Rings
When the salesperson at the chain jewelry store asked how long my partner and I had been looking for rings, I didn’t tell him the full truth. I think I said something like “oh, we just started looking”, which was technically accurate. I was just there to browse and get my finger sized, I told him. What I didn’t tell him was that I’d only met Richard three weeks ago; I didn’t want to look like an outright fool.
Me, 12 years old: braces on my teeth, frizzy brown curls I hadn’t yet learned how to tame, a lonely and precocious “browner” whose desperate need for approval applied to my teachers first, friends second. My periodic and intense crushes were requited only in my daydreams and my diary. When my teacher gave us a sheet of sentence prompts to complete, I finished “I need…” with “a boyfriend”; being wanted was the solution to finally being cool enough.
My first kiss happened a little later that year: I was at a bonfire party, on a farm, and someone suggested playing hide and seek in the cornfield. I was the only one who was under the mistaken impression that we were actually going to play hide and seek. When my crush found me amidst the cornstalks and smashed his sloppy wet mouth all over mine, my immediate reaction was to pull back and say “ugh!”. The next day, when a group of us went to an IMAX movie and I wouldn’t make out with him because I wanted to watch the movie, he “dumped me” via a mutual friend.
Two and a half decades later, having grown up on a steady diet of romcoms I only later learned (and then unlearned) to feel guilty about loving, I was still chasing the solution: a partner + a ring + 1.8 offspring = happily ever after. A partner would mean someone finally loved me. Never mind all the other people in my life who loved me fiercely; in a world that elevates romance to a pinnacle, at least for women, and revolves around the nuclear family, at least in the West, only a romantic partner would do. A ring would mean I’d been chosen; this symbol and my yearning for it a holdover of both my lonely childhood and thousands of years of women’s value being tied to their marriageability. I, like almost every straight(ish) woman I know, wanted to be that girl, hands to my mouth in mock surprise, tearing up at the sight of my partner down on one knee, squealing “yes! A thousand times yes!” as he rose up to kiss me. As for the offspring, I wanted desperately to be a mother. In an ideal world, the two children I would have with my partner would be a manifestation of our infinite love. In reality, the clock was running out on my childbearing years, and I wasn’t willing to let those years tick away while I searched for Mr. Right.
At 36, I froze some eggs for insurance. I’d just ended a relationship with Mr. Almost But Not Quite It because, as lovely as he was, he didn’t want kids. A mentor convinced me that maybe romance and motherhood didn’t have to be so inextricably intertwined, so I started trying to conceive on my own—a plan B, as it were, but one I was growing toward being able to embrace. I continued dating through it all, because I was still running the unwinnable race of having all my problems solved by romance, and I wouldn’t give up on love until I’d found it. I was on three dating apps, and in a window of potentially being pregnant but not knowing yet, when I met Richard.
After our first date, we texted nonstop for days. We kept discovering reasons our meeting was fated: we’d had the same residence room at McGill, years apart; we’d both volunteered at the Sexual Assault Centre on campus; we both loved Ani DiFranco; we both tended to fall hard and fast. We were doing just that, over text, playing perfectly into each other’s fantasies.
Leading up to our second date, Elvis’s “Fools Rush In” was playing on repeat in my head, and instead of seeing it as prescient, I took it as romantic; this should have been the first sign. On that date, when I nervously told Richard that I’d already been trying to conceive, he took it in stride. If was pregnant, he’d love that child as ours; if I wasn’t, it would give us a chance to make one together. It was our second date. Richard had ended a nine-year relationship just weeks before we’d met, because he realized he wanted kids, and his partner didn’t; he wanted the fairy tale almost as desperately as I did.
During our third date, Richard pounded the table while he told me—loudly, in a crowded restaurant—that naturopaths were snake oil salesmen, and “if it worked, they’d call it medicine”. By then, I was too far gone, my blinders too far up, to do anything but excuse this as a passionate difference of opinion and feel proud that we’d gotten through it calmly, at least on my part.
A week later, we were in his car, headed to Ottawa together on our first road trip. We’d already declared, fools that we were, that there was no “after” this relationship for us—this was it. Our engagement was a foregone conclusion at this point, so we entertained ourselves on the drive by answering the questions from a book I’d found called 101 Questions to Ask Before You Get Engaged[1]. Unbeknownst to us, it was a very Christian text, and included questions such as “what is your relationship to Christ?” For a staunch atheist and a secular Jew, this was hilarious, but it did give us an opportunity to share our relationship to religion and spirituality more deeply. Only now, years later, when I look back at an online preview of this book, do I realize that I apparently missed the first chapter altogether: “Warning—Never Marry (or Get Engaged to) a Stranger”. I suppose we’d fooled ourselves and each other into thinking we were no longer strangers.
In the conversation in which we discussed our inevitable engagement, I “offered” (decreed) the following “guidelines” (rules):
I wanted to be proposed to. Modern feminist that I was, I was too attached to this symbol to let it go. Despite the fact that this would be his third engagement, he was willing to comply.
I wanted the proposal to feel special. This proposal could fall anywhere on the spectrum between (but excluding) rolling over in bed one morning and throwing the ring at me and organizing a 200-person flash mob.
The night after I’d gotten my ring finger sized by that unsuspecting salesperson at Spencer’s Diamonds, Richard and I lay in bed scrolling through lab-grown diamond ring designs until we found one we both loved. The next morning, when I woke up and turned over, he showed me the order confirmation. I made him promise not to give it to me until I told him explicitly that I was ready. I loved the idea of the ring, but the idea of the real thing on my finger terrified me. This should have been yet another sign.
Before I took him home for the holidays, I decided to pack what I needed so I could tell him I was ready. Years before, by the cash of a random little cafe and shop on Adelaide, I’d noticed a bowl of smooth, flat, unvarnished wooden hearts. When I saw them, I immediately decided that I’d give that token to the person with whom I’d spend my life when I found them. I bought a heart and held onto it through several moves and several relationships. Sometimes, I would find it in the back of a drawer while I was in a relationship and think, “maybe, but not yet”; those maybes never turned into a yes, but now I’d found my yes in Richard. I made a small felt box to contain the heart and wrote its story in a card, concluding with the words: “I’m ready. Your move, my love.”
A week later, he told me he’d booked his own birthday dinner, at the restaurant on Ossington where we’d had our second date. He’d also gotten us tickets to the symphony for the following night. It didn’t take me long to start wondering if there was a very real reason we were having two fancy dates in one weekend. I was simultaneously in excited overdrive and replaying every scene in every romcom where the female lead builds up what she thinks is going to be a proposal in her head, only to get very different news. To be clear, I wasn’t actually afraid he was going to break up with me instead of proposing, à la Warner and Elle in Legally Blonde; after all, he’d already bought the ring. I just thought that there was a very real possibility that I was setting myself up for ridiculous and ungrateful disappointment if it wasn’t happening yet. I still went out and bought two new outfits and did my nails, just in case.
When we walked into the restaurant’s private back patio, exactly fifty-five days after we’d met, all of our friends were there waiting. Richard got down on one knee, nervously made a heartfelt speech, and slid the ring onto my finger. We—I—had done it. I’d arrived at the solution to life. I’d finally been chosen. I was in bliss.
Only one week later, we got The News: the news that broke my heart and shattered his; the news that we may not be able to make babies together after all. The news that turned my Dr. Jekyll into a Mr. Hyde. Neither of us coped with the news particularly well, and a pattern began to develop: his anxiety would mount, land on a particular topic—my slippers on the floor, my friends “flaunting” their polyamory, my wanting to go out for dinner with a friend—and launch at me in a tirade. These episodes became more and more frequent, with barely a reprieve between. At one point, the actual words “it’s not like I’ve been hitting you” came out of his mouth. The worse it got, the more I fidgeted with the ring on my finger, wondering if I’d get to keep it, or if I even wanted it anymore.
At the therapy session where our relationship came to a head, Richard pulled out the little wooden heart I’d given him and placed it on the couch between us. The drama of it is comedic in retrospect; he’d brought the heart, knowing it was over, just to underscore the end of the fairy tale. Fifty-five days in, fifty-one days out.
I went home and packed a bag, preparing to leave the place to him for 48 hours to get himself out. As I walked out, I took the ring off my finger and left it on the shelf by the door for him to find. Part of me hoped he’d leave it, like I deserved to keep it given what I’d been through, if only to throw it off a bridge somewhere in a fit of spite. But when I came home to a now empty-seeming condo, the wooden heart was in its place. My finger was bare. Apparently, I was going to have to be my own solution.
Months later, I bought myself a (recycled) diamond ring. It’s been three years now since my daughter was born, and that ring no longer fits on the finger for which I bought it. But it’s mine.
[1] By H. Norman Wright
First published in the Wine Country Writers’ Festival Anthology 2024