Sunday, February 19, 2012

Engagement Ring Thing, Part 1

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
1 Corinthians 13:4

I twisted my engagement ring back onto my finger last week for Valentine’s Day.  Ian surprised me with a cooking class for the two of us for the holiday (what a guy!), so I decided to don some of my special jewelry for the evening, including the earrings I wore on our wedding day and my diamond solitaire engagement ring (don’t worry, we didn’t get our hands too messy during the class).  It’s still sitting pretty on my the finger typing the letters s, w, q and x in this post.  

I hadn’t worn it for many months before last week.  I took off my engagement ring last summer because it’s a bit tight, even more so when my already-stubby fingers puff up in the summer heat.  After wearing it for nearly two years straight (a year before the wedding, and a year after), I was surprised that I didn’t miss it very much.  I enjoyed the simplicity of just wearing my wedding band.  So I kept my engagement ring in my jewelry chest, wearing it only sporadically.

But after a few comments about its absence last year, I started wondering: should I always wear my engagement ring with my wedding band?

Don’t get me wrong.  I love my engagement ring.  Ian and I picked out the diamond together at Leber Jeweler in Chicago.  It’s a sustainably mined 3/4 carat diamond from Canada.  (Adorable fact about Canadian mined diamonds: in a effort to build a national brand, Canadian diamonds are etched with a microscopic image of either a bear or a maple leaf.)  I remember sitting in the jeweler’s office watching him pull various diamonds out of their red maple leaf-emblazoned paper squares, spreading them delicately across a soft velvety piece of black fabric.  It all felt very James Bond. But the gems didn’t even matter that much to me because all of the sparklers laying in front of us represented something much more precious: that we were acting on the commitment we both felt in our hearts.  

I proudly wore my engagement ring for the year of wedding planning, and quietly slipped it onto my right hand on our big day.



 

And with these words: “this ring which we have chosen together, I give in token of the covenant made this day between us.”  - we crowned our wedding bands as two of our most important possessions, knocking engagement ring off its meaningfulness throne  Because it plays second fiddle now, I don’t mind not wearing it.  Simply put: I’m not engaged anymore.

So I take pleasure in the simplicity of my wedding band. It doesn’t draw attention, no one asks to see it, and no one judges its size.  Therein lies another, perhaps more important reason I sometimes choose to keep my engagement ring in my jewelry chest: because it makes me feel a little bit self-conscious, which I’ll explore in Part 2.

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