🇺🇸How does United States mark Proposals and Engagements?

Everyday topic

The United States has no national institution of betrothal, and an engagement generally creates no enforceable obligation to marry. Suits for breach of promise to marry existed historically and have been abolished in most states. What still reaches the courts is the ring: whether an engagement ring must be returned after a break-up is decided differently state by state — some treat it as a conditional gift, some look at who ended it. So in the United States the legal question of engagement is usually reduced to a question about one object. An American engagement therefore carries almost nothing in law, and all of its actual weight sits socially: the announcement, the photographs, the party.