Diamond Engagement Rings and Successful Marriages

Does the modern practice actually reduce your chances of success?

As I've observed from time to time in these posts, identifying demographic or economic trends can help us understand what's happening in our communities and where we might be headed. Statistical datasets are certainly not infallible, but they can sometimes give us at least a glimpse into the inner workings of complex systems.

In that spirit, I just recently followed a link on the wildly popular Marginal Revolution economics website to a ten-year-old study of marriage outcomes. The study wasn't focused on Jews, but I think it can give us some food for thought.

The original study - "'A Diamond is Forever' and Other Fairy Tales: The Relationship between Wedding Expenses and Marriage Duration" - was undertaken by a couple of economics professors at Emory University using surveys they conducted online through the Mechanical Turk platform. More than 3,000 US-based subjects responded to questions about their basic demographic profile, marriage history, and the costs associated with their weddings. By comparing the general responses they got with respondents' reports of whether or not their marriages ended in divorce, the study authors sought to identify factors that are likely to predict successful marriages.

As the title suggests, one of their more interesting findings was that, within certain constraints, the more money couples spend on their engagement rings and wedding parties, the more likely their marriages will fail. The key "claim" the study was testing was the implicit promise of the wedding industry (which includes suppliers ranging from diamond dealers to caterers) that you signal your suitability for success in marriage by "investing" serious money up front ("A diamond is forever"). The unspoken argument is that marriage requires such ephemeral financial commitment.

Specifically, couples who were recently married (i.e., who had been married less than six years) and had spent between $2,000 and $4,000 on an engagement ring had a 1.3 times greater risk of divorce than couples who spent between $500 and $2,000. Similarly, couples who spent more than $20,000 on their weddings were nearly 1.6 times more likely to divorce than those who spent between $5,000 and $10,000.

The study was constructed well: the authors compared their large data set with the US Census Bureau's 2012 American Community Survey to ensure that they had a realistic representation of national demographics. Where necessary, they adjusted their results to improve their fit.

But what might that mean to us?

We'll begin with the usual disclaimers. The existence of a correlation between two factors - like expensive engagement rings and higher divorce rates - doesn't, on its own, prove that one caused the other. Also some of the study's observations will simply not apply to us. One example is the discovery that couples who dated for more than a year or had a child together before marriage were less likely to divorce. Even if extended dating actually did cause a decrease in divorce in the general population, we'd be foolish to imitate such practices. But in any case, there's a vanishingly small chance - given the structure of our shidduch system - that such considerations would even work for us.

But it might be useful to ask ourselves exactly why we all insist on spending the way we do on our weddings. If there's some genuine value in the practice, then more power to it. But if it turns out that we're just imitating broader (non-Jewish) trends, then even the trace of a statistical risk should inspire a reassessment.

The gift of a ring as the mechanism of halachic kiddushin is probably very old. But the halachic preference for a plain gold ring without a stone (so as to avoid confusion over its assessed value) means that non-transactional engagement rings - especially diamond rings - are historically unconnected. I'm aware of no source in Chazal or rishonim promoting or even discussing non-kiddushin engagement rings. This would make sense, since kiddushin was historically the only Jewish marker for a pre-marriage relationship (or, an "engagement").

The use of specifically diamond rings is of non-Jewish origin. The earliest record of such a use seems to have been from a royal engagement in Vienna in 1477. So not only is it impossible to claim that the practice has the status of an organic Jewish "minhag" but it might be worth considering whether it's forbidden within the framework of "בחוקותיהם לא תלכו".

So given that the practice has no Jewish origin - and that its widespread popularity only dates to the years following the Second World War - do diamonds nevertheless provide any social benefit? It's been argued that expensive engagement rings act as a kind of replacement for lawsuits based on archaic - and deprecated - "Breach of Promise to Marry" laws. Without recourse to such legal action, women whose fiance's had abandoned them would have little protection from loss of market value. However, the underlying problem such a mechanism (which I’ll avoid describing) came to solve would hopefully not apply to our community.

I'm therefore left to assume that the primary argument in support of giving one's kallah a diamond ring is that a substantial financial commitment would help to guarantee a commensurate commitment to a sustained marriage. But if that is indeed why we're doing it, we should ask ourselves whether or not it works.

Which is where that 2014 study comes in. Part of the power of that study is their use of multivariate comparisons. That is, by allowing for multiple factors, they were able to more effectively isolate the most likely causes of key outcomes (primarily divorce). So once age, geolocation, education, household income, religious affiliation, and ethnicity are all accounted for, it seems that spending more on a diamond ring or on general wedding expenses are reasonably reliable predictors of divorce. Or, in other words, a diamond ring and an expensive wedding certainly do not contribute to better marriages.

Having said that, I should note that the data showed a decreasing risk of divorce for couples who spent more than $8,000 for their ring. But that assumes the result doesn’t represent an unrepresentative statistical outlier. And, considering how $8,000 in 2014 translates to around $10,500 in 2023 dollars, I’m not sure that’s a standard to which we should aspire.

You should feel to free correct me on this one, but I can think of no reason to imagine why those conclusions shouldn’t apply equally to Jewish marriages.

Now, given the obvious financial constraints under which most of us live, blindly going along with the modern diamond ritual (and overpriced weddings) isn’t just an empty gesture, it seems downright irrational and irresponsible.