Engineer's guide to getting married: Part 1: Rings

Yup, long time no bloggy. I've been working on a special project that's going to reap rewards for my entire lifetime. That project is foreign to many men, especially engineers so I attempt to distill the past 10-11 months into one place.

~% man marriage

Usage: sudo marriage -proposal <>

You can't just walk into a ring store and choose the one with the best specs. Not only is the ring a girl's most anticipated piece of jewelry, it has to be with her every day for the rest of her life. So it has to fit her personality, her style, her lifestyle, and hopefully your budget. Therefore, I can't give any advice on what to look for in a ring but I can recommend that you look at rings together and strongly consider letting her choose or design the ring herself. In my situation, we went to a bunch of ring stores and she showed me a ton of characteristics about rings that she really didn't want. So I had to figure out what a ring would look like that didn't have those characteristics and try to convey that to the jeweler.

Some of the features I had to avoid were:

• No bezeled gems: They don't let enough light in for full sparkly goodness
• No barrel cut gems: They look glassy and fake
• No encrustations (lots of little diamonds)
• No asymmetric rings
• Nothing that sticks out too much or has sharp corners
• No yellow gold
• Nothing too thick or heavy for her delicate hands
• Classic looking without being common looking
• No diamond as the main stone, but auxiliary diamonds ok

You would need to know where your girl stands on these issues, because some are make or break in either direction for your particular bride.

As for giving her the ring, you should know what the answer will be before you propose. The time and location can and should be a surprise. I ended up taking off a day of work unbeknownst to her so that I could get the ring before our trip to Colorado. She knew I'd propose eventually because of the ring store trips but really didn't think I'd have time to get it done. Us guys tend to act so abnormal on the day we propose that she always knows something's up by the time it happens.

That's really enough for one post, so I'll make this a series. Tune in next time, same Bat time, same Bat channel.