What is a Promise Ring?

What is a promise ring? - Not just for high school sweethearts

In this day and age, promise rings have a bad rep. Most often, when we think of promise rings, we stereotypically associate them with high school and college sweethearts naively professing their undying love for each other and (also stereotypically) breaking up very soon after. Rather tragically in my opinion, Hollywood has destroyed every ounce of dignity and respect associated with the promise ring and has made it seem like you can’t give someone a promise ring without taking them up to Make-Out-Point in an old Cadillac and then returning them home before curfew.

 However, having researched this topic in a lot of depth over the last few weeks, I think it’s time we discard this somewhat cheesy and juvenile idea of the promise ring as it’s both outdated and historically incorrect.

 When you give a promise ring to someone else, in essence all you’re doing is memorialising a commitment with a piece of jewellery. In fact, when you really think about it, this is basically the premise behind gifting any piece of jewellery at all. So, when you strip it back to its core, promise rings have been gifted and exchanged for centuries, for a variety of different reasons, to express a range of special commitments.

 For instance, Ancient Roman law required couples to announce their intent to marry and then wait at least a certain amount of time before marrying, which gave rise to the use of a ring as a token of their intent, loyalty and faithfulness. In 16th century England, poesy rings with engravings and inscriptions allowed the wearer to don something completely personal to them and the person with whom they were exchanging the ring. These could be a religious or romantic messages or even expressions of friendship. During the Georgian and Victorian eras, acrostic rings (where the initial letter of each gemstone spells out a word or name e.g. Diamond, Emerald, Amethyst, Ruby, Emerald, Sapphire and Turquoise to spell out ‘d-e-a-r-e-s-t’) became increasingly popular as a way of conveying secret messages or personal terms of endearment.

 These rings represented much more than careless material gestures, they were vows and commitments: a promise to marry, a promise of friendship, an expression of love, an intimate pet name you share with someone. Anyway, you get the idea. Without exhausting you with a long-winded history of all rings in all their forms, what this brief overview of promise rings over time showed me was that jewellery, and what it means to give and receive jewellery, is always changing to fit the nature of evolving relationships.

 Modern promise rings have only resurfaced as a mainstream trend within the last decade or so, largely thanks to the publicity surrounding celebrity promise rings (think: Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth). However, what’s also clear is that couples are redefining what a promise ring means to fit their own unique circumstances. So, here’s a few examples of what I think a promise ring means in the 21st century.

For couples without engagement in mind

As well as childhood sweethearts, there are also other misconceptions that exist surrounding promise rings – primarily that they are a precursor for marriage or that they are a symbol for chastity. Thanks to the Jonas Brothers, promise rings are now often confused with purity rings, when actually there’s no connection between them at all. Purity rings are intended to act as a physical reminder of a religious vow to practice abstinence until marriage, whereas promise rings are tokens of commitment usually within the confines of a romantic relationship.

Promise rings are now gaining popularity among couples that may not feel the need to put a label on their relationship or stick to a timetable. For them, a ring or any other piece of jewellery is just an outside symbol for themselves and others that they are clearly in a committed relationship but have no immediate plans for marriage.

Skint but committed couples

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this, and it’s going to come as a bit of a shock if you haven’t, but engagement rings are crazy expensive., traditionally it is one month of salary, but not many of us can afford that. If this is news to you, you might want to consider what is sometimes called a placeholder ring, a kind of promise ring ideal for couples who do have intentions to get married but can’t afford to quite yet. A stand-in ring is typically much cheaper than an engagement ring, which you can wear until you decide to commit to the real deal. Ring that is, not partner. You can choose to wear the ring on your ring finger and then if and when the engagement ring comes along in the future, the promise ring can either move over to the opposite hand or hang on a necklace.

Indecisive but committed couples

You may not know this but there are a surprisingly large number of women out there that hate their engagement ring. There are whole groups on Facebook dedicated to commiserating about their partner’s lack of ringtelligence. Bringing this up to your partner is difficult and emotional. You don’t want your partner to be burdened with bringing up such a difficult topic or, worse, keeping their feelings a secret. To remedy this, many partners now enjoy choosing and designing the perfect engagement rings together. Having co-designed and collaborated with countless couples myself, I actually find this process to be quite beautiful. Without taking away from the magic of a proposal, a promise ring or placeholder ring can take the pressure off of a purchasing decision that may not be quite right.

 So there you have it, giving and receiving modern promise rings doesn’t have to look like something out of a 90s teen movie because believe it or not, being in a committed relationships looks quite different than it did in the 90s. Don’t let this dated trope hold you back from sharing such a long-standing tradition with your partner because promise rings can mean whatever it is you want them to mean.

Interested in a promise ring?

Militza Ortiz Jewellery is a small jewellery business based in Wimbledon, South West London UK. We would love to help you with your promise ring.