For anyone appreciating expensive things, giving diamonds represent the willingness to fulfill that desire. It’s easy to conflate that with love, at least for a while, even when you aren’t a materialistic person.

Jewelry is the pinnacle of “just monetary value”. Unlike almost any other possession, a car, a house, clothes, etc. jewelry serves no practical purpose, only shows the willingness or ability to spend for it. The more you spend, the more valuable the gesture, the more you cared to please the recipient.

Materialistic people have the same feelings you have. Those just happened to be triggered by different values than yours.

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Muromec 5 days ago | parent [-]

The other purpose of jewerly is looking nice. That's difficult to comprehend, but it's the actual important thing for people who's most expensive piece of everyday wear isn't their phone.

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close04 3 days ago | parent [-]

Nothing supports your "looking nice" argument like finishing it with the "most expensive piece of everyday wear".

If you want something nice, you get something nice, not something expensive. That's difficult to comprehend for people who measure niceness in a visibly displayed price tag.

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Muromec 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's a shoker, but nice things that are done by people who love making them have a tendency to be expensive.

	▲	close04 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Don't break your back moving those goal posts. If you cared about "nice" you would have said "nice" and let everyone understand what you mean. You said "expensive" because you meant "expensive", the core value slipped out. > nice things that are done by people who love making them have a tendency to be expensive No and no. People love making things as much as anyone loves their job, and the price of your output is not what determines it. Niceness and price are almost completely independent characteristics. You can have beautiful cheap trinkets, and garish expensive jewelry, and everything in between. Look no further than when you need an expert to tell apart real and counterfeit items. Or when your "nice and expensive" luxury items are cheap crap because nothing says "made with love so it's expensive" like luxury companies making a $50 bag with slave labor and selling it for $3000 [0]. In the end what matters to some people is the visible price tag, that's the signal, that's the core value. In the real world you’d flash some bling and people would instinctively give more weight to your opinion. Here it has to stand on merit. So I see why price is such a core value. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2024/06/24/italian-...