THE STATE’S HIGHEST COURT will soon decide if the best way to determine who gets an engagement ring after a break-up is by prying into the details of a couple’s relationship. For a no-fault divorce state, dragging fault into a broken engagement could seem inconsistent, and the physical ring at stake can make a personal decision into a conundrum for a court even before the marriage contract is signed.
All of the emotion and planning bound up in a traditional engagement – a person buys a ring, gets down on one knee, and proposes to another person who is or acts surprised – is “a performance of romance,” Boston Globe advice columnist Meredith Goldstein said on The Codcast.
Getting engaged is complicated, Goldstein said. “It’s tied to romance, especially now, but also it’s a legal thing. It’s a business contract,” she said. “So I think the minute we begin to enter into that contract, it is a very awkward line to dance down. Is this business? Is this pleasure? And who benefits and whose responsibility is it to keep this going?”
“Love Letters” host Goldstein discussed the societal understanding of engagement and engagement rings in light of a Supreme Judicial Court case slated for argument this Friday, with custody of a $70,000 Tiffany diamond ring in the mix.
“In this specific case, yes, the ring is quite valuable,” Goldstein said, “but for so many people who are not buying that kind of ring, I always say, ‘let’s think about what we’re fighting over, too.’ And maybe what we want is help with rent to move out of the place, so it’s easier to navigate out of the relationship.” But rings feel particular, she acknowledged, whether they are important as “part of a tradition” or “an honoring of something.”
Engagement is a step along the process of a slow-rolling series of contractual agreements that could include pre-nuptial agreements, the marriage contract itself, post-nuptials, or agreeing to certain shared and separate assets. It doesn’t necessarily feel terribly amorous when sliced apart that way.
There can be something very romantic about agreeing to terms that let both parties leave the marriage or engagement whole, Goldstein argues, so the partners don’t feel trapped by sunk costs or legal barriers. But that requires looking clear-eyed at the contractual part of a marriage.
“I think a lot of people like to pretend the business piece of it and the legal piece of it is an aside, when in fact it’s the whole thing,” Goldstein said. “It’s the reason you’re doing it and not just staying together romantically and having a commitment ceremony that has nothing to do with the law.”
Most states have law – primarily court decisions – that addresses engagement rings as a special matter. The ring is generally considered a conditional gift, and Massachusetts courts interpret a number of Supreme Judicial Court and Appeals Court cases dating back to the 1950s, so far concluding that the Bay State rule is generally that the person who initially bought or owned the ring gets it back as long as they are not “at fault” for the break-up.
“I’m gonna generalize here, because I think each case is very specific,” Goldstein said. “I think if you’re going old fashioned and one person is giving the engagement ring to another, and it is about a promise and that promise isn’t fulfilled, it does seem like a conditional gift.” She noted some parallels between the rings and already-purchased wedding presents if a couple ends up calling off the marriage, often bound up in custom and expectation more than law.
“In the case of an engagement ring – and I’m not a Supreme Judicial Court justice – and I’m sure there are exceptions to this rule for me, but for the most part, it is still an old fashioned thing that is about a promise,” she said.
The tangle in the current SJC case, and in plenty of breakups, is the messy question of “fault.” It has a legal dimension, which the high court will need to assess, and a common understanding.
“In any letter I get to my column, everybody’s at fault, right?” Goldstein said. “The person writing in is an angel; the person they’re writing about is the devil; but then maybe in paragraph three, they’re like, ‘but also…’ There are cases where one person is obviously at fault, but fault is complicated. I would imagine that the definition of fault has a lot to do with things that are very misogynistic and not cool, and what did that horrible woman do? Like it’s witch hunting stuff. So I worry about that.”
The woman in the current suit is arguing for the SJC to embrace a rule that would let her keep the ring based on a no-fault system that treats even rings as unconditional gifts – an unusual rule compared to the rest of the country. She argues that court-decided fault and ring reclamation plays into “outdated and sexist stereotypes.”
Who gets the ring isn’t the specific question before the court. Rather, the justices are asked to decide if the way Massachusetts is doing hard relationship math – fault-based analysis of conditional gifts – is the best way to handle the tricky business of a break-up.
“So often we think of the promise of getting married as, well, you give the ring back ’cause you didn’t go through with it,” Goldstein said. “I happen to not like the conversation about fault for obvious reasons, you start getting into, ‘but you were in a bad mood on Sundays!’ Like, what is the misdeed? And to me the real question here, is it, did [the marriage] happen or not? Otherwise it encourages the parties to start pointing and saying, but you did this, but you did that, but I did this, but you did that. And then it’s just really muddy.”
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