How do you buy a wedding ring?

Posted on | April 25, 2010 | 13 Comments

The next bit of wedding planning is to buy the rings, since we both agree we’d like to have one. It was different with the engagement. I proposed to William so I didn’t expect a ring. I am also not much of a jewelry person. But wow, try explaining that to someone sometime, that you don’t see the need for an engagement ring. People really don’t mind telling you their opinion about that one.

I already had my mother’s engagement ring in any case. It’s quite beautiful: four small diamonds set to make a square so that the pattern makes a cross. It’s also a bit religious in that way. I think my mum converted to Catholicism before marrying my Dad.

I started wearing mum’s ring about a year ago when my Aunty told me I should. She was thinking of the symbolism (and no doubt her relief!) that I am “taken”. And as one of my few living female relatives, I figure it’s the least I can do to make my Aunty happy.

But I like to wear it because it reminds me of mum as much as it does the other connotations. Mum died before I met William, and by wearing the ring I try to enact some kind of conciliation between what I know she hoped for my happiness and one of the ways that happiness has taken shape. It also makes me feel connected to my past family at the same time as I am preparing to join another.

Last weekend William and I tried to find some jewelery shops to look at some rings, even just to work out what size we are, etc. We found a couple of places in the city but in each case we left quickly feeling really flustered and intimidated. One was way too fancy and everything felt too important and expensive for us to ask to see. The second, more mainstream shop was just the opposite – quite crowded. The wedding ring counter was already taken by two couples and I got the feeling they would be there for some time.

We tried a few more places that we found in the arcades but by then I was starting to realise that “buying the rings” was creating some serious conflicts for me in terms of my critical “gender studies” habits. I was feeling a rush of adrenaline when entering the shops that wasn’t what you’d call positive. It was more a feeling of terror and alienation, as if we didn’t belong here and shouldn’t be pretending that we did.

Well, that’s also the feeling I get trying to do a lot of other normative things and it’s only typical of our relationship that we ended up abandoning the ring shopping and spending the rest of the afternoon at a book shop. William bought a journalism book and I bought three cultural theory ones – including a history of marriage!

From the safe theoretical position I profess regularly I can of course note the following: that the feeling I had in the jewelry stores comes from seeing in other couples the kind of pleasure I am supposed to be feeling in wanting to get married; that what I saw was other couples performing a script I am supposed to know how to act and enjoy.

But what does it mean to want to get married when this isn’t the kind of pleasure you want from it? If buying or receiving the ring isn’t the most profound statement of love and self you will ever be able to make?

I also wonder if it’s possible for our rings to be a symbol of commitment that doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to intense, hyperbolic consumerist citizenship. I think this is where I’m at a disadvantage without my mum around any more. That’s because even if I’m not religious I think she might have been able to help me broker a solution to this that is more suited to my politics (as well as all the other tacit forms of confidence that having a mother can bring, that only not having a mother around makes you appreciate).

Without her too, I think that maybe what I lack right now is a set of knowledges shared between women that would help me fill this void of understanding who I am in relation to options presented entirely by the market (okay, maybe I’m talking about more than rings here). Combined with other wedding preparations I’ve talked about here, I’m certainly worried about the parasitic relationship between love and commerce, and would like to think more about how it’s possible to nourish the kind of extended family and kinship networks that can revitalise and sustain people in a variety of intimate relationships, in addition to marriage as an institution.

So, without having any other advice right now, this post is of course a really long way of asking whether any of you reading know of any nice places to buy a ring? Or people who make rings, maybe even out of existing ones? And honestly, what would you think of someone who bought a wedding ring online? :-)

Category: Events, Gender, Marriage

Comments

13 Responses to “How do you buy a wedding ring?”

  1. Laura
    April 25th, 2010 @ 10:09 pm

    we just walked into a small jewellers’ shop in a high street and asked the jeweller to make us two plain gold bands, which he did, and that was that. Couldn’t have been easier. If you intend to wear your mother’s ring with your wedding ring, you can ask a jeweller to match the gold.

  2. H
    April 25th, 2010 @ 11:58 pm

    I know a friend of mine got her ring at a jeweller in the Blue Mountains. I’m pretty sure it was in Leura. Might feel a little less commercial and you could make a nice day of it :)

  3. jeremy hunsinger
    April 26th, 2010 @ 1:30 am

    Engagement ring is the important one. The wedding rings were simple bands, bought from amazon, her’s gold, mine tungsten carbide.

  4. Monique
    April 26th, 2010 @ 1:37 am

    Hi Mel

    I once thought it would be a hilarious joke to get married to my boyfriend. It was my first big love and it was all new and exciting. Marriage meant little to either of us because both our parents were divorced. It seemed like it would be mighty fun and cute. I might even get a pretty dress out of it.

    As gender studies students we thought of it as a wonderful way to burlesque the ridiculous notions of marriage that we still grow up with. Even with divorced feminist mothers, you can’t escape Hollywood cinema. It remains the inevitable, the ideal narrative ending. It seemed marvellous to be the first of all my friends to get married, but to do it in a way that ridiculed the whole idea. I could say to people at uni “Oh just let me check with my husband and I’ll get back to you.”

    But a number of other concerns began to crowd into the picture. Legally, it would change the way Centrelink considered me for Youth Allowance. Socially, it was mean to make fun of my friends who wanted to take marriage seriously. Emotionally, my partner felt it wasn’t appropriate to upset his grandmother who was dying of cancer and wouldn’t have understood it as a joke.

    What I eventually had to realise is that marriage is actually a ritual about other people, about friends and family. It isn’t really about the relationship of the couple, but about the symbolic significance for the people around them. A way of formally acknowledging and legitimating the relationship to the world; bringing together two families and friendship groups.

    The point of telling this story is in the hope that seeing the ring as symbolically significant to other people takes the pressure off from having to follow some ficitonal internal narrative that feels false.

    I have friends whose approach to marriage has been either worryingly religious or frighteningly commercial. Either way they are highly introspective about their expectations of self-satisfaction and goo-ey romance. Perhaps this is why they are always dissapointed after the fact. Because in the end the ring doesn’t really change anything but the significance of your relationship to other people.

  5. remy
    April 26th, 2010 @ 8:45 am

    haha! I laughed when i read “it’s only typical of our relationship that we ended up abandoning the ring shopping and spending the rest of the afternoon at a book shop“, I’m pretty sure that’s what happened with my wife and I when we went ring shooping, only on that occasion I bought Sartre’s ‘Not Exit’ and she bought Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’! (I know… maybe this was symptomatic of our unconscious at the time)

    I also empathise entirely with the necessity of the maternal superego, even if only to reassure us that all the bumbling and doubts are actually key checkpoints along a well-worn path.

    On the matter of rings, we also felt nauseated by the bombardment of consumer images and implicit moralistic injunctions to do this or that. Have you considered an antique shop? we found that much more “in our zone”, and an interesting walk though history as well. Melinda got an antique ring left behind by a “war bride” from 1946. In the end, that’s where we got our rings… as cynical postconsumerist types, at least we could console ourselves with an ironic distance to the ‘thing’ itself.

  6. ben
    April 26th, 2010 @ 11:11 am

    I’ve been married for ten years, and am only now thinking about wedding rings. We didn’t even have a wedding. I spent a couple of decades rejecting ritual, but despite all the arguments I still have against the glorification of heteronormative coupling, I recently discovered that by nonetheless getting married and failing to mark this event with any symbols, I was effectively being lazy and *not actually being bothered with* ritual, which is quite different from my critique of marriage, I guess. And with no other obvious symbolic rhythms at hand, it was easy to fall prey to the less acknowledged ones that can insinuate themselves into one’s habitus, e.g. the culture of work, imperialising everything in its path.

    Now I don’t want to suggest that wedding rings magically protect you from work/life imbalance (!), but I do appreciate the idea of at least being *mindful* about our relationships with such symbols, with all the friction that might exist there. Give yourself a mindful architecture, and you will remain alert in your lives. Including a critique of heteronormative conformity in how you mark this occasion is better than having the occasion and leaving it unmarked, leaving you to disappear into some maze of Contemporary Life(tm). I have no brilliant ideas on how “remark” this marking with objects like rings, but for the heteroexclusive ceremony I’m still sticking with pushing my concept of commentary via Bob Dylan cards, which I wish I’d done with my own occasion :) . Perhaps super-plain wedding bands (which you could get practically anywhere) with some excellent engraved commentary? Or would that look too Lord of the Rings?

  7. melgregg
    April 26th, 2010 @ 3:58 pm

    Oh wow. These are all such great suggestions. Please keep them coming, because the stories attached are amazing :-)

  8. Michelle
    April 26th, 2010 @ 8:27 pm

    Mel, to only begin a response: I, too, felt very awkward walking into Michael Hill Jewellers, or Prouds (ha!), or whichever shops we went into. Since we’re both women, most sales assistants didn’t really make the chit-chat that they probably would with a male-female couple looking for rings. One woman tried, but assumed that we were looking for “a commitment ring”–which I suppose it is–but it did reinforce that we didn’t really belong there.

    Mainly, what I want to tell you right now is that you should not buy a ring online. Wedding bands all feel different. Some have edges that are more bevelled, others feel more blunt-cut, some are thin, and others are thick. You won’t know how they feel on your particular finger unless you try them on. You are going to be wearing these rings for a long time, so you need something that feels comfortable. And some people prefer white gold or platinum, rather than yellow gold.

    I don’t feel very attached to my ring, strangely. I thought I would be. But it really isn’t that important to me. The terribly romantic truth is that I can’t even wear the damned thing all the time, because it gives me dermatitis! Sigh.

  9. Meredith
    April 26th, 2010 @ 9:31 pm

    We got ours made here & they did a beautiful job. http://www.thedymocksbuilding.com.au/sitefiles/businessdetails.asp?idBusiness=36&idCategory=2

    It’s slightly seedy up on level 3 of the Dymocks Building but I like that. They have a massive collection of photos of things they’ve made for people.

    Richard got plain gold but I had a little ruby that my mum had given my for my 16th birthday (as one of a pair of earring-studs) that I wanted incorporated into my band to remind me of Mum but also because my daughter’s name is Ruby.

    I love the ring and it was really worth putting effort & the thought into it. And it cost about the same as just buying one from a mainstream jeweller.

  10. Senga
    April 27th, 2010 @ 7:35 am

    Mel, I second Remy’s suggestion of an antique shop. My ring is a 1930s diamonds set in platinum (sounds more expensive than it was!) We actually chose this as an engagement ring and I didn’t get a wedding ring. I bought another antique ring for myself – a black diamond set in white gold – to celebrate surviving my first year of motherhood!

  11. Tammi
    April 27th, 2010 @ 2:22 pm

    Wow, Mel, this brings back memories and hits me at a time when I’ve stopped wearing my wedding ring, though I have no intention of leaving my dear husband of these past 16 years. Here’s our little story then:

    Stuart had a silver Russian wedding ring from his grandmother when we got married, so since we were poor, we decided it would be his ring and I would get one in three golds (white, rose, yellow). About 3 years later I surprised him with one that actually matched mine in golds, but blew it on the size so he’s always worn it on his middle finger (d’oh), but neither of us were fussed & too expensive to resize.

    About a year ago I started to think mine was a bit small, maybe even insipid, as I now tend to wear very chunky rings on my other hand. Basically, I’ve ‘outgrown’ my original ring, unsurprisingly given we were married at 23! I took it off over summer because in the heat and doing lots of travel, it was feeling too tight. I haven’t put it back on. I’ve really enjoyed bare fingers. I like casting off my conventional past, which included a very conventional wedding I wouldn’t dream of allowing now (my MIL organised it all as my fam are in the US).

    After toying with the idea of no ring, I’m leaning back towards wanting one, but one that suits the very different character I am today. So I’m looking for a big, chunky platinum/silver/white gold (don’t really care which, I’ll choose on the patina) ring. I’ve even considered a tattoo of an interrobang on my hand that would wrap up around my finger. ;-)

    I guess my point is one you’ve already articulated in your angst – your love is (meant to be and hopefully will be) forever. The ring is just props. It signifies lots of things, but mostly it just tells the world you’re attached (or a chattel, in some views). Rather than looking at lots of rings to decide how to signify that, I reckon I’d close my eyes and imagine what I want to look at on my hand for the rest of my life (or maybe just 16 years, then trade it in!). I’m looking forward to stumbling across the one I have pictured in my head. :-)

  12. ana australiana
    April 27th, 2010 @ 4:58 pm

    You could always try a Catherine of Siena, if Jeebus has any foreskin left? And I’ve been thinking about your vows and the silly Australian man-woman rule, so… how about doing them in another language? Is that allowed? If it was French you could use the lovely word alliance, for wedding ring, or indeed radical communal bond! xx

  13. Rosie
    April 30th, 2010 @ 1:34 pm

    hey Mel!
    If you feel conflicted about buying rings, why not make them yourself? I think there’s a place in the Dymocks Building on George St where you do a workshop and make the bands yourself?
    Alternatively, I used to work in a precious jewellery store in the Strand Arcade (consumer-central!) but my boss Manuela is the loveliest person. She sits with you and talks about what it is you want, measures your ring size and makes a bespoke ring to your budget and desire. The shop is full of gorgeous stuff but you can go as ornate or simple as you like- it’s called ‘Zappacosta Jewels’ on level three.
    Alternatively, antiques could be the go? My fave antique shop is Victory Antiques in Blackheath- heaps less exxy than antiques in Sydney, and the shop used to be a cinema! It’s full of crazy stuff, great for an afternoon fossick, and the attached cafe has pretty great coffee too:)

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