you guys see Amanda Lang’s ring? huge…
I think it depends, if the girl didn’t care, I’d be happy to spend a lot. But if she demanded 20k, that’d make me pretty uncomfortable.
Also, I need to invest in De Beers.
Ok, I misunderstood.
Bottom line is, if a girl should ask you to spend huge dollars on the ring+diamond either asking literally or hinting at it, BIG disappointment and she will probably make a poor choice for a lifelong partner.
If you love the girl and she really is everything you dreamed while not asking for much, then of course you’ll want to spoil her. If you feel like you want to, then it’s ok.
Just keep in mind the stats. Start with a 50% divorce rate. Now of the 50% that don’t divorce, how many couples stay together because of the kids? bec of religion? bec they are used to the life already? bec they don’t feel they are attractive anymore to look around? bec of pressure of family and relatives? saving face with others? bec they just don’t want to die alone? And factor in how much easier it is to meet new people these days…
After all is said and done, the % of couples are truly happy? probably 1 in 10. likely less actually. Do you want to gamble a ton of money on a diamond on those odds?
I don’t think most women outright demand a certain $$ ring, but I do think that what will make a girl happy depends. For example, presumably an NYC socialite from a prominent family and a farmer’s daughter from Kansas have different expectations. It also depends on you…if you just started working or if you are an MD BSD you will probably make different decisions and people will expect different things. That’s the reality, and despite what many say it does matter to most people. I think that’s stupid, but there are a lot more stupid things people do.
Haha, with that attitude you’re doomed brah. Ask yourself this: is it better to have loved and lost?
Alas, why marriage seems like a poor proposition to me. No offense to the OP or other married folks on here.
I saved some money on taxes from getting married. Plus, if your spouse has high earnings potential, they can act as a hedge for your income. From my observations, talented females tend to choose careers with stable employment prospects, such as law or medicine. This works well if you pursue a career with high earnings but high volatility (like finance).
This is so true, let’s ruin this thread with a pessimistic / realist approach to relationships. As an analyst, I can’t help myself and run numbers on everything without even trying. Let’s say, just to pick a number, the average person has 5 serious relationships prior to marriage and marries the 5th one. Going into the marriage, that means you already have an 80% failure rate on serious / meaningful relationships. 50% of marriages fail, but the real failure rate is higher than that as iteracom noted. 20% * <50% marriage success rate = <10%. So you have a less than 1 in 10 chance of having a lasting, productive, happy relationship, which is terrible odds. There’s nothing wrong with relationships and I’m not advocating being single for your whole life, but I have to say that marriage is the definition of a poor asymmetric risk: You have huge downside (50%+ of your assets) if it fails, and the failure rate is extremely high. Historically, marriage made sense for men because it was the only way for them to get some. Today, that obviously is not the case, and while marriage clearly works out well for some, I think the majority of men would be better off not marrying.
But if your wife makes more money than you, it could work pretty well. Or if you marry an 80-year-old heiress.
Well yeah, that could work. My analysis didn’t factor that in.
Palantir, TIF is better than DeBeers…the operational difficulties of finding a diamond are way higher than selling it to a HCB who has a sucker for a man…right?..
Hmm…it’s just that I viewed jewelry as a commodity, and dunno if Tif has real brand name value enough to generate pricing power. Maybe it does. De Beers though runs practically a monopoly.
Tiffany diamond jewelry costs like 150% or more of a no-name brand for the same quality. The name definitely has value. They are probably going to make a ton of money off the newly-rich Chinese (Asian people are even more brand sensitive than Western people).
DeBeers does not have brand power, since they sell diamonds to other distributors. However, they do own like 50% of the diamond market. It’s hard to go against a company that ball-chokes the market like that.
Oh, I have loved and lost, a couple girls I’ve honestly loved and real potential keepers. But bec of various circumstances, they fell apart. But none of those times required me to shell out a ton of money for a diamond. Isn’t my ‘loved and lost’ outcome a far better outcome than “loved and lost” and “down -$20k” and “divorced status” ?
I’d have to buy viagra in bulk at wholesale.
Anyway, I think the whole marriage, spending a ton on a diamond, fairy tale wedding, etc… these were all designed to create a sense of “lock in and cement” the relationship. It’s like a ritual… "oh look we did all this, I poured a ton of money on you, your parents paid a ton of money for that… and so we’re cemented in this “let’s be together forever” idea.
Marriage should be less about these material things, and more about two people really wanting to be together, and if down the line it doesn’t work out and the two people aren’t happy anymore (and the VAST majority don’t work out), then people go their separate ways to find a better life without all this sunk cost and failure.
A person in their 30’s person who is attractive or has a great personality etc… will be much better received with “I’ve never married” instead of “yea… I’m divorced”
You gotta spend money to make money?
*after relations*
Iteracom: “That was great. I love you so much.”
Girl: “I love you so much too. I would love to spend the rest of my life with you.”
Iteracom: “I would do anything for you. I would love to spend the rest of my life with you. But, these thing usually don’t work out. Let’s not get married so that we don’t have to tell people we have been divorced, because that won’t be well received.”
And, the worst reason to never get married goes to…
Haha, I hear what you are saying, but you are just being such a debbie downer it cracks me up.
My dad was a middle class boy who married the rich girl; he wasn’t a gold digger, but he couldn’t help thinking that her money would make things easier for the family. It didn’t.
When they finally split, she just hired a more expensive lawyer than he could possibly afford and used the laws on the books to take pretty much everything from him. It took him about 15 years to recover from that financialy, and I’m not sure he ever recovered from it emotionally.
Don’t get fooled by her higher earning power; it’s still a very assymetric proposition.
Money didn’t cause the problem, so I’m not saying that you should stay away from rich girls (although there is a problem for both men and women who are too used to using money to solve all problems in life - it often means that other coping mechanisms and methods of relating to others are underdeveloped)
And you don’t have to believe that women are innately bad, greedy, or selfish people (I don’t) to be worried. All you really have to believe is 1) women are human beings that are at least tempted by the incentives of a legal system that favors women in divorce because it basically assumes that they are the same helpless creatures that they arguably might have been in the 1900s, 2) there are ups and downs in a marriage, and there will be times when each of you are fuming at the other.
If you find yourself in a divorce situation, you have to assume that you hate each other and want to inflict as much pain on the other as possible. And even if you don’t feel this way, the lawyers involved will try their hardest to get you to.
Ok, I’m an idealist, so I like to believe in marriage. But I did like your analysis.