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last few weeks, I think it’s time we discard this somewhat cheesy and juvenile idea of the promise ring as it’s both outdated and historically incorrect.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.
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.