I used my (deceased) grandmother's engagement and wedding bands. I paid a few hundred bucks to get them repaired and cleaned up (they needed work after ~60 years of wear) and am very happy. They're about 1/4 the size of my wife's friends rocks, but they got a big rock and we got a lot closer to a down payment on a house.

> won't actually net you "a bunch of money upfront,"

Even if its a "charitable gift" on the seller's part, it saves one family from the suffering of buying a diamond.

> it's a "tradition" that means literally absolutely nothing to me.

Please preach to all the impressionable young women you know.

Sorry, I don't really "preach" (at least unsolicited) because people don't generally like being preached to and this is a topic that is incredibly emotional for some people for some reason.

The idea someone would worry replacing expensive trinkets with cheaper but similar looking trinkets might damage your marriage is extremely foreign to me! I can say that much at least!

Plus I don't know many impressionable young women these days because I'm approaching 40 and the majority of my friends are already married or no longer impressionable. :)

Ha, I thought we were the only ones. My wife and I have never worn our rings as it just seemed stupid and also I found it uncomfortable.

Our engagement ring was an heirloom. Additional gemstone jewelry has mostly been synthetic corundums, as I find the superior hardness and refractive index of diamond to be flawed by its 4 planes of perfect cleavage. And also, we wanted to poke the DeBeers cartel in its eye, by not giving them any of our money, ever. That was explicitly a concern about diamonds.

The synthesis process for the giant corundum boules used to make lenses and windows and such is pretty cool, too.

> "Synthetic diamonds, which can be produced in about 500 hours, share the same physical, chemical and optical characteristics as natural stones. But they are not nearly as valuable."

This "article" is an advertisement. This bullshit statement seals it. Value is demand driven. The only way for DeBeers to force mined diamonds to sell for more than grown diamonds is with relentless marketing to make people think there is a meaningful difference. And there is. Mined diamonds have historically resulted in a lot of human misery to bring the stones to market, whereas grown diamonds use some electricity and can come from any industrial park.

Same here, going on 10 years of marriage. We bought very cheap rings (< $100) basically because "Maybe we'll need these some day?" but so far haven't found a reason to wear them consistently.

I understand the value of an heirloom that symbolizes one's progenitor's marriage. Presumably, that is how the ring tradition originated, and why the durability of diamond is a significant selling point for that use case. But I don't think rings are well-suited to this purpose now and would rather leave some other trinket behind, well aware that the true legacy of the progenitors lives on through the posterity.