{"id":7352,"date":"2009-04-09T17:49:02","date_gmt":"2009-04-10T01:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=7352"},"modified":"2009-04-09T17:49:02","modified_gmt":"2009-04-10T01:08:50","slug":"whenever-the-subject-turns-to-engagement-and-wedding-rings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=7352","title":{"rendered":"Whenever the subject turns to engagement and wedding rings…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…as it does in this Pandagon post<\/a>, I wonder whether anyone else felt like my husband and I did — that having rings was a tangible reminder of each other’s presence and love, even when we weren’t in the same place. I was living alone in Iowa when we got formally engaged (we’d been informally engaged for a long time before that), and it was nice to be able to put on my ring as a reminder of him. We got him an engagement ring, too, which I understand he wore (more often than I did) for the same reason.<\/p>\n

I like gifts of jewelry for this reason. My best friend gave me a seahorse pendant with an aquamarine eye (my engagement ring features an aquamarine because we were not about to do diamonds, cuz no fucking way) that I wear to remind me of her. I still wear the $20 shell pendant my husband gave me when we started dating. And I make my own jewelry as memorials, for instance the blown glass pendant filled with suns and stars that I wear to commemorate the writing workshop where I decided I was going to be a professional writer.<\/p>\n

I make jewelry for people that I hope will serve the same function. It’s really fun to sit down with a collection of stones and crystals and glass and try to figure out how to capture a friend’s tastes and personal style, as well as some of your affection for them, in an attractive, material object.<\/p>\n

Then again, I know that other people are interacting with the cultural symbols of engagement and wedding rings differently than we did — simply from things like the scandalized and angry reactions we had when we went shopping for engagement rings and told people we weren’t going to buy diamonds. Several jewelers told us we HAD to. And then we left. It took a while before we found a small family-owned store where someone said “oh, how European!” and sat down and helped us decide on what we wanted, an aquamarine center stone with two violet sapphires around it, all of the colors supposed to wash together like the gray-blue of the sea on a cloudy day, which is both my favorite color and a very prevalent hue in the city where my husband and I met and left our hearts.<\/p>\n

I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that consumer choice (I have a pink ipod instead of a green one! A relatively inexpensive aquamarine ring instead of a wow-expensive diamond!) is a true expression of individual identity… but I always figured the only reason to follow any of the wedding traditions would be if it was fun. And for me, finding relatively-inexpensive relatively-non-bloody jewelry was fun. And it gives me a tangible and shiny symbol for when I want my husband with me and he’s not there — or when he is with me, and we want to share memories and emotions or just look at pretty rocks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…as it does in this Pandagon post, I wonder whether anyone else felt like my husband and I did — that having rings was a tangible reminder of each other’s presence and love, even when we weren’t in the same … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism-sexism-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}