Okay, the reason I asked whether a ring was needed when a marriage proposal is made was because I was in a discussion the other day regarding proposals (don't ask me why the topic came up, the truth is I don't remember) and the other four or five people in the conversation were all "oh, he's totally got to have the ring when he asks."
And there I was, recalling that a whole slew of my RL friends didn't have the ring in hand when they got to discussing marriage. And I know that most of them went 'ring shopping' after the announcement of their engagement went out, so they didn't have the ring beforehand.
Of course, I do tend to have quirky RL friends. Or ones that kind of agree to get married before the actual proposal stuff happens, and then go off and do the picking together.
I was just wondering what other people's baseline experiences/opinions were, and whether I was just an outlier statistic, or possibly an oddity. :)