What's in a Ring?

About a year ago, I crashed my bike and broke my wedding ring. The band was cracked. A ruby had fallen out. The prongs on the diamond were bent and the diamond was in danger of falling out. The ring had already been repaired several times due to rubies falling out and posts being bent. At one point, I had 2 more posts added because there were only 4 of them and the diamond nearly fell out once when one got bent. We bought the ring in 1987for $500- it was on sale at Christmas for ½ price. We weren’t even engaged yet, although we knew we would be soon. That’s a whole different story. Anyway, we WERE engaged shortly after and I wore that ring for 20 years until it broke. We’ve been looking for a new ring ever since.

The thing is, I was trying to find a ring where I could put the stones from the old ring into the new setting. I’m very sentimental and I wanted a piece of the old in the new. I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find something that was just right. It had to be unique. It had to special and nearly one of a kind. It had to mean something , and it had to speak to me. I have enough “stuff” in my life that now I only buy what I love. I’m also afraid of impulse purchases and buyer’s remorse. It also couldn’t cost too much, because I’m a frugalista. That’s my new word for cheapskate! I previously mentioned my first ring was $500. Well, now I make about 15 times what I made back then, but there is no way I’m paying $75,000 for a ring!!

The other problem is finding something that we both love. The good news is, we have pretty similar tastes in jewelry. That’s shocking! It took us 10 years to buy our own silverware (stainless steelware, of course) because we couldn’t agree on a pattern. It took us about 13 years to buy an entire set of matching dishes! We had been using my mom’s wedding china for years- it had a lot of pieces missing… then one day, we were at a bazaar in Japan and we saw a set we both loved. We bought enough for 12 place settings instantly because it was the first time in 18 years of marriage we saw one we both liked. So you see the problem…..

I have been to every chain jeweler in the States and a ton of private ones looking for a ring I love. I had also been to several jewelers in Japan. And Australia. I was starting to give up and was searching for a private jewelry maker. Now, here we are in the Caribbean. This is the gem stone capital of the world. Apparently, there are no taxes, everything can be bought duty free and DeBeers, which owns about 90% of the diamond mines in the world, has stores here under various names, so they cut out 2 or 3 middle men and can sell them cheaper. We spent a few hours in Jamaica looking at diamond stores and didn’t see anything we liked. We also had no intention of making an impulse purchase of a wedding ring while on our cruise. Well, I’m sure you can see where this is going! While in Grand Cayman, we had 3 hours to kill and there isn’t much else you can do in 3 hours except to shop. So we did. In about the second store, we found 4 rings that we both really liked and they were all reasonable prices. I had the lady write down the product numbers and prices on all of them. We left and looked in a bunch of other stores, mostly trying to find something that we could both agree on and maybe buy over the internet or in another store in the States or on another trip to the Caribbean next year. We were determined not to make an impulse buy. But one ring stuck in my head. And everything I looked at I compared to it. That’s when I knew I had to go see it again. So we went back to the store, looked at all 4, narrowed it down one by one. First the one Jack didn’t really like much at all went. Then the one that was my least favorite was off the table. Then we were down to 2, which were equally gorgeous, but one was the one I had been thinking of. And I kept trying to figure out a scheme to make the second one look a bit more like the one I had been thinking of. Then I did Eeny Meeny Miny Mo- which is the way I’ve settled a lot of major decisions in my life. Seriously! Once the game has determined the choice, I know in my heart whether I’m happy with the decision or whether I was hoping for a different outcome. It picked the one I had been thinking of, which as soon as it did, I knew that’s what I was hoping for. So some more comparisons. Some more angst. And then the choice was made. That one. It’s small, sort of old fashioned looking, with small diamonds going down the band on each side, and has a blue diamond in the center. Yup- a blue diamond. I have never seen one before and I doubt I’ll be seeing many in the future. It’s a regular diamond that has been irradiated to produce the blue color. Just like the pink and yellow diamonds are created. I thought they were natural, but it turns out that nearly none of them are. And this ring cost less than 6 times what my first ring cost- still less than most first time rings today, I think. So I got a unique ring, fit for a Frugalista!

So, back to the original question. Is it any less a wedding ring because I didn’t get it in a special ceremony? Can it be a wedding ring just because we say it is? I think so. My wedding gown was my senior prom dress. Since everyone kept asking us if we were getting married, I figured it must look like a wedding dress. And I was too cheap to spend a gajillion dollars on a dress I would never wear again. It might help to know that we got married in college and neither one of us had much money then. Plus, as I said, I’m cheap. And what to do with my old ring? I can’t just leave it in a drawer for the rest of my life. But I’m not sure I wasn’t to repair it and wear it as my wedding ring anymore, because then my new one won’t feel like my wedding ring. What to do?!?!?! I really don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. But for now, I have a new ring that is as unique as the first one (many people never realized that one was a wedding ring), was bought on a special trip, and we both love it. I think it’s symbolic of our relationship overall. We are pretty non-traditional and we don’t always do things the way others would expect us to do them. That will have to do for now.