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Saturday, November 27, 1999 By Dennis Roddy
Pennsylvania's Supreme Court, ruling in the case of Lindh vs. Surman, has settled, at long last, a question that has dogged women since engagements were first broken: where to throw the ring.
After careful deliberation, the court has decided it should be hurled firmly in the direction of the giver, perhaps while wishing he had instead given a ceremonial hatchet.
It was 1994 when Rodger Lindh informed Janis Surman that he would be happiest at a greater distance from her. He requested that she return the engagement ring, which in this instance was a rectangular brilliant starburst-cut diamond of 2.5 carats valued at $21,000. It was, in the considered words of Lindh's attorney, "quite a spectacular rock."
Her refusal engendered, in the words of your correspondent, quite a protracted case. It featured the revelation that Lindh had called off the wedding once before, gotten the ring back, then returned it for a re-engagement before finally setting sail from Surman's life and disembarking at the nearest small claims court.
Five years later, the justices reasoned, as they occasionally do, that if Pennsylvanians may now divorce without either side assigning blame to the other, it would be inconsistent to assume that they should end engagements with liability attached. The ring was a gift predicated on getting married. No marriage, the ring goes back.
Here is a return to traditional values. Of late, litigation surrounding many broken engagements pivoted on custody of the children. Five years of Republican leadership and we are back to fighting over the engagement ring.
Traditionally, engagements were supposed to end like this:
He: I just think our marriage would be a mistake and make both of us unhappy. I hope you understand.
She: Of course I do. You'll always be very dear to me. Here, I want you to have your ring back.
He: No, darling, please don't. You should keep it.
She: I'll always remember.
He: I'm hungry. You want to get a pizza?
There are regional variations to this gentle ritual. In some cultures, cattle must be returned. I once broke an engagement and asked for my six-pack back.
But the abiding principle in the broken engagement has been that the jilted party gets the ring.
I telephoned a lawyer friend who once broke an engagement.
"I felt morally obligated to give it back," she said. "If he had jilted me? I wouldn't have wanted it."
She paused for a moment.
"But what would have been the right thing to do?" she asked herself.
Law school will do that to you, I suppose.
Joanne Ross Wilder, the attorney who successfully argued Lindh's case and got back his ring, has asserted, quite cogently, that by setting a precedent on where the ring shall go, a consistent rule can now promise an end to interminable squabbling.
This is good law. Whether it becomes good manners will depend, of course, on how readily social custom adapts to law.
We are left to choose between the legal world and the ideal world.
"I don't think the ideal world extends to a stone of this magnitude," Wilder said.
That, of course, is how the legal world sometimes becomes the real world, a place for which I am ill-suited. I'd have let her keep the ring and given my next fiancee a vacuum cleaner.
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