Wedding Bands

A few years ago, I developed a temporary skin allergy on my hands. It didn’t last long; I never found out what caused it or made it go away; and, in the scheme of things, its effect on my life was negligible. But it did for some reason make my fingers itch unbearably whenever I wore rings. So for those few weeks while it lasted, I stopped wearing them.

I am not a great wearer of adornments. (“Minimalist” is the description I’d choose; if another person were to prefer frumpy, they might just not find themselves without company). I will wear a simple necklace when Mr. Los Angeles and I go out, mostly because he likes it and he is the one who has to look at me after all; I also have an engraved silver cuff bracelet of my mother’s that I break out on extremely fancy occasions; but my youthful ear piercings grew over years ago, and the only brooch I have worn in decades is an Irish flag pin for St. Patrick’s Day. I do wear a wristwatch, because since my idly drifting writer’s life very rarely requires me to be anywhere very much at all at any time very much at all, I am therefore the very much more fanatically obsessed with checking the hour of the day at any hour it falls. And I also wear two rings: my wedding band on my left hand, and on my right another gold band inset with tiny diamonds, which Mr. Los Angeles gave me early in our marriage.

When I was first required to ditch the rings I was prepared, even somewhat tickled, to do so. I felt girlish, mildly naughty. Who was this woman, I asked myself silently, sashaying down the street with her fingers bare of signs of commitment, her hands scrubbed clean of history? Unbotoxed and proudly carrying the spread of her middle years, she was visibly of an age to have stories to tell: what strange dramas could her past therefore hold that she had made so momentous a choice as not to display a hint of them? There was a mystery here, I thought. I quite intrigued myself.

As the novelty wore off, however, the titillation began to pall. A wedding ring is not an enormous piece of metal: the napkin-holder sized piece on Mr. Los Angeles’ impressively mighty hand weighs barely 6.2 grams, while that on even my own large peasant paw slips in at just 2.4. But it is an appendage that I usually wear so regularly and so unthinkingly that it has become almost a part of my body itself; and, although I am not usually conscious of it when I am wearing it, I found that I became acutely aware when I was not.

Reaching fruitlessly to the finger indentations where my rings usually sat, I began to realize how many times during the day I thought of Mr. Los Angeles, whether to tell him of something that had happened, or make a plan for something that was about to happen, or simply to share a silly joke; and how accustomed I had become in those times to sensing those two tiny weights of gold on my fingers, and how bare and lonely my hands felt now that they were no longer there. Although it was summer, they began to feel really quite cold.

It would not have occurred to any of the married women in my family to remove their wedding rings. When I was a child, I once asked my mother whether she ever took hers off: we were at a family gathering, she was sitting with a couple of my aunts who all looked at each and laughed in the knowing way that women do, and I knew that something was being communicated that was powerful in a way I could not yet understand. My grandmother had been left a widow in her forties: when she lay dying in her eighties and her fingers had grown so thin that the nuns at the hospice had removed her rings for safety, she looked down at her hands, this fearsome matriarch who for decades had ruled with a rod of iron her family, the parish priest, and several hapless bank managers, who had been married for twenty years and widowed for forty, and said, simply and forlornly, “Without my wedding ring, I don’t know who I am.”

The strangest point of my own ringless experience was the evening when Mr. Los Angeles and I decided to try a new restaurant for a romantic dinner. The space was small and flatteringly lit; a candle flickered on the table between us. We ate, we flirted, we laughed; we exchanged memories, revived private jokes. Mr. Los Angeles reached his manly hand to cover mine; I reached my free hand to cover his. It was only when my bare finger brushed his ringed that it occurred to me: he was visibly a married man, but, to the outside observer, I would appear to be single.

It is not, I must make clear, that an eager throng was crowding to watch us: Mr. Los Angeles and I are neither famous nor even particularly interesting to look at, and there was no reason to suppose that even one curious soul might be lurking in the shadow of the fiddle-leaf fig tree with furrowed brow of fascination to study our encounter and ponder its meaning; but if there were, I suddenly thought, and they chanced to look at our hands, what on earth would they make of us? Might they think that Mr. Los Angeles was the sort of person who would cheat on his wife? Might they think that I was the sort of person who would be party to cheating on Mr. Los Angeles’ wife? Where was Mr. Los Angeles’ wife this evening, anyway? I do not usually pay much attention to what opinions even real human strangers might form of my private life, let alone hypothetical lurkers in the shadow of the fiddle-leaf fig; but on that occasion, I found, it bothered me quite considerably.

It is, when you consider it, a thoroughly bizarre thing to get married. To select just the one person out of all the millions of people in the world, and say, “I choose you, and you alone, to spend the rest of my life with; I promise to be kind and faithful to you for all of it, no matter how long it will last or what it may throw at us or how it may change us; and when, out of all the millions of other people in the world, you make the same promise to me, I still think you sane enough that I believe you.”

Strange, yes; but couples have been marrying each other almost since time began, and since not much long after have been marking their commitment by exchanging rings. It was the ancient Romans who chose to place them on the third finger of the left hand, in the belief that that finger contained a vein, the vena amoris, that flowed directly to the heart: although that particular anatomical theory has now gone the way of the toga, the custom, along with the aqueduct and much of the modern legal system, remains. Not everyone today chooses to wear their partner’s ring; but for those who do, it transmits a clear and unmistakable message, not only to the world, but to the wearer too. It is a reminder that you are no longer a single person but part of a pair: that, wherever you go and whatever you do, there is another person somewhere who shares your life, who has your back, who is your pal.

Mr. Los Angeles and I do not have a picture-perfect union. There are times when we disagree; there are times when we want to strangle each other; there are times when we each look at the other and think, “What on earth was I thinking?” But we wear each other’s ring through the good times and the bad; we never (well, except for the time one of us had an allergic reaction, and the time another removed his to wash his hands in a gas station and forgot to replace it, and have you any idea how the price of gold has shot up over the years?) even consider not doing so.

I still don’t know what made my allergy go away. But I was awfully pleased when it did.