Why I stopped wearing wedding ring

HELLO there folks, how are you doing this March 2016? This week I am publishing something sent to me that I thought was interesting. See what you think.

Why I stopped wearing my wedding ring

A few months into my husband's deployment, I stopped wearing my wedding ring. I sat on the edge of our bed with tears in my eyes and slipped it off my finger. The gold felt heavy in my hand. I plunked my wedding ring into the ceramic ring holder, the one that looks like a bird on a stump, the one he hates and turned off the light.

Years earlier, my future husband had given me that ring as a symbol of the covenant between the two of us, the sign of a continuous, never-ending promise that nothing, but death could separate. A few months later, we stood together before an illuminated cross in the front of my church and whispered sacred vows over that ring. "For better or for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, 'till death do us part. . ."

Those were the early days when we talked in dreams. Everything was said that could be said, then, because it was impossible to keep it in. How deeply I loved him. How beautiful marriage was. How much we were going to do together as husband and wife. How he was handsome when he slept and how I envied his eyelashes.

I still envied his eyelashes, but he snored now and I burned dinner. My ring had worn a place on my finger, a permanent indentation, white and smooth, with the years. The gold was scuffed, and I would managed to chip a diamond. I didn't even know you could chip diamonds, but there it was, all the same. The love that had once been poetic had become practical: folding socks, stopping for milk, paying the phone bill, taking out the trash. He went to work. I grew babies. In the evening, we exchanged daily updates like kisses.

"The kids finished their math."

"I have a meeting tomorrow at two."

"Did you buy windshield wipers?"

And so it went, each day feeling more and more like we were to people occupying two separate worlds that collided only occasionally. Some days, it felt like I wasn't married at all.

It might have gone on that way indefinitely had he not been deployed to the other side of the world. I realized, before he left, that life wouldn't be that much different with him gone. Not really. And that broke my heart. The Army put an ocean between us, and more time zones than was polite. The Internet was sporadic and Skype froze his face in disturbing pixelised mutations. We would go days without talking because it's hard to talk over an ocean. Over the course of days and weeks and months apart, our marriage was stripped down to the bare bones. There was nothing to hide behind: no busyness or long hours at work or a never-ending laundry pile. There was nothing to cover up the fact that we really didn't love, honour, and cherish each other the way we set out to do.

Because you can think you are doing okay if you can throw in a foot rub in every once in a while, and if you feel affectionate and say "I love you" a couple times a day. You can think your marriage is godly just because it's comfortable. You can think you are honouring your vows just because you still wear the ring. But you can be wrong.

And both of you can feel incredibly unloved and lonely and isolated, even in the middle of a perfectly satisfactory marriage. People were not made for satisfactory marriages, and our souls know it. Our souls are restless for the kind of intimate communion that is man and woman and the mystery of two made one. It is why we make those vows in the first place, because our souls long to be bound by that kind of promise. But like any good thing, it is one thing to want it, and another thing to do it.

I sat on the edge of my bed in the quiet of the night and slipped off my ring. I cried over it because I had allowed my marriage to become something so unlike what I knew it could be. I had neglected my vows. You can think you are honouring your vows because you wear the ring.

Bare faithfulness is not the same as love. Enjoying someone's company is not the same as cherishing. Being proud of someone is not the same as honouring. All of those things were meant to be so much more, so much richer and deeper and more gospel-infused than anything I had been living for a long time.

I looked at my bare left hand and made a decision.

If I was going to wear that ring, I said to myself, then I had to live the vow.

To be continued next week . . .

Wedding Doctor can be messaged/WhatsApped on 0772 933 845 or email: marriagedoctormanicapost@gmail.com.