Things have changed since the last time Will and Lauryn and I went looking for an engagement ring and wedding bands. Will and Lauryn have gotten screened for genetic diseases. They’ve started looking around at private high school tuitions, which are astronomical. Priorities have shifted. A diamond seems less prominently featured on their list of affairs than it did before. But it’s still present. It’s a pang of a desire, something that should be done before time runs away and deprives them of this shiny thing that—despite its relative inefficacy in making life any better, important-things-in-life-wise—is still naggingly wantable.

But they’re wavering this time, I can tell. The way Lauryn puts it is, “Just in thinking about how much things are gonna cost down the line and thinking, ‘Do I want these several thousand dollars sitting on my finger, or do I want to be putting that towards my children’s future?’” At the same time, she admits that as soon as she enters the jewelry store, she gets “caught up in it.”

“If a big diamond on her finger sends a message about what a big moneymaking man I am, I’m really okay with everybody assuming we’re poor,” Will says from the driver’s seat. But soon enough, we’re at the mall, scanning diamonds, getting caught up.

This time, they’re focusing on wedding bands—diamond-studded for Lauryn, plain for Will. They are still, Will assures me, in the research stages of the process. They’ve chosen the mall, because it’s basically a jewelry farm. Three or four to a shopping center. Comparisons galore.

One of the first things our first saleslady asks is “When’s the big day?”

“Hard question,” says Will.

It takes her a minute to get a handle on what they mean when they say they’re married but just haven’t gotten around to getting the bands. This is probably a bit jarring to someone for whom rings are like rungs in a ladder of appropriate timing. Like, love, ring, wedding, more rings, end scene. At one point, I am almost certain I can hear her say that, well, they’ve waited long enough.

This store is different from the smaller, privately owned one we visited last time. It’s more a peninsula of the mall than a store, really. There are a greater number of words in the display case here than there were at Clyde’s shop. More information.

The saleslady asks when they think they’ll have their ceremony. She seems very concerned about the ladder. The rungs have not been laid. It may all fall apart. She suggests something like spring, summer. She herself wears three rings on her left hand, one on the right. They are gold with diamonds, colored gems and diamonds, black metallic, and one with pink stones—not as pink, though, as the bright polish that gilds her nails. Before we leave the store, she tells Will and Lauryn coquettishly that she would not wait too long—if they don’t have to.

They don’t have to, is the truth. But, as I’ve learned, they are anything but impulse buyers. Despite what Lauryn told me in the car, about getting carried away, no amount of shine blinds them, stops them from considering what’s smart and what’s not.

In the next shop we visit, the clerk drops a stand with a fat diamond ring onto the floor. I bend to pick it up and hand it to her. I don’t think she even noticed she dropped it, but she doesn’t look too flustered. I think of all the horror stories I’ve heard from diamond men—losing a diamond, sweating, kneeling to the floor. I can’t imagine this woman dropping to her hands and knees to hunt for stray gems like I’ve seen my father do at the end of a trade show.

The clerk asks Will and Lauryn when the wedding is.

“Umm, we haven’t set a date yet,” says Lauryn. I wonder if they are getting tired of all these questions.

We look at men’s rings for Will; at tungsten, at flat and rounded ones, at matted and shiny one. Will wanders. When the lady has taken out the sizing rings, to gauge Will’s finger width, Lauryn calls “Will! We need your finger.”

The shops in the malls are like television sitcom sets: all the same house with different shades of wood and furniture. They feel tiring—reruns—and even the jewels get lost amidst them. In the car ride home, Will says he guesses he’s becoming convinced that getting the ring online is the way to not get cheated. Of course, online diamond buying means more options, which means more competition for sellers. Will has caught on to this. In the car, he asks Lauryn what she wants to spend. Lauryn says six or seven hundred. Last time, the answer was two or three thousand. Private schools are really terribly expensive.

This kind of thinking is why stores and distributors try to carry a diamond for everyone: for people who want diamonds and private school, too; for people who want diamonds that don’t seem to announce, We are wealthy; for people who want diamonds that look like they’re old but are actually new; and for people who want diamonds that look like they’re new but are actually sort of old.

I’ve spent so much time now thinking about what this line of thought means for the diamond industry, for people in love, and for me, that I forget to ask my two friends if they feel they’re getting closer to what it is they want.

Read More by Alicia Oltuski: Precious Objects: A Story of Diamonds, Family, and a Way of Life

Follow Lauryn and Will’s engagement ring stories and other diamond news in subsequent installments of Diamonds.

Note: names and identifying details in this article have been changed to preserve the anonymity of its subjects.

Shopping Mall Photo

The post The Thing About Shopping for a Diamond in a Mall appeared first on The Faster Times.

My father is a jeweler, but I want to see the hunt for engagement ring from a couple’s perspective, so Will and Lauryn are letting me tag along as they shop. On the walk to the jewelry store Lauryn gets thirsty. I tell her they might have water there.

“I think they should,” she says.

“They should give you cookies, too,” I say. “And a little bit of liquor.” Lauryn and Will kiss on a street corner.

It’s Christmas day. We’re hoping the store is open. Will is anxious. Back at their apartment, he’d told me that he associates the diamond industry with getting ripped off. “That’s every thought I have about it. I’m overwhelmed with the fear of getting cheated.”

Indoors, it looks a little bit like a jewelry store crashed into someone’s grandmother’s house. A family of Russian dolls loiters on top of a large display case that snakes around the side of the store like a border, separating the customers from the sales staff. Behind the case hangs a framed portrait of some unnamed patriarchal figure wearing hunting gear. Photographs of satisfied customers with their diamonds dot the walls.

In addition to actual merchandise, colorfully wrapped sucking candies line the display. A plastic wedding cake couple kisses next to a figurine of Marilyn Monroe, and little phallic ring stands point upward. Beside them, necklaces, bracelets, and rings wink up through the glass with varying degrees of glint. A few of them feature gold chains, colored gemstones, or complexly poured platinum settings. Some of them look like your prom date’s studs, others like your rich aunt’s finest. Later, we will learn that there is half a million dollars worth of jewelry inside this showcase.

The owner of the store, a man in a three-piece suit who likes to refer to himself in the third person and will occasionally pop in with cheery remarks like “Aren’t you gonna have fun looking for a diamond?” is helping another couple, but turns to us while an assistant goes to get Lauryn’s water and asks “What, is a jewelry store making you nervous?” He sticks his tongue out. “It’s only your life!”

When it’s Will and Lauryn’s turn, Clyde, the owner, brings out a few stones for them to look at. Some come in parcel papers. I’ve seen my father and his diamond dealer friends use these. Usually they’re blue because this makes diamonds look whiter by underplaying the way the eye detects the color yellow.

“These are all certified,” Clyde explains. What he means is that they all have a report from the laboratories of the Gemological Institute of America (the GIA), stating their carat weight, color, clarity, and, for round brilliant diamonds of certain colors, cut.

The diamonds this shop sells don’t go below an I in color. Lauryn asks why not, and Clyde explains that they’d be yellow—and then she’d be “stuck with a yellow diamond. And you’re living with him.” Throughout our visit, Clyde cracks jokes (“she’s not that cute,” he says when Will and Lauryn look at a whiter stone). But it’s not just him. There’s something about the prospect of dropping large sums of cash that make people tell—and laugh at—unfunny jokes.

Clyde comes back with tweezers and a loupe and tells Will to “find the flaw.” He says he’ll teach him. “Put your elbow on the table.” Flaws can come in all shapes and sizes. If they appear on the exterior of the diamond, they’re called blemishes. Those on a stone’s interior are inclusions.

Lauryn decides that a one-carat diamond is too big for her.

Will: “She’s crazy, right?”

Clyde: “She’s cute.”

Before we leave, Clyde concedes that Will and Lauryn have to visit more than one shop before settling. But he does throw in that they won’t find a better price. Confidently, he prophesies, “I’m gonna sell him a diamond, because he might not like me, he likes Mary.” He points to his saleslady, a girl with a cleavage-liberating shirt.

After Clyde steps away, Mary shows Will and Lauryn some wedding bands.

“When are you guys getting married? Do you have a date?”

This is a complicated issue. Will and Lauryn have been married for four years. There were fewer than ten people at the ceremony, including the bride and groom.

“That was the timing that made sense for being married, but not the timing that made sense for having a wedding,” Will had explained to me. No judge, no rings. One day, they want a wedding with a rabbi and a chuppah. That’s one day. Today—or soon—they want the rings. They’re craving the rings. Will, especially. It’s not that he’s unprogressive. It’s that to him, as to many other people, the ring or lack thereof, is a signifier.

“Lauryn,” he put it frankly, “is very indecisive, so commitment isn’t in her vocabulary, and not wearing a ring has always been to me this emblem of lack of commitment on her part, so it will be nice that she’s in a position where she’ll be announcing to the world in some very subtle way that she is committed to me.”

Technically, there was once a ring. It was Will’s grandmother’s, and Will gave it to Lauryn when they got engaged.

“So it is this family heirloom, and I thought that that would be something that, like, a girl would want, but it turned out to be the exact opposite—”

“Nooo!” Lauryn half-protested. “It’s just that it was built up by your father really, and it just—”

“And my father, for some reason, did have the impression that this is a really—it’s a cloudy diamond, it’s nothing special.”

The truth is, Lauryn worried about losing the ring, this heirloom ring. Give it to one of Will’s nephews, she figured. They would appreciate it.

Before we left for the jewelry store, Lauryn said, half to me and half to Will, “I think it’ll mitigate your bitterness.”

“You hope it will mitigate my bitterness.”

“You said. You said if we get a ring and I wear it, you won’t—”

“That would be better…”

Better is what they’re looking for in this ring, in the $2,000 to $3,000 they’ve decided to spend on a diamond that Lauryn will put on her finger—and also a band they’ll each wear. Not the scene. Not the sky’s the limit. Not revelation and surprise and an unbargained purchase. Better.

Follow Lauryn and Will’s engagement ring stories and other diamond news in subsequent installments of Diamonds.

Note: names and identifying details in this article have been changed to preserve the anonymity of its subjects.

Photo by cjmartin

Read More by Alicia Oltuski: Precious Objects: A Story of Diamonds, Family, and a Way of Life

The post In Search of the Modern Engagement Ring appeared first on The Faster Times.