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Meludreen: I asked a simple question. It is not my fault that you were too incurious to consider it, and too insecure to see it as anything other than an attack, because for some reason you are unable to process or respond coherently to curiosity or inquiry. If the best you can manage in response to anything that appears to your circumscribed, paranoid vision to threaten your need to establish your worldview as the default setting for everything is "oooh, you must have deep-seated issues! There must be something wrong with you, not to think as I do", you are not worth the time one might spend talking to you. The only possible advantage in doing so might be for the benefit of others. Please have a think about how previous discussion about marriage and the like have all been about people's deep-seated issues. Consider, for example, how it was only people's deep-seated (being gay) issues, because of their upbringing (which made them gay), that made them bitch about not being eligible for superannuation or bereavement benefits through marriage, until others without your admirable fixity of purpose looked at the issue and took steps to resolve it. The awkward fucks.
Deep-seated. Get it?
Or, you know, don't. You could, after all, simply have asked this thread to remain hugs'n'puppies. You choose instead to knee-jerk into pathologising anyone who appeared to disagree with you, presumably on account of your deep-seated issues with treating other people and their ideas with the baseline respect that is as a result of this stupidity now no longer due to you.
Stupidity is kneeling before you, Meludreen. Stupidity is proferring a ring. It is asking you to make a commitment to stupidity. Are you ready to say yes to that commitment?
Nightclub: Thank you. That makes good sense. Although those are nouns, dude. Just sayin'.
(And yes, "caring" can be a gerundive, but not in this construction.)
My unspoken assumption, I think, was that engagement was a ritual - since we have plenty of people here who believe in the power of ritual to do all sorts of things, a ritual to communicate all the above concepts seems to make perfect sense. I think perhaps the odd thing about it for me is the absence of agency - the object of that love, caring, desire, compassion, tenderness doesn't get involved in the process until pretty much right at the end, and at that point is given an essentially binary response - either "yes, the ritual can conclude successfully" or "no, the ritual may not conclude successfully". I can't think of a comparable role in ritual - limited but pivotal - except possibly the way a sacrifice might indicate the success or otherwise of a propitiation by direction of fall, shape and colour of intestines and so on. Generally, the last part of spoken rituals are very carefully scripted ahead of times to avoid precisely this sort of difficulty. So, is it _just_ a ritual? Or is there more to it than that?
There are an awful lot of ways to communicate love et hoc genus omne. Some of them have binary conclusions in much the same way - the proposal of marriage being the obvious one. Possibly an aim of the engagement ritual is to head off that riskier binary proposition, when an acceptance (or rejection) of the conclusion of the ritual has real, measurable social and legal implications - you get out of the way the question of whether the other party will say yes or no when there is not so much at stake, so you can then perform the ritual of marriage after lengthy discussion and planning, rather than putting oneself in a situation where an unexpected "no", or indeed an expected "yes" will have potentially immediate consequences. So, you can see engagement not as a ritual in itself but rather as one part of a longer ritual of "life-commitment", or possibly as a preparatory ritual - like a ritual cleansing that enables the greater ritual of getting married to go more smoothly.
Personally, I have encountered engagement primarily as a recognition that two people intended to marry, but did not at that point have the means to marry as they would wish. Therefore, the engagement ring was a sort of reminder that they needed to work towards getting things in place for the wedding (rather than the marriage), even as the cost of the ring delayed the fulfilment of this goal. You could see the expense of the ring, and the reciprocal commitment of wearing it, as handy ways of saying "I am serious about this relationship" - a more "adult" version of the letterman jacket or the quarterback's ring, but without the implication of legal force contained within the wedding ring.
These are all options which could be taken and explored, as are others. Unless, of course, that would be cheating on stupidity... |
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