Monday, November 12, 2012

Ring up my plea - Guilty As Charged

Something my husband said the other morning, I forget what, annoyed me just a wee bit - which broke a dream I'd been having just before waking.

He'd bought me an engagement ring.

WOW!  We got engaged in 2005 and married a few months later. I didn't have a ring. We were married with cheap 'greenstone' rings partly due to budget, partly timing. The idea was to get wedding rings when we worked out exactly what we wanted - at some relevant time like our wedding anniversary. Time went on....

Anyway, in this dream, he gave me a ring.

I hated it!

In fact, thinking about it, it was pretty cool. But it was diamond and sapphires and I have no especial love for sapphires.

This was like a ring of smooth polished diamond with circles of different coloured sapphires kind of piled onto it.  Very modern. Very architectural. But it was glued with Uhu or something and it all fell to bits. Which left me with just this asymmetrical smooth carved diamond ring, that didn't glitter.

WHAT?

I felt awful.  Here he was giving me this ring, finally, that he'd had carefully made (only not carefully - he was muttering something about it being just a test one...), but I just couldn't like it. I knew I should love it, whatever it was, but in my dream I was saying "I just don't like it. Why would you get me sapphires?  I kind of get that it's cool, but, I dunno, I just.... I kind of think why bother having diamonds if they're not sparkly."  And I felt really mean and ungrateful, but also invisible. How could this man think I would like sapphires and unsparkly diamonds?  Now I'm not a 'crazy about diamonds' kind of woman. When we got married I wasn't into them at all and was quite happy to have a single ring. We talked about having one beautiful ring each, with some kind of design to them. Rings we each liked, that were individual but somehow similar.  We talked about it for a while, then the subject got dropped.  Right around the time the word Love disappeared from our house.
Better or worse?!

Maybe that was why,  as time went on, I thought perhaps a single ring but something with some little diamonds in it, for a bit of sparkly bling.  And then more time passed, and stuff happened, and I started to think "Sod it, I'll have a big fat sparkly not-blood diamond thank you. Well, a smallish one anyway."  And why not make it an engagement ring all by its self, after all!  So I showed him the odd pic, dropped the odd hint...  Things turned in a different direction and well, I haven't bought him a wedding ring (though in my defence I did get him a rather gorgeous greenstone pendant as a wedding present.  He got me... erm... let me think... erm... I'll get back to you on that one...)

Anyway, here was my 'dream' husband presenting me with this engagement ring that was nothing like anything I'd shown him, or talked about. It was like a ring he thought his wife should like, the wife he imagined he had, or maybe wished he had, but not one made with the actual me in mind at all. So it almost felt like an insult rather than a gift. So in my dream I felt rejected and sad.

Now, if I had a ring like that made out of glass, I sure as hell would wear it, for fun, to dinner, to a party. But as an engagement ring? I don't see an engagement ring as a gimmick, as something to show off how 'different' you can be. Of all the jewellery I ever wear I guess I kind of think of wedding and engagement rings as being something more understated, private, personal, discreet.

Funny, I never thought about it before.

Hint

But the main thing I'll take from that dream is to make damned sure that next time I buy something for my husband I make sure it's the thing HE wants, not the thing I think he ought to have...

Thinking of past gifts, I'm guilty as charged.

(c) Naomi Madelin 2012


Thanks to http://boards.weddingbee.com/topic/ugly-engagement-rings-post-em


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2 comments:

  1. Oh, yes, you’re right to choose a gift that your husband would want. That way, he’ll think more about what to give you and how you want your diamonds to look like. How about shopping together for the ring once you get to talk about it again?

    Cheers,
    Bridget Rossi

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Bridget. Should couples shop together for the ring? Is it a mutual purchase, or a gift from him to her? I guess it depends on the couple. My feeling is that if someone wants to give someone else a really personal, special gift, they should choose it. Isn't saying "Hey, I want to buy you this special thing but I don't believe I know you well enough or have confidence enough to choose it myself (or maybe I just can't be bothered to put in the time), so come and choose it," a bit of a cop out? To me, taking the plunge and really thinking about the person you are buying for, who they are and what they would like, is the gift more than the thing itself.

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