In defense of geeky wedding rings

A while back I wrote a piece for Home for Wayward Geeks entitled, "If You Want a Harry Potter Engagement Ring, You Should Have a Harry Potter Engagement Ring," after a particularly click-baity article told people if they wanted a Harry Potter ring perhaps they weren't mature enough to get married (and I kind of got mad about that). The idea came up in conversation earlier today, and so I figured it might be fun to share it again it for kicks since I've been meaning to repost it here to the blog for months now. 

Also I mean--have you seen these rings? Geek-tastic AND beautiful. Seriously. 

Repost: If You Want a Harry Potter Engagement Ring, You Should Have a Harry Potter Engagement Ring

n the age of clickbait, antagonism is king, and a writer over on Gawker smartly went after a large group of online readers this week with her piece entitled, If you buy a Harry Potter Engagement Ring, You Should Not Get Married. Her argument, should you want to avoid giving Gawker the benefit of your page clicks, is that to purchase or accept a Harry Potter engagement ring is indicative that you have "made a series of incorrect choices," and makes some mildly snarky comments about the books not being age appropriate for adults, which is effective considering how often telling adults not to read YA novels has resulted in great clickity clicking on the internet the past year or two. 

But if you're going to get married, it is good piece of advice, you'd think, to know and understand the person whom you are proposing to or whose proposal you are accepting. And knowing them means a lot of things, but first and foremost you'd hope you understand that person's passions. Whether it's rock climbing or Harry Potter or fostering rescue dogs or collecting Hummels, when you marry someone, you are marrying their passions. 

Therefore, would it not make sense that If you are the type of person who would squee with joy over a snitch engagement ring, you deserve to find someone who would go looking for one for you? If you want a diamond, find someone who will buy you a diamond. If you don't believe in engagement rings, don't find someone who will insist on spending three months salary on a ring you don't want. It's about understanding your partner's desires and hopes. It's really not about the ring. 

Of course, really, we're told it's supposed to be about the ring, because that's what our marketing overlords have told us we're supposed to do. Diamonds themselves are a scam of such epic proportions Don Draper would get the vapors at how well-crafted the lie is. Rather than obsess over that particular point of fact, I'll point you to the extensive (if profane) Diamonds are Bullshit, by Rohin Dhar, co-founder and CEO of Priceconomics. If you are into diamonds, if you think they're beautiful and you want one, feel free to indulge, but educate yourself about their value and why they are considered "must have" stones for engagement rings. 

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And that doesn't even get into the initial reason engagement rings exist in the first place (summed up really well in this piece by WHoWhatWear's Meghan Blalock) and how even that original reason doesn't fit with the use of diamonds considering the stone's value drops faster the minute you buy it than a new car's value drops when you drive it off the lot. 

So what this boils down to is: throw what you know about engagement rings and their meanings out the window. They're something else now. A promise, a sign of affection, a symbol of love and understanding of your partner. And considering how long you'll hope that ring will be on the appropriate finger, isn't it a good idea to have a strong sense that it will make the wearer--and hopefully, by extension, the purchaser--legitimately happy? And doesn't that really boil down to communication? 

If you are the type of person who would want a Harry Potter engagement ring, you shouldn't be with someone you're ashamed to say that to. If you are afraid to communicate to that person, perhaps you should think about the state of your relationship. If you're with someone who thinks buying you a Harry Potter engagement ring is appropriate and you, even as you sit here reading this article wearing your Hufflepuff scarf, think, "okay, that's going too far, even for me," and you haven't discussed how that is not what you desire, reconsider getting married to that person.

We're picking on Harry Potter here, but The Boy Who Lived isn't the only hero who has inspired some intricate rings. There's quite a few Batman-based engagement rings out there, such as this Harley Quinn style ring (and yes, that site is called Geeks Who Wed, by the way), and some pricey Star Wars rings in lightsaber themes have been making the rounds lately as well. Actually, When Geeks Wed did a piece over a year ago with a lot of different rings, from Star Wars and Star Trek to Legend of Zelda and Pokemon. Check them out--they really are beautifully crafted, even if they're not for everyone. Many of these rings are festooned in diamonds, too, by the way, so the crafters and buyers are not cheaping out here. It's a matter of taste. 

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Full disclosure: I make my living writing about superheroes and I think a geek-themed ring is going too far for me, personally. I won't judge someone for wearing or buying one, never in a million years, but it's not my thing. That being said, f I were with someone for whom an R2-D2 engagement ring was a dream come true, though, I would hope she'd tell me. 

And more to the point: an engagement ring, and more importantly, a marriage, should be about personal happiness and making the life choices you need to make to be happy. If you're being swayed in your own happiness and joy by articles on Gawker, perhaps you should not get married until you find yourself a bit more. Go out. See the world. Form your own opinions. Judge yourself, don't be judged by others. 

And if you're a traditionalist at heart and want a big honking diamond engagement ring, please read up on the history of diamonds. There is so much beauty in the world, geeky and traditional and everything in between. Consider an alternative, if only because we're all better than that. There's more than one type of beauty in the world, and it is, as the saying goes, in the eye of the beholder. 

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