Weddingbee Blog

I would love to wow everyone with my incredibly romantic proposal, but unfortunately, I don’t have one. Mr. Cannon and I have been together for five years and have been discussing marriage for four of those years. I had been not-so-subtly emailing links to rings I liked for literally years before we decided to get married, and yet, when we finally picked a date, there was no ring involved.

Let me back up and admit that I had originally been pretty set on a ring of a certain price point for a specific reason—I was engaged before and had paid for my own ring. Luckily, I ended that relationship before we walked down the aisle (it would not have ended well), but in the end I wound up paying a tidy sum for the ring. My ex ended up stealing it, leaving me with a hefty credit card bill and a lot of misgivings about love. After blowing all that money, I felt a bit entitled to something at least that nice when my true love finally proposed.

Image via Blue Nile

Enter Mr. Cannon. When Mr. Cannon and I first started dating, I was finishing my senior year of college and he had just moved back to the area. Neither of us had much in the way of money, but we both had a ton of fun spending time together. As the years went on, we moved across the county and had many adventures together, and although we have much more money than we did when we started dating, we’re hardly rich. Add that to the fact that I’m an accountant (and pretty conservative with money), and an engagement ring kept feeling more and more like a silly financial hurdle we were waiting to jump so we could finally get married. We were invested in the idea of getting married in 2011, and the more we thought about it, the more doable it seemed. However, all I could think was that if Mr. Cannon spent x dollars on a ring, that would be x dollars NOT in our wedding budget—and I wanted every penny I could get for our wedding budget!

So, ultimately, we talked about it and made sure we were both comfortable with a no-ring engagement. Mr. Cannon was feeling guilty and thinking people would judge him. I didn’t want him to feel guilty on my account. Honestly? By that point, I was over it. I assured him I didn’t need a piece of jewelry. I needed him to be my husband. And those extra dollars in the wedding budget would more than make up for the lack of diamonds on my finger. And if people want to judge, that’s their business. Once we were both sure we were OK with our slightly unconventional plan, we rolled with it and started this adventure we call wedding planning. And with that, our non-proposal, no-ring engagement was born!

Did anyone else decide against an engagement ring?