After Caroline Settino met Bruce Johnson in the summer of 2016, they embarked on a whirlwind romance. Mr. Johnson paid for trips to Italy and the Virgin Islands and showered his girlfriend with lavish gifts. A year later, he spent $70,000 on a Tiffany & Co. engagement ring and popped the question at a resort on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
The fairy tale did not have a happy ending.
Mr. Johnson soon soured on the relationship, broke up with Ms. Settino and sued to get back the ring. The case has slowly made its way through the state courts, which have wrestled with the thorny question of who gets to keep an engagement ring when wedding plans crumble.
On Friday — seven years after the couple’s breakup — the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court provided a final answer: “When the planned nuptial does not come to pass, the engagement gift must be returned to the donor,” regardless of which party might be responsible.
For decades, courts in Massachusetts had decided which party should keep a ring by determining which was to blame for the relationship’s demise. The ruling ended that practice, concluding that fault was too difficult to pinpoint — and that broken engagements, however painful, ought not to be cast as failures, anyway.
“Indeed, assessing blame when one party concludes that a proposed marriage would fail is at odds with a principal purpose of an engagement period,” the justices wrote, “to test the permanency of the couple’s wish to marry.”
They also noted the complexity of any such faultfinding mission, given the myriad potential laments of brokenhearted litigants — among them “difficulties with in-laws, hostility of one party’s minor child, pets that cannot get along, untidy habits or religious differences.”
In the case of Ms. Settino and Mr. Johnson, prenuptial bliss evaporated rapidly. Mr. Johnson said he began to reconsider his proposal after his fiancée “repeatedly called him a ‘moron,’ treated him like a child, complained about how he used his cellular telephone, berated him over spilled drinks” and opted not to accompany him to his prostate cancer treatments, according to the court’s decision.
He had also been alarmed by text messages he found while snooping on his fiancée’s phone, in which a longtime male friend of Ms. Settino referred to her as “cupcake,” according to the ruling.
After Mr. Johnson sued to reclaim the ring, Ms. Settino filed a counterclaim seeking $43,000 for dental implant surgery that she said Mr. Johnson had promised to pay for, but had only partially paid for by the time they split up.
A Superior Court judge found in 2021 that Mr. Johnson was solely responsible for ending the engagement “based on his mistaken belief that Settino was having an affair,” and ruled that Ms. Settino was entitled to keep the engagement ring, as well as one of the two Tiffany wedding bands that the pair had intended to exchange. The judge also awarded damages for the dental procedure.
An appeals court later reversed the decision and ordered the rings to be returned to Mr. Johnson. Ms. Settino then sought the high court’s opinion.
In arguments before the court in September, lawyers for Mr. Johnson and Ms. Settino each argued for changes in state law so that future star-crossed lovers could avoid such a predicament. Nicholas Rosenberg, representing Ms. Settino, urged the justices to end the practice of considering engagement rings “conditional gifts,” handed over on the condition that a marriage take place.
“The ring is either yours or mine — there’s no such thing as, ‘it’s yours for now, and I might take it back,’” Mr. Rosenberg said. “The default is, ‘I want to give this to you because I think we’ll be together for life’ — and if you’re wrong, you’re wrong.”
The high court disagreed, citing a “near universal understanding of engagement rings as gifts inherently conditioned on a subsequent marriage.” Only in Montana, it noted, have courts rejected that idea, finding engagement rings to be unconditional gifts, “completed upon acceptance.”
In an email on Friday, Mr. Rosenberg said that Ms. Settino was disappointed with the ruling. “We firmly believe that the notion of an engagement ring as a conditional gift is predicated on outdated notions,” he said.
Mr. Johnson’s lawyer, Stephanie Taverna-Siden, was more successful with her argument — which was ultimately written into the court’s ruling — that the state should embrace a no-fault approach to broken engagements, as it has long done with divorce cases.
“You avoid litigation because people breaking up don’t have to argue about fault,” Ms. Taverna-Siden said.
Neither lawyer responded to questions about their clients’ ages or occupations. But Ms. Taverna-Siden noted in court that the legal battle between Mr. Johnson and Ms. Settino had lasted more than four times longer than their romance.
“These people have been in litigation for six years,” she said. “Their relationship only lasted a year and a half.”
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