Does Spending More on an Engagement Ring Lead to Divorce?

The ring is already picked out, open in a browser tab, when one of you finds the headline first: spend more on the ring, and the marriage is statistically more likely to end.

Here is the direct answer. Does spending more on an engagement ring lead to divorce? The research does not show that it does. One 2015 study found an association between higher ring spending and higher divorce risk, but it is a correlation from a single survey, not a demonstrated cause. And the number most people repeat, that big spending means 3.5 times the risk, does not belong to rings at all. In the same paper, that figure describes total wedding spending over $20,000 among female respondents. The ring result is smaller, and much easier to live with once you see it plainly.

Ring shopping rarely happens apart from the rest of the planning, and a scary headline lands on top of the ordinary stress wedding planning puts on a relationship. The weddings and engagement guides cover the wider season. This piece stays on the ring, and on what the study says when read directly rather than through a summary of a summary.

Does spending more on an engagement ring lead to divorce? What the study found

Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo Mialon, economists at Emory University when they wrote it, published the paper behind this question in the peer reviewed journal Economic Inquiry under the title “‘A Diamond Is Forever’ and Other Fairy Tales” (Francis-Tan & Mialon, 2015). They surveyed more than 3,000 people in the United States who had ever been married, asking what they spent on the ring and the wedding and how long the marriage lasted. After controlling for a number of demographic and relationship characteristics, they report that marriage duration was inversely associated with spending on the engagement ring and the wedding ceremony.

An earlier working paper version circulated in 2014 (Francis & Mialon, 2014). The two are the same research at different stages, not a replication.

Inside the results sits the ring specific number most coverage skips. Respondents who reported spending $2,000 to $4,000 on an engagement ring showed roughly 1.3 times the hazard of divorce of those who reported spending $500 to $2,000. That is the actual ring finding, and it is modest.

A hazard ratio compares the rate at which divorces happened in two groups over the period the survey covers. A ratio of about 1.3 means the higher spending group divorced at a rate roughly 30 percent higher than the comparison group in this sample. It does not mean any given couple who spends more carries a fixed extra chance of divorcing, and it says nothing about why the two groups differ. Read that way, the ring result is a real pattern in one dataset, and a fairly small one, closer to a data point than a warning label.

The “3.5 times” figure is about wedding spending, not rings

The 3.5 times figure is real. It belongs to a different variable. In the same paper, total wedding spending above $20,000 was associated with roughly 3.5 times the hazard of divorce among female respondents, compared with a lower spending group. That is a wedding budget finding: venue, food, flowers, photographer and everything else added together, reported for women in the sample rather than for everyone. It says nothing about the price of a ring.

Much of the secondhand coverage runs past that distinction, quoting 3.5 times next to a picture of a ring without mentioning that the underlying variable is the whole wedding, or that the result was specific to female respondents. It is an easy slip when reading summaries of summaries, and it is exactly the slip that makes this study sound far more alarming than it is.

Hold the two numbers apart: the ring finding is about 1.3, the wedding finding is about 3.5, and they are not interchangeable. Neither one is a forecast for a particular couple. A result reported for one subgroup of a sample is also the kind of number that most needs a second study before anyone builds a rule on it.

Why spending more on an engagement ring may not lead to divorce: what the research does not show

A correlation says two things moved together in one sample. It does not say one caused the other. The authors controlled for a number of demographic and relationship characteristics, which rules out some of the simplest explanations, but statistical controls only account for what was measured, and only as well as it was measured. Several plausible explanations can sit underneath numbers like these.

Financial strain. What a ring costs relative to what a couple can afford matters more than the figure on the tag. A ring paid for from savings and the same ring paid for with new debt look identical in this kind of data and very different in a household budget.

Age and stage of life. When people marry shapes both what they can spend and a great deal else about the marriage, and no single control captures all of it.

What the spending signals. A large purchase can reflect family pressure, a wish to impress, or a quiet mismatch between partners about money. Any of those could plausibly matter more to a marriage than the ring itself, and a spending question cannot tell them apart.

Who answered, and how. The data come from one country and one survey, from people recalling what they spent, sometimes years after the purchase. A remembered dollar figure is not a receipt, and people whose marriages ended may remember or report spending differently from people still married.

So the study does not show that a cheaper ring protects a marriage, that an expensive one harms it, or that the pattern holds outside the United States. Evidence specific to same gender couples is thin, and this study cannot be read as settling anything for them. None of this makes the finding false. It makes it what it is: a modest association in one sample, worth treating as a data point rather than a rule about any couple’s odds.

Where the “months of salary” ring rule came from

If a number is going to shape what you spend, it helps to know where it came from. The idea that a ring costs a set number of months of salary came from diamond advertising.

Journalist Edward Jay Epstein traced the campaign in a 1982 piece for The Atlantic (Epstein, 1982). He describes how De Beers and its advertising agency, N. W. Ayer, set out from the late 1930s to tie diamonds to romance, summarizing the agency’s aim as teaching young men that “the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love,” and quoting a 1947 strategy plan whose goal was to make the diamond engagement ring “a psychological necessity.” A BBC News history of the salary rule traces the numbers themselves: one month’s salary suggested at the start of the campaign in the 1930s, two months in United States advertising in the 1980s, and three months in advertising in Japan (Cawley, 2014).

Advertising is not the whole story. Legal scholar Margaret Brinig argued that the diamond ring’s rise also tracked a legal change. Starting in 1935, states began abolishing the “breach of promise to marry” lawsuit, which had let a woman whose fiancé broke off an engagement sue for damages, and Brinig read the ring as a financial pledge that partly took the lawsuit’s place (Brinig, 1990).

None of this makes a diamond, or any ring, a poor choice. It means the salary formula came from marketing and old legal incentives, not from evidence about what makes a marriage last. Separately, the Federal Trade Commission revised its Jewelry Guides in 2018, covering how terms like “diamond” and laboratory created diamonds can be described to buyers (Federal Trade Commission, 2018). Those guides govern marketing language and disclosure. They contain no pricing or spending guidance.

How to set an engagement ring budget together

Neither the research nor the advertising history is a good place to borrow a number, which leaves your own conversation. It works best treated like any other wedding money conversation that can tip into a fight: early, before either of you has a locked number.

Start with what the ring is for. For some people it is a public signal, worth stretching for. For others it is a private symbol that could be a plain band, a family heirloom, or a matching tattoo. Some couples skip rings entirely, or put the money toward a courthouse wedding, an elopement, a trip, or no wedding at all. None of these choices is more serious about the relationship, and the two of you may not land in the same place, which is why it helps to say it out loud.

Then ask what else the money is for. A ring budget sits beside savings, a possible wedding, maybe existing debt or a housing fund. The guide to talking about the wedding budget as a couple walks through naming priorities before naming a dollar figure, and the same order works for the ring.

Decide who is involved. Some couples shop together and treat the ring like any joint purchase. Others keep the design a surprise and hold the budget talk separately from the reveal; how couples choose between a surprise and a planned proposal covers that decision. For two women or two men, the question can widen: both partners may want to propose, both may want a ring, or neither may, and how same gender couples decide who proposes goes through those choices.

Before talking numbers, it can help to check how aligned you feel on the bigger picture; the shared goals reading in the Relationship Check In looks at how aligned partners feel on the life they are building. Once you do agree on a figure, the shared goals for money inside Twogle keep it visible on each partner’s own phone, so the number you both chose stays the number you both see.

Talking about debt before the ring

Money conflict has far sturdier evidence behind it than ring price. Jeffrey Dew, Sonya Britt and Sandra Huston analyzed 4,574 couples in the National Survey of Families and Households and found that financial disagreements predicted divorce more strongly than any other category of disagreement they measured (Dew et al., 2012). Once disagreements were in the model, a couple’s financial well being was no longer significantly linked to divorce, and the link between money disagreements and divorce ran through how couples handled conflict and how satisfied they were. That study is not about rings, and it is correlational too, but it points at something a couple can act on: how money gets talked about.

Debt is often where those talks get hardest, which makes the order worth naming: talk about what each of you owes before you talk about what the ring costs. A ring bought with new debt, or bought while one partner’s existing debt stays unmentioned, sets up exactly the kind of money disagreement that research flags, whatever the number on the receipt. A guide to telling your partner about debt covers that disclosure conversation, and the money and shared goals guides gather more on managing money together.

What to try this week

Before anyone opens another ring tab, each of you writes down two things: a spending range you would be comfortable with, zero included, and one sentence about what a ring means to you, whether that is symbol, tradition, practicality or something else. Do it apart, even if it is only ten minutes at lunch.

Then compare. You are not checking whether the numbers match; you are looking at the gap and at whether your reasons line up. Two partners who wrote different amounts but the same reason, something like “I want this to feel meaningful without stretching us,” are more aligned than the numbers suggest. Two partners who wrote similar amounts for opposite reasons, one wanting a public statement and one wanting to spend as little as possible, have a real conversation ahead that a shared number would have papered over.

Picture Priya and Dana, who each planned to propose to the other. Their ranges came out almost identical, but Dana’s sentence was about a ring she could wear to work every day, and Priya’s was about something that looked like her grandmother’s. Same budget, two different rings, and a much better conversation for knowing it before either of them shopped.

The exercise separates the two questions the headline blurs together. The number is rarely the point; what the ring stands for between the two of you is, and no hazard ratio can have that conversation for you.

No study, this one included, can tell you what to spend on a ring. Read closely rather than secondhand, it mostly shows that the number matters far less than the headline made it sound.

Read deeper

• How wedding planning stress affects a relationship, and how to plan it together
• How to talk about the wedding budget as a couple
• Surprise proposal vs planned proposal: how couples decide
• Who proposes in a same sex relationship, and how couples decide
• Weddings and engagement guides
• How to tell your partner about debt
• Money and shared goals guides

Sources

• Brinig, M. F. (1990). Rings and promises. Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, 6(1), 203. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordjournals.jleo.a036986
• Cawley, L. (2014, May 16). De Beers myth: Do people spend a month’s salary on a diamond engagement ring? BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27371208, checked September 2026.
• Dew, J., Britt, S., & Huston, S. (2012). Examining the relationship between financial issues and divorce. Family Relations, 61(4), 615 to 628. DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3729.2012.00715.x
• Epstein, E. J. (1982, February). Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? The Atlantic.
• Federal Trade Commission. (2018, July 24). FTC approves final revisions to Jewelry Guides. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2018/07/ftc-approves-final-revisions-jewelry-guides, checked September 2026.
• Francis, A. M., & Mialon, H. M. (2014). “A diamond is forever” and other fairy tales: The relationship between wedding expenses and marriage duration. SSRN working paper. DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2501480
• Francis-Tan, A., & Mialon, H. M. (2015). “A diamond is forever” and other fairy tales: The relationship between wedding expenses and marriage duration. Economic Inquiry, 53(4), 1919 to 1930. DOI: 10.1111/ecin.12206