Into the Fianceé’s Den: Investigating the Digital World of Engaged Women

The basis of my investigation into the agenda of the engagement ring is my curiosity with the entire institution of marriage. Symbolism within marriage revolves around the ring and during the months pre-wedding the focus is on the engagement ring. Yet this was not always the case. For many years betrothal gifts, dowries and for a short period male engagement rings, were given to celebrate the initial stages of marriage. However none of these have shown the persistence or longevity displayed by the engagement ring, which is now offered more than 80% of American women. My mediated experiment allowed me to cross into the world of fiancés and fiancées, floral arrangements and carat sizes to explore the reaction given to this symbol.

MEDIATED PERSONA

To examine the symbolic, authentic, and intended meanings of the engagement ring I began by creating a personal profile on Brides.com. I believe that the best place to begin learning about this symbol is to immerse myself in their world and pretend to be an engaged woman in their digital community. As the online counterpart of the Condè Nast publication, Brides.com incorporates digital magazine articles and supplementary information with a community forum where soon-to-be brides, current brides and experienced wives can post and respond to questions from their peers. Profiles are created by these women (as well as a few curious and overwhelmed men), and may include a personal photograph, plus ‘About Me’ and ‘About My Wedding’ information. Brides are able to share the date of their wedding, their age, and the length of time they have been registered on the site. Visitors to Brides.com can view this information without signing up, and are also able to post questions as a non-registered guest.

PUBLICIZING PRIVATE CONCERNS

In facilitation of this experiment I unknowingly entered into an online community that blurs the lines between the public and private spheres of life. The website I chose allows brides to pose questions publicly online which, before the rise of the digital age, they might have reserved for a more private setting. Here though, there is a meshing of the naturally public world wide web and the exclusive nature of a site catered to this particular group. Brides seek advice on personal problems with fiancés and family members, and even their sex lives. These women understand themselves to be social, which Richard Sennett says in The Fall of Public Man may lead to the blurring of public and private lives. He asks, “Is there a difference in the expression appropriate for public relations and that appropriate for intimate relations?” (Sennett 6). Although I observed behavior that would suggest the brides are not making themselves vulnerable, other clues suggest that this forum is in fact a publicly exclusive setting, so a certain sense of privacy is taken for granted. In essence, public action leads to visibility, which leads to power; so by publicizing their questions the members of Brides.com are constantly evolving, making both front and back stages effective because both are socially enacted. These women create visibility for themselves both on the site and in their normal public lives through the social nature of their condition as brides.

My Brides.com profile

My Brides.com profile depicts a recently engaged working woman of twenty-six who lives in New York City with her fiancé. To facilitate this persona I uploaded an image taken by my aunt as an April fools joke of her boyfriend’s hand intertwined with her own that is wearing an engagement ring. This image is fitting with the others posted by members of the site portraying flower arrangements, rings, pets, children or couples. Originally I abstained from including an ‘About Me’ and ‘About My Wedding’ section, but I added them when I saw that while I was getting a number of views, I wasn’t receiving actual feedback on any of my questions.

For the past week I have been posting potential questions a newly engaged woman might have, and gauging the reactions I get from other members through their responses. I have tested out different lengths and levels of description in my questions, as well as various titles of my posts. Some of the questions have included:

• Do men get an engagement ring because they feel it’s what their fiance wants? Would they rather skip the ring? Has anyone ever asked their male friends, husbands or fiances about this? (Men & Engagement Rings)
• Has anyone else experienced [men hitting on you while you are wearing an engagement ring]? Is it easier to abstain from wearing it just so I don’t receive this extra unwanted attention? How do others deal with this situation? (Going out on the town with girlfriends)
• Is it better to go ring or no ring? How important is it? Does it say something if you don’t have/wear one? (Ring or no ring?)

Throughout this process my goal has been to get a sense of the concerns engaged women may have with marriage, engagement and particularly the engagement ring. What I have come to find is that while these women are eager to ask their peers about superficial wedding questions, such as cake flavors and unbalanced guest lists, they are much more reluctant to request advice and counsel regarding life as an engaged or married woman.

OBSERVATIONS

The categories of information on the site exemplify the superficial nature of these questions, and surely play a part in guiding them. Visitors may browse ‘Ideas’, ‘Dresses & Style’, ‘Photo Galleries’, ‘Local Vendors’, ‘Honeymoons’, ‘Home & Registry’, ‘Engagement’, ‘Community’, ‘Shop’, ‘Win’ and ‘Our Magazines’. Even within the community forum the only relationship questions revolve around sex and lust in marital relationships. Topics with the most frequent activity include ‘All the Style Details’ with nearly two million views, and categories like ‘Married Life’ are dwarfed in comparison with almost half a million views. The tag-line for ‘Married Life’ may even shift the focus away from its potential as a place to seek marital guidance: “You’ve sealed the deal, now share your tips on how you got there and talk to fellow newlyweds about life as a Mrs.”

Various forum categories and the number of views they have from the Brides.com community

While certain aspects of the site such as forum topics and categories are monitored by the website, members have full control over their own username, profile image and end-of-post signature. Astoundingly, very few women choose to post their own name – or part of it – as their username. Some use a nickname or catchphrase, but the one clear trend was to stray from their given first name. At first I assumed this must be in order to insure privacy, but upon further exploration it became clear that one of the most popular username choices is “FutureMrsFiancé’sFirst&LastName”. Instead of insuring privacy, these women merely wish to allude to their future selves, or perhaps in their eyes the best version of themselves. As John Berger argues in Ways of Seeing, a woman’s presence communicates what she represents, and from these online self-presentations I interpreted that these women wish to be seen first as a part of a couple, second as a bride and somewhere near the end of the list as their own woman.

Another element of the member profile is the personal profile picture. As I surveyed the images chosen by brides to represent themselves, an overwhelming number of couples, families, children, dogs, diamond rings and floral arrangements greeted me. Very rarely was the face of a profile the actual face of a woman. If a member chooses to abstain from posting a personal picture, a generic bridal gown on a headless mannequin serves as her avatar. Joanne Entwistle argues that the disembodied or mediated version of self-representation is just as important as the three-dimensional self, but what happens to a woman’s self-perception when her visible body is clearly absent?

The image that represents photo-less members

Perhaps the most interesting type of visitor to the community forum is the guest. Those who post questions on the forum without pre-registering appear as a guest, and receive no representational image whatsoever. Hannah Arendt proclaims in The Human Condition, “Power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse” (Arendt 201). As such, the men and women who post questions as a guest are not represented by an image, profile or description and are viewed as outsiders who do not belong to the community and thus, do not wield power. Guests more often than not were the authors of seldom-answered questions whereas questions posted by members could see up to ten responses. From my own experience it became clear to me that it was vital to create an image, persona and personal space within the community in which you could wield power by gaining trust and admiration through your responses, and eager followers through your posts.

A member of Brides.com leaves her final mark on a post with her personal signature, which can be any appropriate text she chooses. Suggestions are given when you create your profile of what you might select, such as your name, an inspirational quote or a countdown showing how long until – or since – your wedding. The majority of guests who create a signature choose the latter option, which makes it possible to countdown to the very second at which time she will be finally become “Mrs.Fiancé’sFirst&LastName”. During my time posting, one woman who called herself ‘Aunt’ responded to one of my questions with a lengthy, thoughtful answer. Just when I thought I had found a “normal” woman in the community, I was stunned to find out that she was 57 years old and although she had been married for years, she kept returning to the site and had posted more than 600 times in a year. In fact, from then on it was not uncommon for me to notice that the personal signatures were reading “6 years, 5 months and ten days since my wedding”.

Quite a few members of the site are long-since married women who return to answer or post questions and revisit the days of their own wedding. By maintaining the image of a bride and not a wife, these women remain in the spotlight and as Arendt says, “Each individual in his unique distinctness, appears and confirms himself in speech and action, and that these activities, despite their material futility, possess an enduring quality of their own because they create their own remembrance” (Arendt 207). They clearly wish to maintain hold of their power, and to do so they must remain visible within this digital world.

PERSONAL EXPERIMENTS

Once I established my new persona in this mediated world, I began to ask the brides questions. Posing as an unsure and overwhelmed new fiancée, I asked for advice on a variety of topics including the necessity of engagement rings, responses to unwanted male attention, and self-worth as seen through a four-figured piece of jewelry. Unlike many of the other members I did not ask questions about potentially disastrous drunk uncles, or how many flowers were too many flowers but I did make an attempt to adapt to their environment. For each one I introduced myself as a struggling soon-to-be-bride and explained that I loved my fiancé very much but still had some lingering concerns pre-wedding. In a few instances I used a fictitious friend as the asking me questions in order to gauge their response while maintaining my newly established image.

The most in-depth of my four posts

Most of my posts were carried out within the realm of the ‘Just Engaged’ forum, which featured the tagline, “Recently received the ring? Don’t get overwhelmed, get started here”. The website’s immediate association of engagement with diamond ring in multiple fields is not even the most interesting aspect of this particular category. Inside the forum I found a multitude of questions concerning minute wedding details, but few regarding the overwhelming nature of marriage itself. For many of these women it seemed that being a bride must be meticulously planned and thought out in terms of wearing the ring and throwing the party, but that the day-to-day hurdles of engagement and marriage were better left unspoken – perhaps to keep up their image. In one question I asked how newly engaged women handle unwanted male attention when out with girlfriends, and the response I received seemed to be argumentative and also avoid my actual question.

The response I received to a question I posted

CONCLUSIONS

Relationships seem fundamentally dependent on being a private experience shared by two people, but through this site and through engagements themselves, this system is turned upside down. On the site, fiancees request advice about guest lists, floral arrangements and locations from complete and total strangers. The only thing these women have in common is that the current focus of their lives is marriage. I wonder, why not ask the man you plan to marry some of these questions? He surely must have a stronger opinion than a stranger from halfway across the country. In some cases an entire year is spent in the planning period deemed “pre-wedding”, when the focus is on rings, dresses and other public signs. I’m not even speaking of of public displays of affections, only publicized encounters that are intended to be experienced privately. The symbols that have become attached to engagements, weddings and married life have also become inextricably intertwined with publicity.

In another post I broached the topic of rings and self-worth, but one respondent deemed my question “snobby and stuck up” since I was concerned with my fiance or others potentially judging me by the ring on my hand. I found that the answers I received were argumentative, guarded, impersonal and sometimes hostile; overall nothing like what I had expected. I observed that long-time contributors were less sensitive to my questioning, and I began to see that perhaps my lack of experience and establishment on the site was creating a divide between the brides and myself. Perhaps I was experiencing what it felt like to be an outsider, or a guest? Public as the realm may be, its level of exclusivity and the specific nature of topics with which its members must be familiar, makes it just as private as any elite group. Meaning is clearly not inherent in an object such as an engagement ring, as Arendt explains, meaning is based upon context and you must have an educated audience. It appeared that I was not educated in these matters, at least in the same school as the brides.

The response and signature from another member on the site regarding one of my questions

Were these responses natural when you take into account that they came from women who make being a bride their way of life? Or is it perhaps as Erving Goffman said in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, “Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristic has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way” (Goffman 13). Maybe in this circumstance it is valuable to refer to Berger’s view of visual self-representation, that meaning and perspective are dependent upon the gaze of the viewer, “The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe” (Berger 8). Within the confines of this website I experienced conversations and viewpoints that displayed a desire for a particular self-representation and very few exceptions were allowed for those who stepped outside the realms of this representation. With my next experiment I will continue to develop these theories and explore the reactions of those outside the realm of mediated married life.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958. 199-208.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting, 1977. 8-36. Print.

Entwistle, Joanne. The Dressed Body. Oxford, New York. 2007. 93-104.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. 1959. 4-47. Print.

Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 1976. 8-15. Print.