[coldtea]

>It's deeply ingrained in Western culture.

It's only "deeply ingrained" in the US. In most of the Western Europe etc it's negligible.

And from what I've read it wasn't some deep rooted tradition in the US either -- it took a lot of advertising from diamond companies to instill it...

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/how...

[tjalfi]

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you... has some details on the ad campaigns.

[CalRobert]

Eh, my wife got some flack in Ireland when she didn't have a diamond engagement ring. Yet somehow we're still together.