Lady Gaga has returned her engagement ring, but should all women feel obliged to give back theirs?

After five years of dating, Lady Gaga and former fiancé Taylor Kinney called off their engagement in July last year – though Gaga apparently returned the ring to Kinney only recently.

Since reportedly starting to date talent agent Christian Carino, according to In Touch Weekly, she gave back her heart-shaped rock after the holidays.

According to the magazine she held onto the Lorraine Schwartz piece in case reconciliation may be around the corner, but decided to hand it back instead.

The end of an engagement is never easy, and Gaga fans have poured their hearts out for the 30 year old at the news, but it does raise an interesting question.

Gaga chose to hand hers back, but should all women feel obliged to return their engagement rings after a break up?

Many of us have different ideas about how much an engagement ring should cost – though a rule of thumb appears to be spending the equivalent of one-to-three months’ wages.

Which if we assume the man is paying for, is rather a lot.

Of course, no one proposes with the assumption that you’ll break up before you marry – so spending this amount on someone you love needn’t be a problem in itself.

But if you do break up? That’s when it becomes a bit of a thorny issue.

On one hand, it’s a gift, and in what other situation would you expect someone to return a gift?

But on the other, an engagement ring is a gift like no other – and it’s rare you’d put that much money towards one impractical object rather than a car or a house.

As with any breakup situation, it all depends on the circumstances in which it’s happened – if it was an agreeable one and buying that ring didn’t result in the man having to watch their weekly food shop carefully for the next couple of years, keeping a ring that you were given in good spirit seems fair enough.

Especially if you were together – or even married – for a length of time, you might want to keep it for the memories anyway.

But if you were to suddenly break the heart of a man who’d bought you a ring – and knew that buying that ring had created a huge financial hole for him – that’d be another matter.

A problem, of course, is that breakups have a tendency to cloud your judgement; anger might appear where it hadn’t been before, and each party might rationalise why they were the wronged one.

So the fact is, if a breakup has made you richer and a man that proposed to you poorer, giving the ring back would be the kindest thing to do if in doubt (and hey, if you’re going for a slightly passive-aggressive vibe, it could make you seem like the bigger person. Win win).

Or you could, quite simply, do it as a gesture of good will – as Gaga seems to have done.

After all, what are you going to do with it – wear it?

Do you think women should give back an engagement ring after a breakup? Tweet us at @YahooStyleUK.

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