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Some would argue that the pop-culture icons we worship—and the romantic roles we love to watch them play on-screen—?gure more prominently in our collective lust for engagement rings than setting the standard for color or cut.

Jaclyn Geller, now an English professor at Central Connecticut State University, posed as a bride-to-be to research her 2001 book, Here Comes the Bride, "a feminist critique of the blockbuster wedding."

For her, the engagement ring is the central prop in the performance that modern weddings have become; an object with "talismanic" power. "A woman has this engagement ring jammed on her ?nger, and it's supposed to be this thing that represents the narrative apex of her life," Geller writes. "The man kneels before her, she's supposed to emote so violently that she loses the power of speech. Now, this is a very public, exhibitionist thing-something that takes place at a restaurant or park. Once she says ‘Yes,' everyone is supposed to cheer. There's no parallel scene in the wedding iconography where a woman offers a man a piece of jewelry and he loses consciousness."

Vicki Howard puts it a bit less theatrically. "For a woman, getting engaged is a signi?cant time in her life," she says. "Men have not needed that symbol to have power in society. Men enjoy being married, too, but they have other things."

Which is not to say that men can't get really emotional about their rings.

Late last year, a 19-year-old Marine wounded in a ?re?ght in Fallujah asked doctors to amputate his injured ?nger instead of cutting off his ring. "That would mean destroying my wedding ring," the soldier told the Associated Press. "My wife is the strongest woman I know."

Call me cold-hearted, but if I were his wife, I would have preferred a whole husband. I asked jeweler Herman Rotenberg of 1,873 Unusual Wedding Rings, a store in New York City's diamond district that has be-ringed the betrothed since 1947 (and actually carries more than 4,000 styles of wedding bands), what he thought of the soldier's reaction.

"That's a very rare story, but I could see it under those circumstances," he answered.

Rotenberg was a psychotherapist before he married into the jewelry business, holds a masters in social work, and says he has "seen everything under the sun" in his 22 years selling wedding rings. He ?nds that men are much more sentimental—and choosy—than one might expect. "They come in wanting the simplest ring, and they go out with the most complicated," he observes. "They're very particular, obsessive in the best way."

Today's grooms want all the bells and whistles, he says: detailed ?nishes, mixed metals, even rings adorned with optical illusions. Rotenberg worked with one customer, a surfer, to design ocean waves that appeared to move when the ring was turned.

This attention to detail takes on even more weight when you consider that the history of the groom's band as we know it is about as short as that of the diamond engagement ring. Until the mid-1940s, most men didn't wear wedding rings at all.