Ring Cycle

Married ladies (put another ring on it).

By Kathryn Robinson

On our way to discuss the ring dilemma over dinner in Belltown, the plot abruptly thickened. For there in a jewelry store window gleamed the sparkling wedding ring of my dreams. As symbolically unsettling truths go, it was clearly time to own mine: I’ve never loved my ring. We’d found it in a panic at T minus two weeks till nuptials, and what then struck me as simple and sweet had somehow turned generic and featureless. Now throw in toxic. This new one was perfect: no fat rock, nobody’s cattle brand. Just way more me. And as beautiful as us.

But not the one he slipped onto my finger on the day he promised to love me forever. Wouldn’t a new wedding band compromise that promise? Shouldn’t a ring remain as steadfast as the commitment it stands for? As unchanging as the partner? Of course, women change out their wedding rings all the time. Probably half of my friends are wearing different rings today than the ones they got married with. Our jeweler that night told us she has clients who replace their rings every three years. “Lesser women,” I heard myself snark. Materialistic women. Women for whom the ring is more important than the marriage.

“Wait a sec,” my husband interjected. “In asking a little band of metal to carry all this meaning, aren’t you the one making the ring more important than the marriage?”

Pause.

Okay, the fact that he’s wiser than me is why I fell for him in the first place. Marriage is only as strong as its capacity to adapt, after all. Maybe I’ve been focusing on the wrong symbol all along. Maybe brand new rings—one more fitting for me, one more fitted for him—would provide the most fit symbol of marriage yet: of the new beginning lying ever in wait beneath the surface of any old union.