When I was in High School, we had two very elderly teachers, one for English Lit, and one for Algebra.
These women had never married; but they both wore what appeared to be engagement rings. I eventually learned that they had both lost their fiances before they had gotten married. (They were both of an age to have conceivably lost their fiances in WWI or in the Pandemic Influenza.)
Older people explained to me that this was common, for those ladies’ generation. Many women, having found their ‘one’, decided to never marry after his untimely death.
In those days, people didn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that they were somehow ‘unnatural’.
(In fact, it seems to me that we’ve become more critical and unhealthily curious about people like this, as our culture has become more hyper-sexualized; and this includes the change from discretion in homosexuality, to overtness in it.)
-JT