What divorced readers did with their wedding rings

July 14, 2012 4:06 PM

A Magazine article on when to take off a wedding ring after a marriage fails generated a large response from readers. The feature asked when it was appropriate to remove the band, and explored the symbolism of doing so. Here, readers share their stories about the dilemma of what to do with a symbol of marriage once the relationship has broken down.
posted by Blasdelb (153 comments total)

My mom's ring for her marriage to my dad was a stack of four thin gold bands. When I was a teenager (10+ years after he ended the marriage), she had them made into a pin for me. It's pretty and vaguely Olympian, but when I wear it and people ask about it, I've learned to say it was "a family member's" instead of "my mom's, from when she was married to my dad" because that seems to bum people out.
posted by Sweetie Darling at 4:15 PM on July 14, 2012 [4 favorites]

It never occurred to me that anyone would continuing wearing a wedding ring after the marriage has ended (or is in the process of ending). Reminds me of a friend of mine who used to keep a picture of his ex-girlfriend in his wallet for a creepily long time after they had split up.
posted by The Gooch at 4:29 PM on July 14, 2012 [3 favorites]

Bad idea: "we should throw each others rings into the sea as a symbol of the end of our marriage. " Great, now you're both married to the sea. If you're not the Doge of Venice, you'll soon find that the sea is a cruel mistress.

Good idea: "...hurled her engagement ring into a squirrel sanctuary after reports of his indiscretions."
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 4:31 PM on July 14, 2012 [32 favorites]

Sell it, or have it made into a totally different piece of jewelry. No no no we don't hurl gold into the sea!
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 4:33 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

My ex-husband spent several months sneaking around with a co-worker who was young enough to be our daughter. He denied that anything was going on, even though he wouldn't stop talking about her and kept telling me how much she reminded him of me when I was her age. He thought it would be terrific if we were all to become friends. (This girl showed absolutely no interest in talking to me, letting alone being friends with me.) He made sure to make me feel like shit for suspecting anything inappropriate was going on.

When I finally cornered him and said that we really needed to talk about our marriage, he started off by denying once again that this girl was at all relevant. After three days of talking, he said that he wanted a separation. I reluctantly agreed. He then said what he really wanted to do right then was to go out and see a movie with this girl, which he did, coming home several hours later.

He was out with her every night for the remaining two weeks that we lived together until he got his own place. Three days after he asked for a separation, he came home from work, went straight to the bathroom to get ready for his big Friday night date without looking at or talking to me. I remember that he left smelling strongly of mouthwash and cologne.

Once the front door closed, I took off the ring and took a photo of the dent left in my finger. The dent filled in before the divorce was final. The ring is still around some place. I may yet sell it for the value of the gold in it.
posted by rosebuddy at 4:33 PM on July 14, 2012 [29 favorites]

my wedding ring was removed from me by a guard in a detention facility after i was arrested for domestic battery. didn't bother to put it back on after i got out.
posted by lester's sock puppet at 4:40 PM on July 14, 2012 [11 favorites]

As someone who recently got married (literally two weeks ago), the thought of what I'd do with the ring if things go bad hasn't occurred to me. Throwing the ring into the sea, while certainly very final and symbolic, seems weirdly extreme to me, for reasons that I can't quite articulate.
posted by asnider at 4:41 PM on July 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

I dunno, I guess if the relationship ended super badly I would have it melted down and made into one of those golden poops Consumerist awards to the worst companies in america and maybe formally present it to my ex. If it ended okay I would make a gold tooth for my dog or something.
posted by elizardbits at 4:48 PM on July 14, 2012 [6 favorites]

Mine had a little "accident" in a shop vice. I don't remember what I did with the remains.

True story from before that: my ex was doing Dicken's Faire with a guy she clearly had a crush on. Playing his wife. She had a separate period ring for that, which she continued to wear after faire ended: "Oh, I just like this one more. You don't mind do you?"
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 4:50 PM on July 14, 2012 [5 favorites]

Tossed mine in a drawer the day she moved out. Sold it 11 yrs later, because I realized how high the price of gold had gotten. I came out about even on the cost of the ring.
posted by Mojojojo at 4:50 PM on July 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

As someone who recently got married (literally two weeks ago), the thought of what I'd do with the ring if things go bad hasn't occurred to me. Throwing the ring into the sea, while certainly very final and symbolic, seems weirdly extreme to me, for reasons that I can't quite articulate.

I am very glad to hear that and I sincerely hope that remains the case for the rest of your life.

Congrats on your marriage!
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 4:52 PM on July 14, 2012 [15 favorites]

I took mine off about eight months after the separation and four before the divorce decree. The marriage had been long over and I'd actually moved to another town; but I sort of took things in deliberate steps because my emotional health was fragile and I'd learned that it was better to do things when I felt ready for them. And for that reason it was not a big deal — I'm not actually sure about the timing and I certainly don't remember doing it specifically.

Then I put it among my old jewelry, where it's remained ever since. After being divorced seventeen years, I suppose I might get a slight twinge when I see the ring, but mostly it's a hunk of metal. I neither have a need to rid myself of it, nor keep it.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:53 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Neither of us have one, so we're sorted. In the unlikely event of a split matters relating to kids would probably consume most of the thought we put into it.
posted by Artw at 4:59 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

I misplaced mine the honest way, before I had any inkling things were going haywire.

Then after we split up, as I was moving out, I swiped her ring from our apartment in a fit of pique — and before I could think of anything symbolically appropriate to do with the damn thing, I misplaced that one too.

Luckily, we'd been broke as fuck when we got engaged, and the two rings put together were worth about $50. We also had the world's mellowest divorce, since we had no kids, no assets, no debt and virtually no income to fight over. If you think you're ever going to get a divorce, I totally recommend being flat broke up until you do. Simplifies the hell out of the whole process.
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:02 PM on July 14, 2012 [21 favorites]

My mom eventually had her engagement ring broken apart and made into rings for my brothers and I. That seemed like a nice gesture.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:04 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

My rings are the product of both sadness and joy. They belonged to my mother-in-law, whose divorce was much more amicable than her marriage had been. After the divorce, she put her wedding ring away in a drawer, along with her engagement ring, and let them be forgotten as she moved on with her life.

Many years later, her son arrived home one weekend with the news that he has asked me to marry him. Which must have come as a shock to her; though he and I had dated years before, the current relationship was only a few weeks old. For his sake -- and for love of us both -- she went delving through her dresser drawers and dusty boxes and unregarded jewelry holders to find a ring, that he might put something on my finger when he asked me formally. For something he could wed me with, as she spoke the blessing.

I look at these rings now on my fingers. These simple rings, once discarded and unloved, are a link to her memory. They remain acts of love. I take them off to make bread and sometimes I forget to put them back on for a few days. The turkeys snatch at them with their beaks. They've been enlarged because my post-pregnancy fingers grew. I think about the tasks they've been through, and how familiar they have become, and at the same time, I remain so touched by the thought of my husband and his mother, hunting so hard for these rings. The joy of their second life has redeemed, I think, the pain of their first.
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:11 PM on July 14, 2012 [59 favorites]

Melted mine down into a random lump, along with the engagement ring, and wore it on a chain for awhile... until I decided it was too heavy to be comfortable. Then sold it for the value of the gold.
posted by The otter lady at 5:26 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

when you sign the divorce, full stop.

I cut mine up and gave it back, crying.
posted by mwhybark at 5:29 PM on July 14, 2012 [3 favorites]

Threw mine in a box on my dresser as I moved into my new place. Sold it for the platinum about a year later. For about 10% of what I'd bought it for.

Ironically, five years earlier and two weeks after I'd been married I was throwing a football in a back yard on a cool November night. My hands were slippery with dew and shrunken from the cold and as I threw the ball the ring flew off and sailed after it. I've never felt as much guilt and panic as that. I had all the guys at the party in the yard wi flashlights looking for it. We found it, obviously. Strange how you can go from caring so much for an object to so little. Still care about the ex though. Good person, bad marriage.
posted by MarvinTheCat at 5:44 PM on July 14, 2012 [3 favorites]

I am very curious about this entire cultural phenomenon - wearing of wedding rings. We've been married since 1999, and wore rings just for the ceremony itself, and took them off immediately afterwards. Have not worn them since. All the more confusing, because we also got some rings from our families, passed-down-the-generations type deal - chucked them into a drawer somewhere, not even sure where they are, to be honest.

Which leads me to ask - how common is it, in the U.S., to wear wedding bands when you're married? To us it seemed a really old-fashioned weird thing to do, so we never did - I don't even remember a conversation about it, it was just not something we'd do. Like a cow being branded, or a cow having one of those tags in the ear... why do it? The other purely practical thing - I hate having things on me - watches, rings, jewelry, knick-knacks. I think I'd go crazy fingering and spinning that band.

So I wonder if that's a cultural thing, or an individual thing, or new thing, or old thing, or what? How prevalent is it, not to wear wedding bands at all?
posted by VikingSword at 5:47 PM on July 14, 2012

My first marriage didn't last two years--I hocked the (not super expensive) ring and forgot about it. The second marriage has been going for 30 plus and no divorce yet, although things were shaky at times. Husband never could wear a band because of his job--For a bit, it bothered me, but logically I'd rather have him with all his fingers. Mine had to be cut off of me when I broke my finger on a bucking horse. For years kept it put away because there was no money to fix it. When we went overseas, I asked a Turkish jeweler to fix it, and he said there wasn't enough gold in it to bother. Raised eyebrow at husband, laughed, and forgot about it. He didn't forget it, and next anniversary bought me a beautiful, and expensive Black Hills gold ring. Which of course, I had to have cut off six months later when I re-broke my finger on the saddle horn. We don't wear rings. After 30 plus years, it isn't about the ring after all.
posted by BlueHorse at 5:53 PM on July 14, 2012 [14 favorites]

We both have rings, plain gold bands, which we got because it's What You Do. We both wore them for about 2 years and then stopped because we've never really been jewelry types in general. We would both need to get them resized now to wear them anyway and we're just too busy to bother. Doesn't seem to make much difference anyway.

If we split, I'd sell it I guess. Deciding what to do with all the photos we're in together and our love letters from when we dated would be much more torturous.
posted by emjaybee at 5:56 PM on July 14, 2012

I too am recently married so I've never thought about what to do with our rings if we split. Give them to the kids, maybe? But I did have a "commitment ring," a plain band, engraved with our initials, that I wore in a past long-term relationship. After we split it sat in my jewelry box for a while. When my wife and I proposed to each other, she actually wore that band for several months until we replaced it with a near exact replica as she liked it so much. It is a little odd, maybe, but in a way I really liked seeing it on her finger. It was a symbol of me choosing her - tangible proof that there was nothing in my life, no part of my heart that wasn't hers. A reminder of how our love for each other constantly takes all the old painful parts of us and makes them better.

Now that she has her own rings the old one is back to my jewelry box. But now I smile when I see it.
posted by ohsnapdragon at 5:57 PM on July 14, 2012 [5 favorites]

It never occurred to me that anyone would continuing wearing a wedding ring after the marriage has ended (or is in the process of ending).

I believe my mom still wears hers. At one point we discussed it, but I don't remember what her thinking was.

Which leads me to ask - how common is it, in the U.S., to wear wedding bands when you're married?

My (not American) mother tells me that American men wear wedding rings and that she should have taken the fact that my dad refused as a red flag. (As far as I know, an affair was not involved in the dissolution of my parents' marriage, which is what one would be led to assume from American culture, as I understand it.) This suggests it is not atypical for a British man not to wear a wedding ring. (I'm certain my grandad doesn't and almost certain he didn't when my grandma was alive.)
posted by hoyland at 5:58 PM on July 14, 2012

Held on to it, because it was gold, only until I got engaged (again) then sold it for a faction of what it was brought for and took my soon to be new wife out for a very nice evening. Seemed like an appropriate response, getting rid of a symbol of the old relationship to celebrate the new one.
posted by ambirex at 5:59 PM on July 14, 2012

A bit of advice: Take it off as soon as you know it's over and you feel like getting laid with someone new. It's not rocket science, it's just feelings.
posted by Renoroc at 6:01 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

how common is it, in the U.S., to wear wedding bands when you're married?

Very common. It's a cultural thing.

It does seem to be a bit on the wane, but not wearing a ring is still common enough that people would be curious about it.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:01 PM on July 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

uncommon enough.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:01 PM on July 14, 2012

ring=in a relationship.
posted by Postroad at 6:05 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

how common is it, in the U.S., to wear wedding bands when you're married?

Aren't you in the US?
posted by Houstonian at 6:13 PM on July 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

I wore mine for quite some time after my ex had filed for divorce. A few months after getting kicked out, I misplaced it, and when I found it again a while later. I didn't have the heart to put it back on.

Now it sits in a small container near the door where I usually kept it. Perhaps someday I'll have the heart to do something more final with it.
posted by TBAcceptor at 6:13 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

re: why wear rings

my husband didn't think he'd want a wedding ring, but i knew i did. we thought at first we'd just buy me one - but as we looked around he started liking the idea more and more. we designed pretty (but fairly cheap) rings with a couple from etsy. they're not flashy or ostentatious, but they're also unique, created just for us. he loved the rings instantly. i thought maybe it didn't match my skin tone. after a few weeks i realized i was wrong about that. we take them off to shower or to cook dinner if it's messy. if the chore is done and one of us finds the other person's ring, will bring it over and slide it on like we were getting married all over again. when we're apart and missing each other, we'll spin our ring on our finger - like the other one is constantly enveloping a part of us.

we both love our rings and we love what they represent.
posted by nadawi at 6:14 PM on July 14, 2012 [15 favorites]

Aren't you in the US?

Yes, but I don't quiz everyone who has no wedding rings - are you married or not? Since I never gave it much thought, I figured I'm just not aware of the significance attached - maybe it's regional in the U.S., East vs West Coast, or something?
posted by VikingSword at 6:16 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Never been married but recently I've had two different friends bring me wedding/engagement rings + various other jewelry bought by their former spouses to have melted down and reworked into something new.
posted by the_artificer at 6:17 PM on July 14, 2012

And in both cases this was withing days of their divorce being finalized.
posted by the_artificer at 6:20 PM on July 14, 2012

My husband still wears the (tiny, women's) .2 carat chip diamond band I bought off eBay for him for the wedding. My similar band band fit for the wedding and I (having shrunk down as much as I could at the time) swelled out of it a couple of weeks later. I wear a $5 silver thumb ring that makes the dent in my finger, he wears his original band plus sometimes the titanium engagement ring (similar to the Abyss ring) I got him on his right hand. Sometimes I wear that ring on my pinky.

I actually consider the dent more of a ring than the ring itself. If we split today and I took the ring off immediately, I'd bear the dent for months to come. I'm okay with that, and okay with the fact that his ring has made an even deeper dent.

I used to wear this really insane 6 carat CZ and rhodium bridal set, but the coating wore off and gave me pernicious finger eczema. That's probably some kind of object lesson.
posted by Lyn Never at 6:23 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Sitting alone in an airport, waiting to fly off to London for my first trip by myself. I ritually removed the ring that had never left my finger since my wedding day 18 years before. The marriage was coming to a close and I needed to mark the occasion. Taking off the ring was such a mark.
posted by njohnson23 at 6:28 PM on July 14, 2012 [4 favorites]

Yes, but I don't quiz everyone who has no wedding rings - are you married or not? Since I never gave it much thought, I figured I'm just not aware of the significance attached - maybe it's regional in the U.S., East vs West Coast, or something?

As far as I know, no. I've lived in the south, the midwest, the east coast, and spent a lot of time on the west coast and in all of those locations, the people I know who are married wear wedding rings. I know of a few married people who don't wear rings, usually for job-related reasons (one is a drycleaner, for instance); and I know one or two who don't wear wedding rings because they just don't wear jewelry at all. Those people (both categories) are very much the exception, in my experience.

My mother had several of the (small) diamonds from her wedding set turned into a cocktail ring; she also had one of the larger diamonds turned into a solitaire drop. Then she had two of the tiniest diamonds set into earrings for me when I was a little girl; they're too small to wear as an adult so I'll save them for my daughter. She also had her engagement diamond set into a ring for me for my high school graduation; when I got married, my husband had it reset into a solitaire drop as a wedding present. The gold was used for the cocktail ring setting and (in trade) for the settings for my teeny tiny earrings. I always liked that she didn't just outright sell her rings, but saved the parts of them for me -- they were, after all, gifts to her from my father, and he was really delighted to know that, for instance, that engagement diamond was something I'd wear often.
posted by devinemissk at 6:31 PM on July 14, 2012 [5 favorites]

Threw the first one out the window of my moving car when I thought we were done for good. We worked things out and got back together and I eventually bought a new one, which I lost at work. Never bothered to buy a third. We celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary last December.
posted by briank at 6:33 PM on July 14, 2012 [11 favorites]

We are wearing bands when we get married (next week!), but I anticipate taking mine off(NSFL) during potentially dangerous events.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:35 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

This is something I'm struggling with right now. I'm recently divorced, and though there was no major drama like adultery, it was certainly far from amicable.

I find myself now in possession of a very large and probably quite valuable diamond that I will never, ever want to wear again. It's not an heirloom piece, so I don't feel that I need to return it to the ex, but I just don't know exactly what to do with it. I don't want it remade into another piece of jewelry to serve as a reminder of my failed marriage, but I can't bring myself to sell it either. So for now, it just sits in my jewelry box, where I try to avoid looking at it.
posted by tryniti at 6:37 PM on July 14, 2012

Data point: Husband AI don't wear rings, me cause it interferes with drawing and typing too much ( and I loose shit) and him cause it gets in the way of lab work and piano ( and he looses shit).

We do however, have magic cufflinks.
posted by The Whelk at 6:38 PM on July 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

Husband and I, the husband AI isn't up yet.
posted by The Whelk at 6:38 PM on July 14, 2012 [42 favorites]

Also, get that loose shit checked out by the doctor
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 6:40 PM on July 14, 2012 [18 favorites]

I didn't wear mine much as I had a horrible habit of fiddling with it ALL the time. This culminated in it one day flying off while we were in a bar and landing in an ashtray on a table where some bikers were drinking. It was like a scene in a movie, to be honest, especially as it had a really impressive flight arc from one side of the bar to the other. I slunk over, apologised, and shoved it my pocket after wiping the ashes off. After that it stayed in a jewellery box.

I gave it back to my ex. It was made from the wedding rings of his grandmothers and hanging onto it or selling it just seemed too mean. Mind you, our divorce was not horribly messy and not down to some spectacularly awful behaviour on either side. I'm not sure what I'd have done in that case.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 6:41 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

My Mom had the diamond from her ring set in a pendant for my 30th birthday. I love it, and wear it all the time. Almost everyone I know who is married wears a ring, men and women both. (US, Midwest) The exception is a couple we know who grew up in a higher social class than we now all inhabit. I always thought it was a rich person thing to eschew the ring, or only wear it for special occasions.
posted by Malla at 6:41 PM on July 14, 2012

vaguely Olympian

How are the 4 rings arranged? All I can picture in that vein is an Audi logo.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 6:41 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

I always thought it was a rich person thing to eschew the ring, or only wear it for special occasions.

The actual Old Midwestern Money couple I know ( hog farming!) don't wear thier rings, both are heirloom Cartier and considered much too showy for everyday use. They don't really wear rings but they do have a designed simple gold band for her and a silver band for him.
posted by The Whelk at 6:47 PM on July 14, 2012

Also, magic cufflinks
posted by The Whelk at 6:49 PM on July 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

The small silver ring I actually wore for my wedding cost $15 and didn't survive the honeymoon. It was too beat up to wear from us having played drunken bongos at some point. For a long time I didn't wear one, but my ex-husband sneakily purchased me a replacement ring - a silver sort of replica of the One Ring - that I wore for many years. I stopped wearing it the day he unexpectedly walked out for the woman he had been seeing behind my back, but the dent and untanned line on my finger lasted for months.

I carried the ring on a chain around my neck for a while. But when I moved into my new place, I dumped it with the bent-out-of-shape wedding ring in my unused jewelry box. I haven't even seen them in years now, but I think they are still there.

My bigger dilemma is what to do with my great grandfather's 24K gold wedding ring that I got from my mom when I got married; it's been handed down to the eldest daughter in the family on their wedding day. I guess it will go to my cousin's eldest daughter, so it can stay in the family.
posted by gemmy at 6:56 PM on July 14, 2012

My mom took off her ring from her marriage to my stepdad after she moved out. I asked her recently what she was going to do with it; was she going to try to get some money for the stones or maybe have it turned into a different, cool piece of jewelry? She was like, "Nope. I'm going to use it to pay for your wedding!" Ok, then!
posted by Aquifer at 6:59 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

A friend of mine who is a jeweler runs a class for divorcees where they melt down their old rings and forge something new from the metal.

My dad never wore his ring after the ceremony (and given his work, it would have been a bad idea anyway), my mom always wore hers. I believe the ring is intact somewhere, though I gather that the stone in it was stolen and replaced by a cubic zirconium when she took it in for a cleaning.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 7:00 PM on July 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

well, i took my wedding band off when i got served with the papers - later i gave it back to her and refused to take back the rings i'd bought her, which didn't bug her a bit, as i'm sure she sold them
posted by pyramid termite at 7:01 PM on July 14, 2012

Pruitt-Igoe: Vaguely Olympian (?) and yes, vaguely Audian - which is ironic because my dad worked for VW/Audi for a while and my mom's intent definitely was not to pay tribute to him/that.
posted by Sweetie Darling at 7:14 PM on July 14, 2012

They belonged to my mother-in-law, whose divorce was much more amicable than her marriage had been.

My wedding ring from my first marriage had five small diamonds, in several little hearts. The diamonds came from a tenth-anniversary ring that his father had given to his mother (they had finalized their divorce while we were engaged--sadly not so amicably). Two of the diamonds are now tiny ear studs and at some point I'm going to have my favorite jeweler in my hometown do something with the other three.

(There's also another piece of wedding jewelry that has the other five diamonds and I realized tonight that I can't find it. I'm sure it's just lost in the box but the box is a mess and will benefit from the search process. Those diamonds will probably also go into whatever I have made.)
posted by immlass at 7:37 PM on July 14, 2012

Whelk, do you have pictures of your cufflinks?
posted by Tarumba at 7:46 PM on July 14, 2012

As far as I know, no. I've lived in the south, the midwest, the east coast, and spent a lot of time on the west coast and in all of those locations, the people I know who are married wear wedding rings. I know of a few married people who don't wear rings, usually for job-related reasons (one is a drycleaner, for instance); and I know one or two who don't wear wedding rings because they just don't wear jewelry at all. Those people (both categories) are very much the exception, in my experience.

posted by devinemissk at 9:31 PM on July 14

Same here. Been all over the USA and wedding rings are extremely common. The few people I know who don't wear them avoid wearing them for very specific work reasons.
posted by magstheaxe at 8:01 PM on July 14, 2012

I took off my engagement and wedding rings when I discovered that my husband was having an affair that started within 18 months of our wedding (if not earlier). I also confiscated his, since it didn't seem to represent anything to him.

Just recently he told me that while he was with his ... individual ... he would point to his ring and tell her that "this means I can't be with you forever" and he said she told him "I don't care."

We can't afford a divorce now. I figure if I sell them they will pay for maybe 2 hours of top-notch attorney time?

Bastard.
posted by book 'em, danno at 8:06 PM on July 14, 2012 [5 favorites]

I bought my own wedding band at a craft fair at San Francisco State on my way to Nevada to get married. My now soon to be ex had no interest in a ring but at the last minute I wanted to be just a little traditional. It was a very thin silver wire band which might have cost 15 dollars and ten years later when it was wearing through we had it overlaid on a larger silver band.

Soon after our marriage his great aunt died and left him her beautiful diamond engagement ring and guard band which I wore with the wedding band until we separated two years ago. At first I changed all of them to my right hand, but when I realized I wanted to possibly go out with other men I took them off, since they were a reminder of our nearly 30 years together.

My daughters have already figured out who will get which when I bite the dust, so I have them in a little velvet bag in a drawer, a reminder of some very good years and some very bad.
posted by Isadorady at 8:14 PM on July 14, 2012

Just to inject a little bit of optimism into all of this, my girlfriend and I spent the day at the wedding of our mutual friends whom we met through. I am one of the few people who knew them both before they got together, and coincidentally was the first to know they had gotten together.

I have friends who are happily married. And then, I have a few friends for whom their match-up is so clearly perfect that when it first occurred, the thought was something like, "oh! so that's what the universe had planned! That makes sense now!" These friends are some of those rare few.

(Also, their program was laced with quotes from The Muppets, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Arrested Development, so you know they're awesome.)

The theme of the day, aside from our wonderful friends' wedding, was mine and my girlfriends friends (who are still two pretty separate groups of people, the bride and groom aside) coming around to us to praise how much they adore the other, and implore us both to not screw this up and to "lock it down" already. We've been together just over two months.

Whatever. Today I saw a perfect couple get married and got confirmation from all sides that I had finally found myself in one as well. And then we ended the reception by turning over our programs and singing along to La Marseillaise in honor of Bastille Day. Because that's the type of wedding this was.

I am pretty in favor of happy marriages today, I guess is all.
posted by Navelgazer at 8:16 PM on July 14, 2012 [9 favorites]

I actually just got my wedding band back on today after four years of being pregnant and nursing and pregnant and nursing and the hormones make my fingers swell up like WHOA. (Everyone kept telling me to have it resized because "the baby weight would never go away" and I said, "no, it's just swelling" and I'm really glad I didn't have it resized now!) I'm in the US Midwest and nobody really thought anything of it when I wasn't wearing my wedding band, but I am glad to have it back on. I take mine off, though, at night and in the shower and in the kitchen and so on, because otherwise I will totally lose it down a drain.

My husband wears his 24/7, even when I urge him to take it off so he doesn't lose a finger using power tools.

While I understand upper-class men in the U.K. don't wear wedding rings, most people in the U.S. are happy to wear them, but not wearing one didn't really draw any comment.

Inheriting old wedding rings is meaningful; my mom wears her mom's rings on her right hand ring finger and it means a lot to her. Pretty typical for divorcing couples with kids to have at least the engagement ring made into jewelry for the kids.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:18 PM on July 14, 2012

you know, this week i learned that Doug Sahm sang on "Take Back the Keys to my Heart."
posted by mwhybark at 8:22 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

I don't have any memory of when I took my wedding band off--sometime around the separation, long before the divorce. My ex wore his until after the divorce was finalized. Mine is still in my jewelry box 4 years later because it's a beautiful band with some nice engraving and I don't want to melt it down or sell it. Maybe eventually I'll get it made into a cocktail ring.
posted by impishoptimist at 8:26 PM on July 14, 2012

It's weird how these traditions are both societal and familial. Like I know in the US, men traditionally wear rings, but since my dad doesn't, I still think it's strange that men do.

(He lost his the first time he played golf after getting married. Though it is remembered as their first bigtime fight as husband and wife, they joke now that they've had lots more important fights since then, as is bound to happen 39 years in.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 8:38 PM on July 14, 2012

My ex said something hideous to me, and in that moment I realized I was finally done trying. The marriage was over, so I took the ring off. It took awhile for the paperwork to become finalized, but when it did, I took the ring back to the jeweler and upgraded to a pair of diamond earrings.

I ended up giving those to my daughter one year when she needed proper jewelry for a formal occasion so it all ended well in the end.
posted by Space Kitty at 8:44 PM on July 14, 2012

My current husband took the diamond from the engagement ring from my previous marriage and worked with a jeweler to design a really nice pendant. He took so much care with the project that the stone--both beautiful and valuable--sort of became his too. I wear the pendant all the time and he enjoys seeing it around my neck. Otherwise it would have just sat in the safe doing no one any good. I showed the pendant to the ex once (we don't bear each other any ill will, although we're not close) and he actually seemed pleased that the stone was continuing to provide me with pleasure, as he spent a lot of time finding it.

A few years later I melted down the setting and the wedding ring itself for the gold value... the former was useless and I felt strange hanging onto the latter.
posted by carmicha at 8:47 PM on July 14, 2012

ended well in the end? teach me to post in divorce threads.
posted by Space Kitty at 8:47 PM on July 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

I took my ring off about twelve or thirteen days after my ex admitted-but-not-really-admitted to having an affair with her boss. The day I removed it was the day she told me she wasn't coming home from work. I remember writing in my journal that my finger felt naked and misshapen.

I misplaced the ring when moving; it's either in a box somewhere or lost for good.

I just looked up an old email to figure out the number of days between confession and ring removal, and holy shit it makes my heart hurt to see how sad I was then.

There's a nuclear reactor at my alma mater, and the workers there do a neat little demo/parlor trick wherein fingernail clippings are randomly numbered and then bombarded with neutrons. You know which number corresponds to which finger, but the experimenter doesn't. The clippings are then analyzed to see which one emits the gamma ray that corresponds to the radioactive decay of the activated gold isotope. (The test is an example of neutron activation analysis (NAA), and I hope a nuclear chemist will correct me if I've misstated anything.)

Anyway, minute amounts of gold are absorbed through your skin and incorporated into the nail on your ring finger. NAA is an extremely sensitive method, and is able to detect the trace amount of gold in the trimming. You've probably already guessed that the "viola!" moment comes when the experimenter tells the subject which trimming came from his or her ring finger.

I never thought I'd say this, but I hope all the gold has grown out of my finger.
posted by compartment at 8:49 PM on July 14, 2012 [175 favorites]

We've been married since 1999, and wore rings just for the ceremony itself, and took them off immediately afterwards.

Which leads me to ask - how common is it, in the U.S., to wear wedding bands when you're married? To us it seemed a really old-fashioned weird thing to do, so we never did - I don't even remember a conversation about it, it was just not something we'd do. Like a cow being branded, or a cow having one of those tags in the ear...

So you were traditional enough to wear rings for the ceremony, and traditional enough to have a ceremony, but you're all shocked and confused by people (in the U.S.!) doing another tradition of wearing rings day to day? Huh.
posted by ftm at 8:49 PM on July 14, 2012 [32 favorites]

Whelk, do you have pictures of your cufflinks?

I'm not in the same island as the cufflinks but I will try to get them in front of a camera.
posted by The Whelk at 9:03 PM on July 14, 2012

Funny, I was just thinking about this. My ex and I bought cheapie rings from some street vendor in Costa Rica. They eventually fell apart and I got myself a "this means I am married" ring just to have and wear around with moons and stars on it. The ex and I eventually parted ways in a not-terrible way (our marriage was pretty non-traditional from the get-go) and I keep the ring around and don't wear it much.

Yesterday I sold the house that I bought back in 1997, when we were technically married but no longer really "together" but a few years before the divorce. Without even really thinking much about it, I slipped the ring back on to go to the closing.
posted by jessamyn at 9:16 PM on July 14, 2012 [8 favorites]

So you were traditional enough to wear rings for the ceremony, and traditional enough to have a ceremony

Well, because the ceremony was for others, not for us. Were it up to us with zero consideration for family etc., we wouldn't have one... nor gotten married for that matter. However, there were legal reasons to do it - green card for my wife - so marriage it was. Don't regret it either, no big deal, one time thing. The ceremony was a big, big deal for the family - and so we did that. Traditional? Insofar as doing a small thing that seems to bring great joy to the whole family is traditional, then yes. Same for accepting the family jewelry. But actually wearing it, that's day in and day out, that's your life, and well, I don't wear any kind of jewelry at all, so no. I am however interested in cultural practices, and this struck me as a significant one, since it involves every marriage.
posted by VikingSword at 9:16 PM on July 14, 2012 [3 favorites]

I wonder how much this is a dying concept. A lot of people I know have ring finger tats instead of rings (to me this is being over optimistic, but ymmv).

Personally, my husband and I had rings for the ceremony but never wore them afterwards (rings for the family so they were content we were "normal" enough). I lost my ring about two years into my marriage...I have no idea how.

Now, as a grown up, I would want a ring. Mostly because I'd want the sentimental value when the marriage broke up since I've already been through the starter marriage.
posted by syncope at 9:21 PM on July 14, 2012

Took my wedding band off as I walked out of the marriage counselor's office, where I'd just told my ex I was leaving. I'd waited to tell him there out of fear for how he would react. He hadn't physically harmed me yet, but the yelling and throwing things were bad enough that I'd kept a few of my belongings hidden in the back of my car since the weekend before, when I'd decided to go. Had packed up enough clothes for a few days of work, in case I had to leave in a hurry, but not enough for him to notice my closet being partly empty. Eight years ago, and I still get a bit of stress reaction when thinking about it.

Anyway, rings are still in a drawer in the bathroom, with the extra chapsticks and eye liners. Thinking to get the pieces remade into earrings eventually, to sort of claim them back from that time.
posted by dorey_oh at 9:34 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

the "viola!" moment

♫
posted by mr_crash_davis at 9:37 PM on July 14, 2012 [21 favorites]

I lost so much weight from stress that the ring only fit my middle finger. After about 3 months in my new place I took it off and put it in a box. I still miss the sensation of it being there sometimes. And him. Sometimes.
posted by last night a dj saved my life at 10:19 PM on July 14, 2012 [4 favorites]

my partner, who I love but who can chuck a tantrum like none other, had a habit of pulling her ring off in a dramatic huff almost every time we argued (even over really trivial things), then putting it back on again after cooling down.

the last time she did this I said in exasperation that it seemed the only point of wearing the thing was to be able to express anger by removing it. I put hers away and told her I'd had enough of that particular piece of relationship theatre. I still wear mine, though.

should I have posted this on the green?
posted by moorooka at 10:19 PM on July 14, 2012 [6 favorites]

We didn't have rings for our courthouse ceremony, but I bought a $6 silver ring for myself at the Vanowen Indoor Swapmeet. I took the ring off because it turns out I'm allergic to nickel, and ring caused my face to swell up and give me a beak like Donald Duck.

My wife threw the ring away in the trash, and that was the end of my ring.
posted by sideshow at 10:23 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

My partner and I share a gold...en retriever / huskie mix we just adopted.

I'm much more worried about what's going to happen to him if we ever split than some metal chunk. Yes, I realize we've become that stereotypical annoying Seattle couple.

We're actually in the middle of designing a custom engagement ring with some wonderful jewelers up here. Nothing too fancy, just a piece with some more organic elements than the typical Tiffany's, which are beautiful in their own brilliant minimalistic way. Building the ring together seems to freak out a lot of people, which seems deeply ironic for such an object.

And thank you nadawi for your touching story. This thread isn't helping my naturally unromantic trend towards cynicism.
posted by formless at 10:31 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Flung into an erupting volcano. Long story.
posted by Ritchie at 10:31 PM on July 14, 2012 [30 favorites]

I am a ring wearer and I always have a special ring on "that" finger. My partner is not a ring wearer and so doesn't usually have anything on "that" finger. Sometimes she will put a ring on there if we are going out.

We are committed to our relationship, although not married. We probably will never be married because it's not what we do any more (and gay marriage is not recognised in NZ).

Occasionally people question me about wearing a ring when I am not married. I say it's a commitment ring and something that I like to wear.
posted by chairish at 10:40 PM on July 14, 2012

Gave mine to a local homeless bloke. Figured he could pawn it and probably needed the money more than I did. Hope that ring brought him more luck than it did me.
posted by gohabsgo at 10:43 PM on July 14, 2012 [5 favorites]

I haven't decided what to do with mine. We separated before the actual divorce, and I am not sure when I took it off. I tossed it into a box with the other keepsakes.

I started to write what i would like to do with it, but I realized it made me sound pretty bitter and angry. In any case, I don't really just want to throw it in the trash, and I don't want to keep it. I'd like to do something cathartic, but really I don't think I'll ever have a satisfying catharsis regarding the whole matter.

It's like nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain isn't good enough, so I'll just store it in metal barrels out in the back yard.
posted by Xoebe at 10:45 PM on July 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Flung into an erupting volcano. Long story.

Tell it backwards and you end up in the shire after a long walk?
posted by potsmokinghippieoverlord at 10:52 PM on July 14, 2012 [35 favorites]

First marriage: took the ring off as soon as I decided I was out, left it in my jewelry box from which it was stolen in a house burglary a year or two later... so yay? No decision necessary. I hope it worked out every bit as well for the thieves as it worked out for me.

Second, current, final marriage: we got really inexpensive silver rings because we had very little money at the time, and planned to replace them later. After about 15 years mine was too tight and I finally took it off (I still have the slightest indent, several years later!); he still wears his even though it actually has a split in it. It's been Time For New Rings To Symbolize Our Eternal Love for about 19 years now, but while luckily for us our shared propensity for outrageous procrastination means we suit each other well as partners, it also means that I don't have a ring on, and he has a crazy old cheap broken ring that he won't take off. I do want us to finally get new rings for our anniversary this Fall, though! Ask Metafilter may be involved.
posted by taz at 11:03 PM on July 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

This suggests it is not atypical for a British man not to wear a wedding ring.

Very few of my English male friends wear wedding rings as far as I know, the only one who does also wears other jewellery.
posted by atrazine at 11:40 PM on July 14, 2012

Pulled to the side of the road, headed out of that bitty Arkansas town on the night of my 22nd birthday, took it off my finger and threw it as far as I could into a field.

I hadn't taken it off prior, wore it from the day I put it on until that night, two years I guess, two years give or take. It was exactly the ring I wanted, a wide band, gold, simple; I've got big hands, it was just right.

I worked then with my hands and callouses had pretty much grown up right to the ring; it felt as strange to have it off as it'd felt to have it on, there at the first. It took a long time for the dents to go away, callouses to grow back.

I've not worn but just that one.

I've wondered over the years if that farmer maybe came across that ring one day, saw a glint in the dirt he was turning, got off his tractor and picked it up, weighed it in his hand, considering, wondering about it, or maybe not wondering so much, if he'd had hard times in love.
posted by dancestoblue at 12:18 AM on July 15, 2012 [11 favorites]

mines in a box somewhere in my parent's basement. i'll probably find it in a decade or 2 when i'm helping them move out to the retirement community or something, and get a bit misty eyed and reminiscent for a while.
posted by messiahwannabe at 1:01 AM on July 15, 2012

If you're on the other end of this story (getting married or newly married), here's one thing "they" never tell you: you're going to get fatter! And then those rings won't fit anymore. You'll either have to get them resized or just stop wearing them altogether. My beau and I chose the latter, as we were already upset enough about how much money we gave to the shitty jewelry industry.
posted by readyfreddy at 1:22 AM on July 15, 2012

After a very amiable separation, with some talk of eventually getting back together, I continued to wear my rings. About three weeks after we parted ways, my ring finger began to swell alarmingly, only that finger, until I was losing feeling in it. I ended up having them cut off shortly thereafter and felt terrible about it. So, I called him to tell him that I'd had to have them removed, and he told me he'd caught his on a piece of machinery and it had broken. It was then that I just 'knew' that it was really over, and it was. I sold the cut rings for gold value this year.
posted by alltomorrowsparties at 1:40 AM on July 15, 2012 [2 favorites]

Are there really no charities that appeal for wedding rings and recycle them? I may have a project for Monday...
posted by Hogshead at 1:51 AM on July 15, 2012 [2 favorites]

Some of the stories in this thread are so poignant and sad-making.

Just had to go find my husband for a reassuring "secret power rings UNITE!" fist-bump.
(Everyone does this, right?)
posted by Catch at 2:17 AM on July 15, 2012 [24 favorites]

Catch - we totally do that.
posted by nadawi at 2:23 AM on July 15, 2012 [2 favorites]

I'm still wearing my ring though my marriage ended late last year, though in death (mine) rather than divorce. We got married in August 2011, she died last November and I figured I keep wearing it until it feels right to not do so anymore. It's only a very cheap one my parents bought for our wedding (which we held in hospital and wear going to do over when she had gotten out), but it is still part of who I am.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:41 AM on July 15, 2012 [25 favorites]

I threw mine off the Hoover Dam.
posted by empatterson at 2:56 AM on July 15, 2012 [4 favorites]

Very few of my English male friends wear wedding rings as far as I know.

It might be a generation thing? My dad didn't wear a wedding ring and nor did I but younger men seem more inclined to wear them?

I think it's another of those distasteful habits we tend to import from America.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 3:32 AM on July 15, 2012

It was kinda spontaneous, with me. I hadn't even realised my marriage had a problem. Eight-and-a-bit years in I was a blissed out, happy cat that got the cream. Boy, did I feel lucky in the way things had worked out for a hopelessly unconfident guy who'd spent his largely-celibate twenties honestly assuming that he was never going to develop the knack of this whole pairing-up thing. Somehow it had happened and, even better, it was working beautifully. I was happy and content. She was happy and content. It was obvious to everyone. Happy married coupledom positively radiated from us, Our friends used to comment on it, if they weren't feeling too nauseated by it. One of them once observed "There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and Decani & Jenny". Ye gods.

And then one Sunday evening, after a typical jolly evening in the pub with friends, she lay next to me in bed, radiating something that was clearly not happily-married coupledom. "What's wrong?", I said. "Nothing", she replied. "Come on Jen", I said, "Something's obviously bothering you. What's up?"

I still remember the pause, and the way it wasn't like any pause I'd felt from her before, and the way it made something collapse in my guts.

"I seem to have fallen in love with someone else. I'm moving out."

I'll spare you the shock, grief, disbelief, tears, pleadings and general misery; I'll just say that if you've never experienced it I hope you never do. She moved out literally the next day; apparently this new love had been going on for quite a few months during which I had remained entirely unaware in my doomed state of comfortable contentment. I didn't see her for two weeks. It would never have occurred to me to remove my wedding ring during that time because I was in a state of disbelief and desperate fighting to get her back, to realise what a dreadful mistake she was making, to get past this, to make things right, to get her, us back.

Finally, she agreed to meet me in a pub in the West End. A bustling, crowded, very public place. I suppose we both thought that would help reduce the possibility of unseemly emotional scenes - not that she was really given to such things. Which made it doubly affecting when I arrived at the pub and immediately saw her, very openly weeping, as I entered. My heart melted. She was as upset as I was. She was having dreadful regrets. There was hope. I walked up to her, put my arm around her. She leaned into me, buried her face in my shirt, crying audibly. I had never heard her do that before. I stroked her hair, said... I don't know... gentle, loving things. All was not lost. There was hope. She pulled away, didn't look at me.

"He's left me!"

I suppose clichés are clichés for a reason. We really do experience them. My blood ran cold. My world turned upside down - again. He's left her. He's left her. And that was when the reality of the situation blasted my brief hope out of existence for good. It was replaced, almost instantly, by an icy anger. Looking back, what I did next seems corny, crass, another dumb cliché, something people in bad films or books might do. But it honestly seemed right, appropriate, necessary. We had arranged to meet, obviously - or so I thought - to talk about us. And all she could give me by way of opening gambit was noisy tears about him. Fuck her. I had had no idea of what she was capable of. Fuck. Her. So yeah, I barely thought about it. I stood up, looked at her with vague disgust and just... immense disappointment. And I took off my wedding ring, tossed it on the table in fron of her and said, "Nail that to your bedpost." And Walked out. And never saw her again.

True story!
posted by Decani at 3:37 AM on July 15, 2012 [131 favorites]

I've really enjoyed reading these stories, even the sad and angry ones. I like symbolism, so it seems to me like it's worth having a physical representation of an important relationship so that you can do symbolic things with the object as the relationship changes. A ring is traditionally that object, but I don't suppose it matters what it is.

I've got a ring, and so does my husband. We take them off to wash dishes, etc, and lose them down the back of the couch (left mine at a friend's house after a particularly fun New Years Eve - I think the booze made my hands swell up?) and I'd never judge anyone for deciding rings aren't necessary to their relationship. But mine has helped me curb my nail-biting by giving me something to fiddle with, and when I'm away from him it reminds me of his love. If we split, I think it'd be satisfying to dispose of it in a way that matched how I was feeling, and I hope he'd do the same.
posted by harriet vane at 3:44 AM on July 15, 2012 [2 favorites]

And I took off my wedding ring, tossed it on the table in fron of her and said, "Nail that to your bedpost." And Walked out. And never saw her again.

Whoa. Wow. Didn't. See. That. One. Coming. (Which makes two of us, evidently.)
posted by disillusioned at 3:53 AM on July 15, 2012 [1 favorite]

After we had been married about a year and living in the U.S., we went to my first husband's home country so I could start my dissertation research. Things had been going badly in the States, but I hoped that it was mostly culture shock and that things would be better on his home turf. I was exactly wrong, and things proceeded to get much worse between us.

I lost my wedding band after we had been there about a month. I'd lost about 20 lbs during that time, and I took it off to do the laundry, which had to be done by hand, in an outdoor concrete utility sink in cold water, a sure recipe for losing it down the drain. Being forgetful as I am, I forgot to put it back on and someone nicked it before I realized it.

About a month after that, he left the country to go to Germany on some trumped up bullshit that I somehow actually believed. Even though I didn't find out about the affair until a couple of years later (honestly, it never ceases to amaze me how--not to put too fine a point on it--a person like myself with a Mensa-level IQ can be such a complete IDIOT about certain things), the fact that I was so much happier with him gone was the permission I needed to mentally consider the marriage ended.

I've also managed to lose my original engagement ring for my second marriage. Soy un perdedor. I'm a loser, baby, so don't give me jewelry.
posted by drlith at 6:48 AM on July 15, 2012 [5 favorites]

I am terrible about remembering to wear mine bc I am super not into jewelry and how it feels to be wearing it (and lifting weights makes it even more of a PITA), which is funny bc my husband claimed he didn't want rings (my engagement ring was made out of candy) but when I did all the work of procuring some for us anyway and assuring him they'd just be keepsakes and he didn't have to wear it yet now he wears his all the time and loves it. We went out to dinner last month somewhere fancy and only realized once we got there I'd forgotten to put mine on. We laughed together at the thought people might think I was The Other Woman.
posted by ifjuly at 7:13 AM on July 15, 2012

So I wonder if that's a cultural thing, or an individual thing, or new thing, or old thing, or what? How prevalent is it, not to wear wedding bands at all?

I don't wear a ring (see the degloving link above for why not), and people definitely comment on it as an unusual choice. I think people often assume I don't wear the ring in order to be a player; there have been more than a few comments like that made, often well-meant, to my partner.
posted by Forktine at 7:25 AM on July 15, 2012

I stopped wearing the ring from my first marriage the same day my ex-husband told me he had been cheating and "didn't want to be married anymore." It took months for the tan line to fade, and years for my finger to stop feeling strange and like something was missing. The ring stayed in my jewelry box for 6 years--until last summer--when I sold it and used the money to buy my new husband's wedding ring.

He has a plain yellow gold band, and I have a very narrow rose gold band. I like the symbolism and simplicity of them, and we get to do the special married person ring-matching high five.
posted by apricot at 8:05 AM on July 15, 2012 [1 favorite]

//I think people often assume I don't wear the ring in order to be a player;//

I'm pretty sure I learned on Seinfeld that you wear the ring to be a player!

We'll have been married 21 years next month, and reading through all this has given me a warm fuzzy feeling of just how damn lucky we are to be at this point without ever having to contemplate what to do about our wedding rings, which we both still wear every day.
posted by COD at 8:29 AM on July 15, 2012 [4 favorites]

British, I wear the ring because my father and grandfather wear/wore theirs. I'm not a jewelry person, so it's the only item I wear apart from my watch. Had to stop wearing it for a few months last year when I got a heat rash behind it, and totally felt naked. Mrs A doesn't wear hers that often as she likes to switch up rings, but only my Mother has an issue with that.

We totally do the power ring fist bump.
posted by arcticseal at 9:54 AM on July 15, 2012

Also, Blasdelb, I love what you're doing with the tags.
posted by arcticseal at 9:55 AM on July 15, 2012 [7 favorites]

I recently fled my home for a domestic violence shelter with just about nothing. I sold my rings to pay for car repairs. It's going to be a while before I can afford to divorce my husband, but I couldn't wear those rings anymore. They made my skin crawl.
posted by FunkyHelix at 10:11 AM on July 15, 2012 [4 favorites]

If you're on the other end of this story (getting married or newly married), here's one thing "they" never tell you: you're going to get fatter! And then those rings won't fit anymore. You'll either have to get them resized or just stop wearing them altogether. My beau and I chose the latter, as we were already upset enough about how much money we gave to the shitty jewelry industry.

YMMV. Married almost nine years and been wearing my engagement ring for longer than that and they still fit perfectly. I had to take my engagement ring off in the last month of pregnancy (couldn't fit two rings on my finger so naturally chose the wedding band). Mr. D.'s ring has likewise continued to fit. And both of us have gained and lost weight over the last decade. I think this very much depends on the individual.
posted by devinemissk at 10:13 AM on July 15, 2012 [2 favorites]

In Nina Simone's autobiography "I Put a Spell On You," she recalls leaving her husband without telling him and fleeing to Barbados. She left her wedding ring on the nightstand.

After over a year of adventures and affairs in Barbados without contacting her husband, she returned to find that he'd legally divorced her and sold all their belongings. She was devastated because, as she claims in the book, she had never intended to stay away forever -- if she'd wanted to END the marriage, she'd have just thrown the ring away! She'd left it on the nightstand as a sort of place-holder and a promise that she'd return sooner or later.

It's little bits of logic like that, sprinkled throughout, that makes this book such a fascinating read.
posted by hermitosis at 10:34 AM on July 15, 2012 [19 favorites]

Also I did a series of interviews this past winter with Woody Allen's first wife, Louise Lasser. I was nervous about asking her too many questions about their marriage (though she did eventually open up and discuss it with me). I couldn't help noticing that she still wears what surely must be her wedding ring -- they were only married from 1966 to 1969, but over four decades later she still wears the ring. Apparently they also still speak on a regular basis.
posted by hermitosis at 10:44 AM on July 15, 2012 [3 favorites]

My first engagement ring ended up being my wedding ring as well. We bought it from the old local jewelers here in town and had two tiny diamonds embedded in a white gold band. We went to a -- well, let's just call it what it is -- pawn shop to look for other ones; he got a band for himself, and in a fit of greediness I got a band with a line of diamonds. I felt a little weird about buying something someone else had worn for my new and pure and perfect marriage, but I had seen my (male) friend's ring with diamonds in it and thought, "Hey, I guess we don't have to have the plain gold band if we like something else."

Funny thing was, after I bought that band I noticed it wasn't made that well and had some wonky measurements. But it was still shiny. A few days before the wedding I told him that I wanted to just wear my engagement ring as my wedding ring. I kept the other ring around in my jewelry box; I started wearing it a few years into the marriage on my other hand. Coincidentally, that was probably around the time when I started feeling like I needed to feel a bit more special and less crapped-upon by my husband.

When my marriage ended, I took my wedding ring off... hmmm... maybe a week or so later. I started dating about six weeks later. Eventually I took the other ring off, too, even though it was just decorative. I didn't want anything related to my ex.

My now-husband's wife had run off with a mutual friend's husband. He kept his ring in a box. When he and I were getting serious, I asked him once if he would put it on just so I could see what it looked like when he wore a ring. He smiled and refused. It was very lightweight.

So we bought our own rings, but the price of gold was horrible. Luckily, I could trade in all three of those rings -- for quite a bit more than I expected, because we went right back to the old local jeweler.

We bought my husband a plain white-gold band on Amazon; none of the local ones quite fit the bill. When it showed up, he said, "This just feels right."

My friend with the flashy diamond guy-ring? His wife ran away with someone else. Oops.
posted by Madamina at 10:45 AM on July 15, 2012 [1 favorite]

I didn't expect my husband to wear a ring, because my father didn't. He's British, and he's a chemist who works with radioactive material, and he's not particularly invested in symbols in general. So I was surprised when my husband said he wanted to wear a ring.

We got our rings at an antiques shop, $50 for mine and $75 for his. They each have someone else's engraving inside them, which I like; I like having a ring that already had at least one promise on it. Plus mine says "R + K" in it, and my husband's name is Erik, and I think that maybe on some anniversary down the road I'll have the engraving altered to be his name instead. I take mine off to make bread, sausage, or meatloaf, and I feel naked until I put it back on again.
posted by KathrynT at 10:45 AM on July 15, 2012 [1 favorite]

From what I've noticed, rich people might wear wedding bands but the woman usually doesn't wear her engagement ring after the wedding unless it's a special occasion. Probably because it's a little vulgar to wear a 6 carat gumball-sized diamond if you're not going to the Oscars or the Met Costume Institute Ball.

That observation has stuck with me because sometimes I cross paths with rich people when I design lights for their homes or parties. When I got engaged one woman (rather snidely) said, "Oh, it must be nice to have something you can wear everyday. You hardly notice it."
posted by Thin Lizzy at 10:58 AM on July 15, 2012 [8 favorites]

We separated about two weeks ago. I took my rings off the day after, I suspect he did as well. Mine are in a safe deposit box for now; I have no idea what I'll do with them in the long run. The funny thing is I love the way my engagement ring looks, and I still want to wear it for that...maybe I will (on a different finger) someday, when the wounds aren't so fresh.
posted by (Over) Thinking at 11:24 AM on July 15, 2012

Data point: I got married recently (Feb 29, because I can remember an anniversary once every four years), and I didn't get a ring because I work with my hands a lot and I don't wear jewelry (other than my stainless steel tragus piercing, but that's a longer story...). This lack of a band seems as strange to my friends and neighbors here in the Deep South of the US as if I had a third eye or possibly a second joint between my wrist and elbow as they grab my arm and ask pointedly, "Have you gotten one yet?" and inspect my left knuckles with a consternated look on their face. I run with a pretty liberal crowd and the thought to not wear a wedding band is as foreign to them as marmite, curries and elevensies. Even the roughest PBR swilling, grease covered biker I've met wears at least a stainless or titanium band.
posted by 1f2frfbf at 11:33 AM on July 15, 2012 [1 favorite]

A friend got a black ring tattooed on her ring finger. She's divorced now but the ring is still there, not out of any sense of sentimentality, but because removing a tattoo involves some degree of difficulty and expense.
posted by grouse at 12:15 PM on July 15, 2012

Don't you be starting on marmite.
posted by arcticseal at 12:19 PM on July 15, 2012

It might be a generation thing? My dad didn't wear a wedding ring and nor did I but younger men seem more inclined to wear them?

Maybe, but I'm 26 and all these men are about that age as well. Maybe it's a retro thing?
posted by atrazine at 1:49 PM on July 15, 2012

Regarding the generational/class differences in ring wearing - my father (and his father, and his father's father and so on) didn't wear a wedding ring because he was a farmer, working with machinery and large animals every day. The men in my husband's family never wore rings because they all worked on the wharf - and never started to wear rings after they worked their way up to management.
Together, Mr. Catch and I are ridiculously, cliched, dead-centre middle class, he works in a library, so no danger of getting his wedding ring caught up and crushed in something.
(He also runs various pre-schooler story times and music groups, full of good looking single mothers - damn straight he has to wear my ring!)
posted by Catch at 2:29 PM on July 15, 2012

Took it off the night I moved out, as soon as I got to my new apartment. Sold it a few months later.
posted by Jubilation T. Sockpuppet at 2:35 PM on July 15, 2012

My now ex-wife told me she was thinking about divorce. I told her I was ready to keep working at it, but it took both of us to do that, so if she was sure that's what she wanted, I would do what I could to make it as easy as possible. She took a couple weeks to think about it before telling me that she was indeed sure, so I had some time to think about what I'd do. I didn't feel right walking around ringless until the divorce was final, but I didn't feel right walking around ring-ed, either. So the day she officially asked me for a divorce, I took it off my finger, put it on a chain, and wore it around my neck. It seemed a good compromise, a way to keep the symbol of what I'd committed to close to me, without still saying to the world, "Hey, look, I'm married!" Took some getting used to having a bare finger, but get used to it I did. I took the necklace off the day the divorce was signed by the judge, and that was much easier.

The ring is still floating around somewhere in my parents' house. So is an old microwave I asked them not to throw away. Because someday, I'm going to set aside a weekend back home, find a mold I like, and try to smelt that baby. After all, when am I ever again going to have a hunk of 18K gold that I just don't really mind at all if I ruin?
posted by solotoro at 5:06 PM on July 15, 2012 [1 favorite]

Next week will be a year of being alone. When he died, I took his ring and have worn it on a chain around my neck, and still have mine on my finger. I don't know when I'll be able to take it off, it's too final that he's not here.

If/When I do take them off, I'll tuck them away with my paternal grandfather's ring for the boys when they get older.
posted by piearray at 8:04 PM on July 15, 2012 [8 favorites]

I'm sorry for your loss, piearray.
posted by halonine at 10:04 PM on July 15, 2012

I have two rings. One, because I lost my first wedding ring a few months into the marriage, and my ex-husband secretly bought me another one that night, then put it on the bedstand, so I wouldn't discover that I had lost the first one, figure it was an omen, and leave him.

When I found out the extent of his lies, I finally did. I found the second one when cleaning out the house.

I still keep them, because someday I'm going to melt them in a fire in Mordor.

Or give them to someone who promises to cut them. Burn them. Anything, but destroy them.

These rings still live here.

If you want them, you're welcome to them.

I don't.
posted by corb at 12:30 AM on July 16, 2012

I hereby volunteer my services of doing very, very angry things to people's rings before I sell them for scrap metal. I'll throw in pictures of the ritual smelting for free.
posted by nicebookrack at 4:56 AM on July 16, 2012 [3 favorites]

I'm happily married and hope to stay that way. But man, the issue of wedding and engagement rings was fraught from the beginning, and NOT by either of us.

We decided we wanted to get married, and agreed we couldn't afford engagement or wedding rings. Nor did we particularly desire one. When I told my mother we were engaged, she exulted, "HE NEEDS TO GET YOU A RING! ONE WITH EMERALDS." What. The. Hell.

As our wedding plans came along, my mom often asked what we were planning to use for wedding rings. I kept trying to avoid the topic, because we couldn't afford anything. I had eventually started wearing a ring of my own as an engagement ring, to ward off a gross dude at the bus stop, but we still had no plans for wedding rings.

Then, a week or two before the wedding, my mother called and said, "Look, I have two rings here. One is a silver filigree ring of mine. One is a gold ring that your grandfather gave me when you were a child, and asked me to give to you when you were an adult. Do you think either of these would work?"

As soon as she mentioned the ring from my (long deceased) grandfather, I remembered it. It was a small gold ring in a design that resembled an abstract seashell to my mind, when I was a kid. That's when I knew my mom had gotten me, and I would have a wedding ring after all.

My husband's father picked him up a silver ring to use for the wedding -- presumably from Wal-mart. After a year of trying, my husband gave up trying to wear it. It's way too big, he doesn't care about it enough to get it sized down, and it was getting snagged on everything. We're looking for a replacement.

If our marriage ended, I don't know what I would do with my ring, but it wouldn't leave my possession. I miss my grandfather. I think he wanted this to be my wedding ring.
posted by Coatlicue at 6:47 AM on July 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

I love my wedding ring. It was a gift from my wife when the original titanium one shattered. It is white gold with 5 diamonds, one for each of us, and one for each of our three children. She gave it to me on a Christmas before she wasn't settled on having our third child. That was her answer.

I used to wear it religiously until it started to make my hand numb. It isn't that tight on me, but once I took it off for a month, the numbness all went away and my hand feels "normal" now. So now I wear it for special occasions.
posted by pashdown at 6:54 AM on July 16, 2012 [2 favorites]

My husband and I have been talking about our rings because of this thread. He stopped wearing his because he'd gained weight so it didn't fit comfortably. I think we're going to get it resized so he can start wearing it again.

(Our rings are the engagement rings. Both are claddaghs and we liked them so well we never replaced them with wedding bands.)
posted by immlass at 7:24 AM on July 16, 2012

My Mom's 1st husband died; she threw the band off a bridge, and sold the engagement ring to pay bills. Her 2nd husband, my dad, died. The engagement ring was used by my brother for his then-wife, returned in a gracious gesture, and I think each of my brothers got 1 of the 3 diamonds. She remarried, and I don't remember who has those rings.

I used my parents' wedding band in my wedding, and wore it until I realized that the marriage wasn't salvageable and we talked to our son. My engagement ring was made from a gold ring that I believe was my grandmother's, and my son may use it to have a ring made for his beloved.

Interesting how powerful a symbol it is for some, not for others. One thing I emphasized to my son was to ignore the diamond & wedding industry recommendations to spend 6 months' pay on an overpriced, market-tweaked symbol.
posted by theora55 at 7:49 AM on July 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

My wife and I decided that since the rings were going to be the only physical thing we carried forward from our wedding day, that we would go all out. Custom designed, heavy, yellow gold for me and white gold for her.

I learned on the honeymoon that my fingers shrink a good deal in the water, and after nearly losing the wedding ring on our first day of snorkeling, I took to leaving it in our room when we were at the water.

Cut to last summer - 10 years later. We are at my wife's family place and have spent the afternoon at the beach with the boys. We agree that it's time to go home - I decide to jump into the water on last time. Now, up to this point, I've been splashing around in the shallows with the boys, not out for a proper swim. So I give my wife my sunglasses and then as I'm going, realize I'm wearing my ring. I drop in into my hat that I'm leaving on my beach towel, and off I go.

Five minutes later...my wife has packed up the beach stuff while I've been in the water, including my towel. The ring has fallen out of my hat, into the soft sand. We search for a few moments before deciding to head home with the boys, so I can return with the rake. We leave a stick in the sand where we were sitting. I'm really glad the beach isn't busy; I'm also sick at the thought of losing the ring - we would never be able to afford to replace it.

I come back a few minutes later and start raking the sand in a circular pattern around where we were sitting. A nice young lady asks me what's going on, and then gets on her hands and knees and sifts through the sand as well. All the while I'm thinking about how much that ring means to me - I haven't thought about it in years because it's just always there, always part of me. I'm feeling more and more discouraged, more and more sick. Running through my head are memories of the past ten years - all the things my wife and I have been through and learned. The ring is part of that. And I know time is running out - I can't keep looking too much longer. Dinner needs to be made, they boys read to and tucked in. And by tomorrow, there will be no way to find it again - too many people will have come and gone. The nice young lady left twenty minutes ago. I decide to rake one last section one more time before calling it quits.

And on what I've decided will be the last rake - the last attempt to find it - I see a flash of gold. I bend over and pick up my wedding ring and immediately start walking for home. The beach is empty and so am I. There is no feeling of triumph, just relief.

It wasn't until that moment that I realized how important of a symbol the ring was to me. Losing it would've been somehow like losing part of myself, my personal history. And judging by the look on my wife's face, she felt the same. So I get how hard it can be, after a marriage is over, to come up with the appropriate way to dispose of them.

And now, anytime I am going to be in the water, the ring is left in the house. I will never risk losing it again.
posted by never used baby shoes at 8:07 AM on July 16, 2012 [20 favorites]

Currently my parents have been married for 40+ years, but for nearly 30 of those, my father never wore a wedding band. (Unsafe for work.)

I remember asking my mother if it bothered her that he didn't wear his ring (which was safely stored in her jewelry box), she shot me this look and said, "If your father doesn't know he's married, a ring sure as hell isn't going to remind him."

A few years after his retirement, Dad had started wearing his wedding band. I grabbed his hand, which had been bare for about my entire life and asked why? He said for the pure enjoyment of shocking my mother silent when he told her he wanted to start wearing his ring again.
posted by freakinloon at 9:31 AM on July 16, 2012 [5 favorites]

I left my house a couple of days after thanksgiving. I stayed with my brother for about three weeks, then moved into where I live now. I was convinced she was having an affair, that her heart was elsewhere. I was out of my mind.

I had tried taking off the ring several times... but it didn't feel right. It stayed next to where I slept at night, and I would stare at it when I woke up, and go through a ritual of putting it on, then taking it off in disgust, then putting it back on in heartbreak, etc.

It came off for good shortly after I settled into my new place. It's sitting in a drawer, still perfectly intact... Because I'm not ready to let go of it. I can't bear to do anything with the ring.

I realized after I got out on my own that much of what happened at the end, much of what I blamed her for was on me, and was the product of a self-deceiving and self-destructive nature that I've just now started to wrap my head around. There are some serious psychological issues that I've been dealing with, and I realize now that I made an enormous mistake - Possibly the largest mistake I've evermade. To deal with the ring is an admission of failure and defeat - and we're still technically married, despite living apart since December. Neither of us has it in us to do the paperwork and end this.

Even though I don't wear the ring, I still feel like something's missing from my hand.
posted by MysticMCJ at 10:00 AM on July 16, 2012

> Which leads me to ask - how common is it, in the U.S., to wear wedding bands when you're married? To us it seemed a really old-fashioned
> weird thing to do, so we never did - I don't even remember a conversation about it, it was just not something we'd do. Like a cow
> being branded, or a cow having one of those tags in the ear... why do it?

For an otherwise eligible guy, if you have no interest in being unfaithful it's a well understood way to announce "I am out the game" to anyone who might be inclined to ask you out or otherwise hit on you, and it's one that isn't going to make anybody mad or hurt their feelings.
posted by jfuller at 10:06 AM on July 16, 2012 [2 favorites]

I gave the band back on my way out the door--thanks anonymous AskMe. It was her grandfather's wedding band. Part of me wanted to utterly destroy it. As I thought about it, though, I realized it would hurt members of her family, who hadn't cheated on me, to not have it than destroying the thing would hurt her. And for the most part I really enjoyed her family.
posted by Fezboy! at 10:11 AM on July 16, 2012

Mine came off the very first day of separation -- maybe even the first hour as I drove to work. Stuffed it in my wallet for want of someplace else to put it. Eventually it migrated elsewhere. I still haven't decided what to do with it.

Meanwhile, I've been watching the indentation in my ring finger change over time, a dark ghost that is less red now some eight months later. Started taking pictures randomly every so often as I think to do so, charting the change.

I googled back then how long it takes for those indentations to fade, and if I remember correctly it of course depended on how long you'd had it on. I guesstimated it would be at least a year or two to disappear.

Had gothy romantic notions that I wouldn't enter another serious relationship until the ring's remainder had gone invisible. As much of a visible metaphor and reminder as the original ring had been.
posted by Celsius1414 at 10:47 AM on July 16, 2012

I am married these sixteen years, and I love my wife. (I wear a ring, BTW.) Some of these stories are pretty powerful, and I have been clicking the little "favorite" icon not because I like their ending but because I can't help but feel the emotions. Good post.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:34 PM on July 16, 2012 [2 favorites]

I have two rings. One, because I lost my first wedding ring a few months into the marriage, and my ex-husband secretly bought me another one that night, then put it on the bedstand, so I wouldn't discover that I had lost the first one, figure it was an omen, and leave him.

When I found out the extent of his lies, I finally did. I found the second one when cleaning out the house.

I still keep them, because someday I'm going to melt them in a fire in Mordor.

Or give them to someone who promises to cut them. Burn them. Anything, but destroy them.

These rings still live here.

If you want them, you're welcome to them.

I don't.
posted by corb at 2:30 AM on July 16

I will hammer them to nothing, pound them flat, cut them into small bits of nothing, burn that nothing on a brick covered with oak, then throw that brick into the river. Let me know.

Alternately, one of my best friends here in town is a custom jeweler, and not just a craftsman but an artist, he has a teaching studio -- a remarkably talented guy. Would you want the gold parceled out to his students, to pound and form into whatever? Would you like it to be smashed and smelted, mashed and melted, maybe want it pulled into fine wire to be used by his students? I'd bet he'd do it if I asked, and if you want me to ask I will.
posted by dancestoblue at 2:18 PM on July 16, 2012 [6 favorites]

My ex offered to give her ring back. I guess because it was valuable expensive diamond thing. I told her it was a gift 20 years ago and it was hers to do with as she saw fit. I took my band off right after that conversation.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 2:24 PM on July 16, 2012

I was engaged very young, though it's undoubtedly a good thing we broke it off pre-nuptials. I never asked for the ring back, and it was never offered. Who knows where it is now.

For my first marriage, we got a set of very expensive, very nice rings. When it ended, I took the ring off the day I signed the divorce decree. The ex, as I recall, somewhat sooner. She sold hers; mine is in a box someplace. One day I'll sell it and buy a set of really nice golf clubs or something.

My wife and I now wear relatively inexpensive, tho nice quality, bands. I rarely take mine off. It's a token, meaningful to us, and I'd likely wear it even if it wasn't the norm in the US. I cannot tell you how offensive I find someone telling me that this is akin to "branding a cow". What a shallow, condescending bit of douchebaggery that is.
posted by kjs3 at 2:30 PM on July 16, 2012 [3 favorites]

We were only engaged. I let her keep it, she didn't like diamonds so it was actually a garnet. On the other hand, one of our fondest memories was a trip to Hatteras, NC, so I presented it to her in a little case shaped like the famous lighthouse. I haven't decided what to do with the case. She left it by the door when she moved out. It's only a trinket worth a few dollars. I've contemplated throwing it out my third story window to watch it shatter into a million shards on the concrete driveway below.
posted by smoothvirus at 12:57 PM on July 17, 2012

As I thought about it, though, I realized it would hurt members of her family, who hadn't cheated on me, to not have it than destroying the thing would hurt her. And for the most part I really enjoyed her family.

I was, for some reason, hoping expecting that would finish with "Especially her sister. Zing!"

My ex and I had matching rings. White gold; I've always hated yellow. We've been divorced a year or so and I still have them both, for reasons that escape me. He wants his back, and I plan to return it. What to do with mine I don't really know. I don't feel I need to destroy it, but I think I would feel bad passing on a ring from an unsuccessful marriage to a new couple, and it's not worth much.

I don't remember the point I decided to stop wearing my ring. It was no later than the day we finally called time on it, and potentially as much as a couple of months earlier. It's interesting to me that I don't recall this while others have such clear memories and symbolism attached. This is the way the world ends.

I do remember that at the time the rings were important to me, and I was insistent he wear his.

I do not plan to marry again, and I do not think there would be rings if I did.
posted by corvine at 1:06 PM on July 17, 2012

As an addendum to my previous comment, and with regard to the "do people really wear wedding rings?" issue, my ex agreed with the idea that wedding rings were weirdly and off-puttingly possessive. I had no strong feelings either way, so we didn't have any.

Oddly, though, our courthouse marriage by a judge assumed a ring and so a friend, who'd accompanied us and acted as one of our two witnesses, supplied a ring for us to use, which we used for both parts of the "placing a ring on the finger" portion of the ceremony.

However, after being married about nine months, out of the blue my spouse had a change of heart and on Christmas day presented me with a pair of cheap plastic rings, for the symbolism. I was very touched by this gesture, actually, and we occasionally wore them. We were very poor and so a couple of months later, my parents offered to but us a pair of real wedding rings, which they did and we subsequently wore. They were so inexpensive as to be almost entirely symbolic and not having any intrinsic value, which seemed entirely reasonable, even preferable, to both of us. I think both of us would have thought it silly to have expensive rings. Thus I've not really considered selling mine for gold, though I suppose these days it's probably worth a not-insignificant bit of pocket money.

To my mind, that particular progression in our thinking about the rings was sort of ideal. It didn't represent at all to either of us any sort of possessive thing — and, indeed, that's why those issues weren't involved in my decision about when to stop wearing it. In that sense, if I believed that point-of-view had legitimacy (which I didn't and don't), then I'd have stopped wearing it the day of our separation. But, instead, it represented to me my own psychological relationship to our marriage and to her. I needed time to decouple — while other people (including her) seem to have on/off switches, I don't. It's a progression of disengagement for me and that took some time. In actual practical terms, the disengagement was almost entirely complete from the day we separated. But I'm talking more about my mental state, my self-image, my sense of where I am and where I'm going. That took more time for me. And it happened concurrently while big practical changes were happening, including moving to a different city, far away. I was ready to remove the ring before the divorce was finalized, but certainly not on the day of the separation. I can see how others would do this — I think that my ex did this. But, for me, I needed a grieving period and an adjustment period.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:12 PM on July 17, 2012 [1 favorite]

We've all had a viola moment.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 5:41 AM on July 18, 2012

Not me, I played the cello.
posted by grouse at 6:55 AM on July 18, 2012 [2 favorites]

We've all had a viola moment.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 1:41 PM on July 18


A Viola moment.
posted by Decani at 5:51 PM on July 18, 2012

The thing that always has bugged me the most about wedding rings is that they are persistently a "wedding" ring. I'm not wearing a ring because I had a wedding. (I didn't.) I'm wearing a ring because I have a marriage.

Should I no longer have a marriage, I would probably wear this ring on my other hand or on another finger. It's my ring, it means what I want it to mean.
posted by desuetude at 11:56 PM on July 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

We've all had a viola moment.

Bunch of pansies.
posted by Catch at 3:43 AM on July 19, 2012

It's probably a sign of my recovery that I feel worse about misspelling "voila" than I do about my divorce.
posted by compartment at 7:36 AM on July 19, 2012 [7 favorites]

@compartment--so you're a reedie too? :)
posted by jennybento at 9:42 PM on August 1, 2012 [1 favorite]

Oh hey I nearly forgot to do this

My Magical Gay Marriage Cufflinks
posted by The Whelk at 9:03 AM on August 2, 2012 [2 favorites]

I went on a 120 km hike in northern Ontario, and halfway through there was a small lake which I threw my ring into.
posted by fimbulvetr at 6:37 PM on August 7, 2012

Oh yeah, nearly forgot. First I broke it by mashing it with a 1 kg meteorite Then I went for a big long solo hike in the wilderness to toss it in a lake.
posted by fimbulvetr at 6:47 PM on August 7, 2012

Mine is somewhere in my jewelry box - one of those hardware storage bins. It was custom made and blessed by a smith in our religious community, so I feel a little weird trashing it. Every once in a while, I see it and am surprised I have it. I'm pretty sure I took the ring off immediately but I don't really remember. I just remember being glad to get away.
posted by _paegan_ at 3:21 PM on August 12, 2012