A Quick Note: The following column is the first part of a series of humor columns that I’ve pieced together over the past two months to chronicle my adventures in the world of engagement rings, if you will! And while I didn’t dare publish these here earlier for fear of ruining the surprise of the proposal itself, some of the experiences that took place were simply far too interesting to just let fall to the wayside. These are those stories…

Shopping for an engagement ring is certainly not an activity to be taken lightly.

…especially if you’re a guy like me who opts to take his prospective fiancee along for the ride to get her opinion in the matter of what she’ll hopefully be wearing on her left hand for the rest of her days! And while I definitely agree that her accompaniment may have a tendency to ruin the surprise, as “Will he propose?” effectively becomes a question of “When will he propose?” the other side of that coin is that eight months salary is an awful lot of dough to be dropping on a piece of jewelry that she might not even like. I mean, not for nothing, but engagement rings don’t exactly carry the same sort of return policy as that ugly, purple sweater you bought her last Christmas that the girl in the store said she’d love…

Nope, when it came to this mammoth purchase, I was more than willing to sacrifice a portion of the element of surprise in exchange for the reassurance that I wouldn’t later catch her swapping it out for something out of a Crackerjack box that she just liked “better.” That said, I’m not entirely sure how this whole process would’ve worked if I hadn’t brought my lady along to interject because I’m pretty sure any man who’s set foot in a jewelry store, whether it be for earrings for her birthday or a necklace for Christmas or even simply for directions, will vouch that jewelry stores aren’t exactly the most guy-friendly retail establishments on the face of the Earth.

In fact, we’re the kind of folks these people prey on.

Because I don’t know about you, but when it comes to women’s jewelry, I’m not exactly what you’d call an expert. I mean, I know they tend to like shiny things and I’ve heard the old mantra, “A diamond is a woman’s best friend…” (spoken by a very shallow, lonely woman, no doubt), but aside from that, it’s pretty much the deer in the headlights effect for me the second I step into one of these places, which is precisely the opposite of where one needs to be when making a purchase of this magnitude! When entering into a realm where the residents smell fear, feed on commissions, and want nothing more than to send you home in the new car, errr, ring of your dreams, one needs a level of preparedness that can’t be read from books or even learned about on television…

…which is why instead, I opted to bring my girlfriend along to more or less run interference, if you will. She would ooh and ahh at all of the gorgeous jewelry that was placed in front of her, then I would do my best to avoid just blatantly laughing out loud as the salesgirl slyly showed me the prices out of my lady’s view. It actually proved to be a good system, especially given that as we left each store, I would break the coveted man-salesgirl bond and fill her in on just how many months of eating Ramen each of the rings she’d gone gaga over actually represented, to which she frequently replied that, in less words, she’d see to it that I received bodily harm if I spent that much on her ring.

What can I say? My girl is a fairly sensible woman, which is why I’m enduring all of this diamond-encrusted insanity in the first place. Please try to hold your jealous until the end of the column…

So anyways, aside from the high pressure sales and those who opted for the “Don’t worry about him – just woo her and she’ll open his wallet for us!”-technique that didn’t exactly work on me, although I’m sad to say that I witnessed more “men” than I care to admit fall to this low blow of a tactic with $5,000+ rocks for their trophy wives while patiently being ignored and sipping my complimentary water. I even learned a thing or two about the diamonds themselves, such as just what elements make them sparkle the most and how large of a diamond I needed to purchase based on how long I wanted my marriage to actually last.

Over the course of a couple months, we spent many weekend excursions out looking at rings, which albeit carried quite the eventual burden, in the meantime really weren’t all that bad. I mean, I had a happy girlfriend, I usually got mall cookies out of each trip for behaving myself, and I even began to find little pieces of satisfaction in getting the salesgirls all worked up about a sale, only to eventually bring their dreams crashing down by insisting that “We still wanted to do a bit more looking first…” We would get messages on the machine at home begging us to come back in to put down deposits and I enjoyed my just desserts listening to each and every plea, but of course, deep down I knew that eventually my browsing bliss would come to an end.

It was on one particular Saturday after we had already passed about four other less than desirable jewelry shops that the unthinkable happened – she found a ring that she actually liked.