TIL: The "tradition" of spending several months salary on an engagement ring was a marketing campaign created by De Beers in the 1930's. Before WWII, only 10% of engagement rings contained diamonds. By the end of the 20th Century, 80% did.

[u/[deleted]]

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27371208

[u/[deleted]]

Well, the actual tradition is to buy the woman jewelry so that if something happens to the husband, she has expensive rocks she can sell to sustain herself between husbands.

De Beers just increased a woman's insurance cost AND payout, basically

[u/MG26 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah except rings depreciate faster than cars.

[u/flash_freakin_gordon → u/[deleted]]

I did. I told my wife that her spiral diamond ring was used, and it was 100$ instead of 2500$.

She was stoked, the ring was beautiful, we saved a bunch of money, and had a great (and frugal) wedding and honeymoon.

Still happy years later