearing jewelry make this guy less of a man?This problem played out logistically. Since it was taboo for women to propose marriage, brides couldn’t figure out when to buy their fiancé’s rings. Were they supposed to secretly return to the jewelry store after the proposal? Not only was the process clunky, but grooms tended to stand in the way. As one trade magazine pointed out, if a man discovered that his bride planned to spend $30 to $50 on a ring for him, he’d probably talk her out of it. For the mangagement ring to succeed, then, women would have to deceive their fiancés in order to buy them gifts that they didn’t really want.

Deep-seated gender roles are much harder to escape than a sixty-year-old custom. I should know: Our engagement ring might be postmodern, but my fiancé’s proposal was entirely old-fashioned. Andy bought the ring without me—without my knowledge. (If I may be sentimental for a moment, the vision of him engagement-ring-shopping at the MoMA store totally kills me; it’s like some weird pre-sexual fantasy I would have had as a pretentious eight-year-old.) And he proposed on one knee, just like Mr. Darcy.

I’m rare among my engaged and married friends; most had long, heartfelt discussions about commitment and readiness before anyone thought about buying a ring. Sixty-four percent of women help pick out the ring, which means they’ve discussed getting married before the actual engagement. But only 5% of women propose. Had we stuck with our happy living-in-sin arrangement for another few years, I like to think I would have suggested we get married—but I would have felt ridiculous getting down on one knee. Even the phrase “Will you marry me?” seems to belong to men; speaking it, I think I’d feel like I was play-acting, and I suspect my fiancé would feel the same way. We’re independent-minded enough to buck a tradition created by the jewelry industry, but neither of us can fully escape the idea that some roles are for men and some are for women.

Next: Is it ethical of us to get married when so many of our friends can’t?

*** Also: Five ways to keep the wedding-industrial complex off your ring finger

This past November, on our second anniversary, my boyfriend Andy and I went to the Lyric Diner, a cozy joint on 23rd Street in Manhattan. He ordered a turkey burger and I ordered chicken fingers. Outside, it was raining. Inside, the radio belted “Midnight Train to Georgia.” The night felt art-directed by Edward Hopper.

Then, suddenly, Andy was down on one knee holding a ring, and the radio had switched to the Simple Minds song from The Breakfast Club, and we were halfway through a conversation I’d expected would take place in, oh, three or four years.

At 35, Andy is nine years my senior. His friends are all getting married and buying houses; my friends are all applying to grad school. His little brother has a wife, twins, and a rabbinical pulpit in Canada; my little brothers have roommates, bongs, and a cappella rehearsal. I’m certainly no child bride—the median age for marriage among American women is 25—but like most of my divorce-wary, commitment-phobic generation, I’d barely started to think about laying down roots.

Heart of Stone: This is not what my engagement ring looks likeI could picture us in ten years…in twenty…in thirty. I could picture our curly-haired babies. I just hadn’t spent much time picturing our wedding.

“Can I have a year to think about it?” I sniffled.

Now both of us were nursing surprise. “A year?” asked Andy. “Like, a year in which we’d each go off and have adventures and sow our wild oats?”

Well, no. That was a terrible idea. In fact, I was beginning to come around to the original proposal. I just needed to make sure of the terms. Did he want kids someday? Would he be willing to leave New York?

He said yes. I said yes. And there you have it: One day I was watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force in a crappy Brooklyn apartment with my boyfriend, and the next day I was watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force in a crappy Brooklyn apartment with my husband-to-be.

Getting engaged turned out to be easy. These days, the wedding is the hard part. Since 1990, the price of the average wedding has risen 73 percent, to $26,327; you could hire your own editorial assistant for less. Surely this wasn’t what our parents’ generation had in mind when they jettisoned traditional wedding strictures to get married barefoot in the backyard. But as weddings got less religious, they lost some of their meaning. We promptly filled that gap with the nation’s other faith—shopping. We looked to the frilly Victorians for inspiration and turned the send-off to marriage into the biggest, most expensive party most of us will ever throw.

The term “Bridezilla” entered the common parlance with a show on the WE channel and marked the beginning of the backlash, as women fed up with the rampant materialism of mainstream weddings began turning out on websites like Indiebride.com and buying books like The Anti-Bride Guide. The emerging indie-bride movement aims to restore authenticity—and a sensible budget—to the ritual by taking a do-it-yourself approach and making room for the couple’s individual tastes. But the difference between mainstream weddings and indie weddings is too often merely aesthetic. Replacing seared ahi tuna with tuna sandwiches doesn’t necessarily make the ceremony more meaningful.

The Cinderella wedding dress: Her bridesmaids will be costumed as singing miceAbout a year ago, the New York Times car-crash column “Modern Love” (I dread it, but I can’t help staring) ran a comic essay by a man who got deeply caught up in his wedding plans—a groomzilla. Get it? The joke only works because when we visualize a wild-eyed spouse-to-be throwing a tantrum about invitation stationary, that spit-flecked lunatic is always female. And her battle cry is first person singular: “It’s MY day.” Note that this is exactly the attitude monstrously spoiled teenage girls take in my favorite MTV reality show and harbinger of the apocalypse, My Super Sweet 16. By telling women that their weddings should be bride-centric fulfillments of all their girlhood fantasies, we’ve taken a ritual that’s all about adulthood and infantilized it. (Disney even started designing wedding gowns for women who want to look like Snow White or the Little Mermaid, which must be awesome for men who want to marry small children.) But, more importantly, the whole point of getting married is to forge a partnership. It’s not about mine, but ours.

Shortly after I got engaged, I signed us up for the popular wedding site theKnot, giving it our tentative summer 2008 wedding date. It replied with a list of 34 things I had to do immediately, most of them involving a pricey transaction of some kind and each marked with a pale purple exclamation point. And we wonder how our sweet-meaning gal pals transform into rampaging materialistic monstrosities?

Carley Romney, the founder of theKnot, insists that the site encourages men to be a part of the process by alleviating the embarrassment of carrying around a wedding magazine. But I can’t picture many men, Andy included, who feel like pastel exclamation points really speak to them. And I don’t see why a marriage of teamwork should begin with 12-to-16 months of me neurotically trying to get those little boxes checked off. In fact, I don’t see how anyone benefits from that at all, other than the 70-billion-dollar wedding industry.

A non-traditional gown for the non-allergic bride: A wedding dress made out of cut flowersSo I can appreciate the indie-bride ethos. I’ve checked out The Anti-Bride Guide, The Conscious Bride, and I Do But I Don’t. I’ve logged hours reading the terrifying but addictive Horror Stories thread on Indiebride. But when a close friend mailed me an essay from Bust magazine (sadly, not available online) about how to have an indie wedding, I began to wonder if the alternative wedding scene was really so different from the mainstream. After making the classic anti-materialist case against modern wedding madness, the piece launched into laudatory examples: the couple who loved Halloween so much that they had a blood-and-tombstones theme, or the sci-fi bride who walked down the aisle to Princess Leia’s Star Wars theme. Over on Indiebride, meanwhile, people were squabbling about whether there’s a price cap on an indie wedding. Superficially, the indie world appealed to me, but it still seemed more focused on the aesthetics of the wedding than the strength of the marriage.

There is one obvious way for us to make sure our wedding is about more than the clothes we wear and the food we serve. A close friend recently got married in a traditional Jewish service—a piece of theater that has been perfected over hundreds of years. No wonder I cried my eyes out. I also signed her ketubah, which felt infinitely more significant than being a bridesmaid—rather than just attending to the bride on her big day, I’m a witness and signatory to her union with her husband for all time.

So indie! And yet so cold: The adventure rabbi marries a couple atop a mountainLuckily for us, Andy’s brother is a Conservative rabbi who immediately offered to do the ceremony. I’m wary that a set procedure—even a Jewish one—may imply a sort of insta-meaning. It also feels a bit like cheating, given that neither of us is particularly observant, but I’m glad to have a tradition that can provide us with both structure and significance.

It might not be the worst thing that the wedding tradition has expanded to include so many options. The New York Times Style section routinely makes the situation sound like a bleak battle between Cinderella and Princess Leia, but the actual weddings I’ve witnessed have been lovely: There was the nondenominational ceremony that lasted five minutes and involved a keyboardist whistling “I’ve Just Seen A Face”, the Jewish-Catholic one that took place on top of a castle in Italy; the gorgeous eighteenth-hole wedding of Andy’s golfer cousin. The barefoot brides of the ’60s got it right when they threw out the rules; the range of options is daunting, but it can also be beautiful. Now that Andy and I are engaged, our job—and my goal with this column—is to figure out what to take, what to leave, and what to add to make it our own. I imagine we’ll piece together our marriage in much the same way.

Next column: I know you want to hear about the ring!