A Pawnshop Delayed Our Wedding by Two Years, and It Was So Worth It.

A controversial perspective on diamond rings and wedding things.

Imagine if your spouse bought you a random house in a random state as a complete surprise… and then said you have to live in it for the rest of your life.

That’s kind of what the wedding industry tells us about engagement rings.

Ever since 1948, when De Beers ran the ad with the slogan “A Diamond is Forever”, much of society has submitted to the convention that men choose and buy engagement rings for women, who are expected to grin, bear it, and wear it forever. The male-focused messaging of engagement ring ads only furthers this notion, even in today’s more progressive society.

Here’s my qualm with this relationship expectation: where’s the togetherness in that?

If a relationship is comprised of two people and their shared experiences, shouldn’t the engagement ring and the search to find it be representative of this as well?

Alternatively, I could see the surprise engagement ring as the final test of the relationship.

If he gets you a ring you like, representative of you and your eccentricities or unique tastes, then he passes and you say “yes!”. If not, glad you dodged that bullet before paying for a wedding!

But if you still need to test him, perhaps that alone says something about your relationship…

I don’t want this post to be misconstrued to imply that the amount a person spends on the ring is a measure of their love or a reason to say yes or no. My criteria here has nothing to do with price, but rather with the journey to the chosen ring.

This may be specific to me, but of the five love languages, quality time is at the top of my list. Perhaps for that very reason, the journey to the ring and the quality time and shared experiences along the way were far more important to me than the ring itself.

Of course, the ring mattered, but only because we had such a unique and relationship-specific story attached to it.

Now is when I’d love to tell you a moving story about a stolen family heirloom that put me and my fiance on a two-year quest for the replica ring to memorialize the stolen one and honor my grandmother’s dying wish…

That would be touching, but not exactly our truth.

Here’s the real incident that led us on the two-year hunt, countless letdowns, and an unlikely hero that brought the journey full circle:

Five years into our relationship, we walked into a pawn shop, and about five seconds later, we both fell in love. Not with each other, of course — hopefully we already mastered that in the five years leading up to the event. With the ring.

The journey could have ended there and it still would have been a good one…but that was just the beginning of our journey to the ring.

That ring was the first ring, which would subsequently be followed by over a dozen failed attempts at recreating the very thing we saw that day in the pawnshop.

Under the bright pawnshop lights, our sweet encouraging pawnshop fairy godmother Deb presented us with the most unique ring we had ever seen. It was an electric greenish-yellow, almost the color of radioactive waste (or at least the color they make it in the movies). It was a pear shape with a beautiful halo and diamonds down the band.

It was gorgeous, one-of-a-kind, and almost perfect. There was just one little problem: it was a little too small.

Just a hair. Like maybe a quarter carat or so too small…

But so close to perfect…

In retrospect, having since mastered the 4 C’s and every other obscure criterion involved in assessing a diamond’s value and beauty, there were some flaws. However, under the pawnshop’s blinding lights, with Deb’s coaxing smile, the ring looked nearly perfect to us.

We would almost take it…but it was just too small!

I wasn’t trying to be a prima donna or anything, but if I’m going to be wearing this every day for the rest of my life and I’m already questioning the size from day one, perhaps it warrants just a little more looking.

Before we left that day, Deb warned us. She warned that this was a one-of-a-kind ring and it wouldn’t be there long.

At that early point in our diamond searching journey, we weren’t quite sure whether to believe Deb or assume this was just some sales tactic to expedite the purchase. We left with a camera roll of pictures and decided to sleep on it.

Over the next few weeks and months, we periodically revisited the pawnshop, just to check on our ring, see if it was still there, snap some pics, and debate over whether it was too small or “the one”…

Finally, about four months later, we made up our minds.

This was the ring we both fell in love with, and we might as well get it. It was almost like fate. You can probably guess what happened next, right?

We walked into the pawnshop, ready to deplete my boyfriend’s savings in exchange for our beautiful radioactive specimen…and it was gone.

Deb had sold it to a customer some weeks before.

Okay, so that throws a bit of a wrench into the plan, but maybe this was for the best.

If Deb’s pawnshop could get a ring like this once, couldn’t they find or create another one? In fact, one of the pawnshop associates was telling me all about the custom engagement rings they made, showing me pictures and specs of rings ranging from $5k to $50k. Of course, we’ll just have Deb and the pawnshop find or make me another one! Problem solved.

Plus, now I can get it a little bigger, so the size won’t be a nagging concern…

When Deb warned us about the ring being one-of-a-kind, what she didn’t tell us was just how hard it would be to find anything close. Apparently, the world of colored diamonds is an unusual one, and most of these colored stones are truly the only ones in the world of their exact color, gradient, shape, and size…

Just our luck, right?

Deb told us she’d do her best to find a stone matching our criteria, but she warned that it was unlikely to happen. She suggested our best bet was to head down to the diamond district of Los Angeles and find a diamond dealer who has (or can get) colored diamonds wholesale. She told us to go in with a wad of cash, be persistent, and prepare for a long journey…

We spent the next two years trying to find and recreate the ring at every jewelry store and pawnshop we came across.

I had jewelers on both coasts calling in yellow-green pear-shaped diamonds from all over the country. Some even came from Israel…

Among those dozen or so jewelry stores and pawnshops we visited, every single one was 100% confident they could find and create what we wanted.

And every single one let us down.

Imagine chasing after a vendor, asking for exactly what they supposedly sell, offering up a generous budget, and getting ghosted. Now imagine that happening twelve times in a row.

It got to a point where I almost didn’t even care about the ring.

It was just too frustrating.

Then one day, driving down a less-than-glamorous street in Venice (Lincoln Blvd), my boyfriend spotted a sign “We Buy Gold!”

As far as signage goes, it was about as cheesy as you could get. I can’t remember if it actually had a leprechaun and a pot of gold on it or if that’s just how my brain perceived their bright green and yellow poster, but it definitely wasn’t Tiffany & Co.

My boyfriend, a sucker for gold sellers and buyers, suggested we check it out. It could be fun, and on the off chance they have diamonds, maybe they could help us with the ring.

I guess the luck of the Irish is a real thing (I swear I saw a leprechaun on their poster…) since Scott the gold seller apparently did have the colored diamond hook-up.

Trust me, I was skeptical. We both were.

After exhausting every reputable jewelry store and less-sketchy pawnshop on both sides of the country, do you really expect me to believe leprechaun Scott is going to jump in and save the day?

Well, seeing is believing, and that’s exactly what we did.

Within three weeks, Scott sent us three different stone options. He gave us the honest rundown and prevented us from making a costly mistake with a deceptive lab-created diamond that would not hold its value.

We went back to the sketchy leprechaun shop with credit cards ready and the second we saw the ring under natural light, we were sold.

Well, as sold as the two pickiest people in the world can be after investing two years into finding the seemingly impossible ring. We requested a few different setting options, made the diamond halo bigger, and decided to get the wedding band made while we were at it.

But, low and behold, within a month and a half of stepping foot in Scott’s leprechaun shop, we had the ring we had both been searching for (and the wedding band to match).

For those of you worried we got scammed by smooth-talking Scott, have no fear.

We drove straight from leprechaun Scott to an independent appraiser with our credit card company on speed dial, ready to dispute the too-good-to-be-true transaction. But to our pleasant surprise, everything checked out. In fact, our appraiser valued the ring at 40% higher than we paid, so we escaped the predatory jewelry store markup.

That’s pretty much where the journey ends… well, except for the victory lap.

My boyfriend had this idea that we would go back to all the jewelry stores full of empty promises and do a little “victory lap” with the final ring.

The last stop on our victory lap wasn’t really a victory lap at all. It was a “thank you” visit and a surprise reunion with Deb, who was probably the most excited one of all.

So, what’s my point in all this?

I could provide you a step-by-step guide to choosing a fancy colored diamond or offer some pointers about ring design and pricing to create your perfect piece. However, that’s likely information you could stumble upon with a thorough Google search and not really my objective here.

My point is simple: the journey to find the perfect ring may hold a lot more nostalgia and value than the ring itself.

Our ring isn’t special because it’s the only fancy vivid yellow-greenish fluorescent pear-shaped stone over a certain carat weight and clarity…(okay, that helps). That’s not what we remember or talk about when we tell people about our engagement.

The most common question we get is: What kind of stone is that?

Once they hear it’s a yellow-green diamond, they almost always ask us about the story behind it. We get to re-live that two-year experience over and over again, with the ring as a nice conversation starter and a reminder of the unique, challenging, exhausting, victorious time we spent finding it.

If you’re looking at your engagement ring like a blank slate, see if you can create a unique journey and story around the quest.

The ring will offer you and your partner tenfold the value when it has tenfold the meaning.

I’ve also included a few pictures below of the original pawnshop ring and our subsequent final engagement ring for comparison.

Thanks for reading…