Yellow gold, white gold – what comes after “engagement ring” and “wedding ring”?

Hello peeps, i moved my blog here cos it's an open site.

Starting with a blog i had on multiply.com that seems to be very popular ... people I don't even know keep coming back to read it!:)

There is an old joke that goes, "Q: What comes after the engagement ring and wedding ring? A: Suffering"

Well an interesting alternative answer materialised after this particular brain dump :)

Yellow gold, white gold – what comes after “engagement ring” and “wedding ring”? Apr 26, '08 8:00 PM


[apologies in advance, this one super cheong hey (long winded)].

I had been wearing my original wedding ring for 11 years.

I had never taken it off, not even when in the shower or washing dishes (yar, you can twist it around and still clean it, and I won’t risk it disappearing down the sink).

It is a platinum ring with a central vein of yellow gold, symbolising strengths protecting vulnerabilities, inscribed with our names and the heart symbol, and our marriage date, 25 Dec 96 (yeah! Xmas day :)). It also has a little diamond in sync with the bigger one on D's identical ring.

The funny thing -- D the man was the one who wanted the diamond ... I've had a casual (non)interest in diamonds ever since i found out it depreciates at 40% ... perhaps appropriate in terms of romance in the average marriage? LOL

But i digress.

Early this year i stopped wearing my wedding ring permanently.

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... cos my fingers grew fat and the ring can't fit any more! (hehehehee what WERE you thinking ...)

Surprisingly this happened when i started weight training in the gym around i think Jan or Feb. I have stopped going to the gym since cos wasnt enjoying it and wasnt seeing any effects and wasnt even perspiring and really wasnt enjoying myself ... so, now I just go for more BodyCombat or BodyJam, 2-4 times a week. But ring still wouldn’t fit leh ;(


What I realised was that i needed music to feel joy during exercise, for it to work for me holistically, not just physically. Happily all that joyful powercardio translated into enough of a shift in body dynamics for me to ditch my size 14 clothes for size 12 *GLEE*.

I stopped wearing my original wedding ring mainly cos the skin under the ring would peel and feel really sore after each workout. Too tight lah, can’t take the sweat.

I am just one of those people whom jewellery doesn't agree with. Even pure gold starts to itch after just hours ... earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings ... perhaps a psychosomatic reaction to the subconscious assertion of the inner tomboy ;) Only the wedding ring has been spared this effect.

How i went about replacing the ring perhaps symbolises the evolution of my marriage and self ;)

When i first told him about it ... "I cant wear my ring anymore, too tight, can you buy me another one?"

"No need lah," he grunted and flicked channels on the TV remote.*

I got upset and sulked, and spiraled into a “he doesn’t love me any more” deep blue funk** wailing over the death of romance in our marriage (so drama-mama right LOL).

[*typical male behaviour and ** typical female behaviour ...see Allan Pease's hilarious yet painfully true book "why men dont have a clue and women always need more shoes"]

For the time my finger was bare I could not FEEL an appreciation of D at all though logically I still admired and respected him and life went on as usual.

I started to think deep into my feelings and attitudes (typical female?), and cornered him to spit out his point of view, which wasn’t easy to stomach cos he was unhappy with me too but just never wanted to talk about it (typical male?). I also started to read up on relationship breakdowns and peripheral subjects like divorce.

Yup, a powerful and scary word, “divorce”.

No (don’t worry, mummy), I did not WANT a divorce (and still don’t), I only wanted to understand it more cos … I have never given it much thought before cos no one I know has ever been divorced, till I came to Aus and realized how common it was, and how little I understood why people would split up, etc etc. I was also curious if there was something more beyond my then superficial understanding of, “Nope, whatever happens, need to stay together for the sake of the kids.” Because all those Aussie blended families I knew seemed happy enough.


So, I attacked my blind spot regarding this topic. I guess such analysis is a useful skill I learnt studying psych and philo, to take any topic—especially if it concerns personal aspects of life and intangible areas like feelings—and not be afraid to delve into it, think about it, acknowledge what you feel, and find out more about it and come to conclusions about it you can work with to move on.

I guess the most challenging bit was, after fantasizing about options for running away (like turning gay? LOLOL), having to come down to earth and decide not to put the control over my happiness into others’ hands by blaming them for things I was unhappy about, but to face myself and see what role I had in creating the situation and doing something about changing the way I felt, thought, and behaved about the situation.

There is a strange feeling associated with taking responsibility for your own unhappiness … you don’t have the luxury of conveniently blaming someone else, feeling justified anger, etc, which don’t solve the problem anyway. I guess it’s like growing up just that little bit more, talking control of your life just that little bit more. Despite the expected hassles and discomforts of having to reinvent a better self and admit your faults, there’s a strange kind of comfort and freedom in the knowledge that (despite not knowing exactly how) I had the power to change things, and that things won’t change unless I did something different about them.

For this to work I have learnt that thought exercises are just the beginning … mind-body-action efforts have really paid off … i.e. I could not just think my way out of the issue, but had to take action. One doesn’t work without the other, though.

A good part of it, in retrospect, was stumbling along and identifying that the marriage was not the source of the problem ;) Funny right, to come to that conclusion about issues that seemed to be about the marriage on the surface. I can only speculate that many people don’t scratch past the surface about this based on the high incidence of divorce, because apparently research shows that 2nd time marriages usually don’t fare better than 1st time ones [generally speaking, at least … I do have the privilege of knowing parents of blended families that defy trends :)].

I had great fun reading what the experts know about male-female differences, and realizing that many of my issues were universal. This really helped me understand The Man a bit better. When you gain understanding, you realize what you can’t expect and you don’t get upset. So that’s one victory, at least for my sanity.

I also had to unpack unconscious yet common expectations and assumptions about what a husband should provide; husbands today have a harder time then their forefathers cos today, women expect them to provide not only financial support, but all round domestic and emotional support as well.

What I had to face up to was that despite all that’s wonderful about D (and that’s a really long list), I shouldn’t expect D to provide all my needs. After reluctantly excavating that hidden assumption and facing it, I felt so free! I lose the fairy tale to some extent, but win a happier blueprint for future happiness. Released from unrealistic expectations! Haven’t you heard of the saying, “If your man is everything you hoped he was (and more), he would have married someone better.” HAHAHA Now that’s a humbling thought!

And to complicate things, my needs seem to have changed, or perhaps after singularly focusing on motherhood for the last 8 years, I am more relaxed about it now since K is older, and am slowly noticing and perhaps yearning for what I have put on hold in other aspects of my life. Yes, it’s all very exciting that the universe seems to have shifted and new perspectives are arising after I activated abundance last year ^__^

Oh the things I want to do! Lose weight, gain fitness, learn to draw and paint, dance, play the guitar, play the flute, teach photography, and of course, write write write … get more serious about writing some books.

In the context of my motherhood-focus I had been strongly repelled to do any of the above co i felt the unmistakable feeling that anything I’d do for personal leisure and pleasure would be too self indulgent … anyway who has the energy to pack extra things into an already busy schedule. Since perspective-rezoning, I have been reclaiming bits of personal time and interests … well, competence and advancement in all these areas still won’t happen overnight and will need sustained effort… and I guess underlying all that is learning to apply a new organizational system to my life so I can get more done in the same amount of time without exhaustion. And to multitask where I can, e.g. K is keen to take guitar lessons and art lessons too …

I have been so blessed … FINALLY this brings me back to the wedding ring(s).

To recap, old khem sulked that D didn’t want to buy a ring.

New khem, after a renewed appreciation of D after all that learning (ongoing), reestablished enough rapport to get him to agree to buy it … then I went out and bought the one(s) I wanted, and rang him after, “Thank you very much darling, for the beautiful new wedding rings you bought me btw you owe me $300”. To be nice, I had rounded it down and absorbed the difference ^__^. I guess you could still call it one ring cos D, K and I all agree the two rings look better worn together on the ring finger than on on separate fingers.

It was quite exhilarating for me [a rare charbor (girlie) moment] ‘cos that was the first time I bought proper jewellery for myself, EVER. I initially chose one ring, the yellow gold one with five spaced out little diamonds instead of what they call an anniversary ring setting (with a string of diamonds in a row, very common), because the former looked more modern and androgynous, suiting me. I left the shop still looking at it on my finger, and saw that it didn’t really go well with my silver watch. So I went back and asked if they had a silver version … for a split second I only wanted to exchange it … THEN when I found out the white gold one was cheaper than the one I bought, and was also on sale, it wasn’t hard to flash that Visa debit card a second time. HEHEHEHE

Perhaps loving how yellow and white gold looks together reflects my inherent duality. Certainly I loved that the two rings can symbolize many things, e.g. at one level, the bigger silver ring is D and the slightly smaller yellow ring is K; at another level, the yellow gold represents all I love about my Chineseness, family, Asian friends, and heritage, and the white gold represents “white influence” of a western education (formal and informal) and now the blessings of living in an angmo (western) albeit multicultural country, and new angmo friendships.

Five little diamonds on each ring - Five echoes the five elements, a complete cosmos of metal, wood, water, fire, earth; Two symbolizes yin and yang, the coolness of white gold and the warmth of yellow gold. Two and five reflect my birth number 25/7 (which, btw is the same as Princess Diana’s!)

Regarding the purchase of the rings, lesson applied = be clear and communicate exactly what you want from your man, instead of expecting him to read your mind and guess the Model Response to your typical female comments which are very puzzling (and could be scary/frustrating) to men.

I guess I understand enough to know now that men don’t really “get” a lot of things women trouble themselves about, so we just need to tell them clearly what’s important to us, instead of driving ourselves insane dropping hints then speculating why they don’t love us anymore.

And yes, sometimes you just have to treat your man like a child instead of expecting him to know better cos he usually doesn’t. The best way to treat your man like a child—besides ordering him to eat more veggies and less junk food and banning Coke from the house—is to give him unconditional love ;) I can tell you this can be hard to do cos it is only natural that we have expectations of our husbands right?

I guess what I distilled from my recent learning journey about relationships is that the last resort of divorce is only a viable option if you have nothing left in your marriage to be thankful for, and that really depends more on you than your spouse.

No, contrary to that old joke, “suffering” doesn’t necessary have to follow “engagement ring” and “wedding ring” … for me at least "pondering" and "savouring" work a lot better :D

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