A Love Story in Four Rings
On marriage, and the moments that make up a life
August 2026 marks fifteen years since my husband, Karl, and I got hitched, and, as has become customary for us as another half decade passes, we exchanged rings (the fourth since 2011). This ritual of a new ring every five years started by accident back in 2016, when Karl found rings he wanted to buy, which he happened to purchase around our wedding anniversary. Since then, we’ve made the connection more formal and have vowed to continue for as long as we are together and have space on our bodies!
While I have my own thoughts about some of the patriarchal hangovers associated with marriage, I love the giving and receiving of rings (and no, it’s not just because Lord of the Rings is my favourite film). For me, the ring is less a symbol of ownership and oppression and more a symbol of love. I look at my hands, and I see a visual representation of the 15 years Karl and I have been married and everything these years have held.
Each one reminds me of a different chapter — a different version of us.
Chapter One: The Vow (2011)
The first ring is simple: a white-gold band for me and a slightly thicker, titanium one for Karl. Although we were married legally in the local registry office the day before, the anniversary we celebrate is our humanist ceremony held in the back garden of the house I grew up in, under the boughs of the Ash tree that was only a sapling when my parents bought the place back in 1983.
It was 15 years ago, but I can remember almost every moment of that day. From waking up early and taking a photo of the sun rising through the trees from the bathroom window, to rousing my friends who’d stayed the night before in tents by blasting Waiting for a Star to Fall from the PA in the marquee at 6.45am. I remember getting ready to walk down the makeshift aisle in the garden and catching sight of Karl from the window, standing by the wooden arch he’d made with his friend Clive. I felt such a wave of emotion then, for this man that I’d chosen to marry who looked so handsome in his suit. We said our vows under the tree as the sun broke through the clouds.
I remember origami birds, a red and white polka dot handfasting ribbon, and a reading from Dr Suess. Fleet Foxes, an unofficial receiving line, pimms, and ice cream. Ball games and haybales and a baby blue camper van. Later: cream tea and a hog roast and fancy dress and dancing til 2am with all our favourite people.
We were so young — we had only been together for five years. Fifteen years on, I look back at that day, and it feels bittersweet. I hardly know the girl who walked down the aisle, so self-conscious and uncomfortable being in the spotlight that she rejected a first dance and speeches. So full of responsibility and a sense of her own capability that she delegated very little of the mammoth task of organising a wedding for 150 people at home, and missed so much of the day running around putting the finishing touches on everything.
I do recognise us though: Karl and I. What hasn’t changed is how much I wanted to marry Karl then, and how I much I still want to be married to him now. If we were to get married again tomorrow, I’d do it all differently, of course, but it doesn’t matter. It was a time and place thing. It reminds me of us: the simplicity and sweetness of our lives and the things that mattered to us then.
Since the day we were married, our wedding has become part of our shared, living tapestry. We still drink tea together every morning from our matching Rob Ryan mugs, a wedding gift from a friend who is no longer with us. Our invitation still sits pride of place above the lounge door, so we see it every day. My shoes — a piece of art in themselves — sit on the shelf in the bathroom, next to books and plants. A piece of the dress I wore for our legal ceremony (the same print as the bridesmaid dresses), a square of Karl’s brown and blue pinstripe suit, and the ribbon we used for our handfasting sit in a clear frame on our fireplace mantle.
And the rings are still on our hands.
Chapter Two: The Leap (2016)
The second set of rings couldn’t be more different to the first. Karl had found them in a book called The Outsiders — a coffee table tome given to him as a gift, which contained features on people living and working on the edges. He loved them and suggested that we buy one each. They were made by Witness Company, a jeweller based in New York, and were proper biker rings: big brass and silver affairs. I wasn’t a fan of the skulls and eagles, but there was one I loved — a bird wing — so we ordered one each in brass. When they arrived I couldn’t believe how heavy they were.
By August 2016, we had been in Detroit for almost two years and were hitting our stride. The novelty of living in a new country had worn off somewhat, but in its place were other gifts: deepening friendships, new experiences and challenges at work, and more adventures travelling across the US and Canada. No longer were we anxious about taking a wrong turn in Detroit or confused about where to shop: Michigan was starting to feel like it was our home.
When we celebrated that 5-year wedding anniversary, things were wildly different to how they had been on our wedding day, and to how either of us had imagined things would have panned out as we said our vows. The unexpected invitation to move to the States blew us open in the best possible way: it was stressful and unpredictable, and everything was new and unfamiliar, but it was also full of magic, growth, and adventure.
It took such a lot for us to uproot ourselves and leave a life that, on paper, was pretty much perfect. We had wonderful friends, we liked our jobs, and we’d just moved to a new house nearer to the coastal landscape that we loved. Kids were in the future, maybe. And yet it was also as simple as saying yes. The wheels began to turn, and months later, on a cold November day with snow threatening in the sky, we landed in a new country to start a new life.
The summer of our five year wedding anniversary, we bought a house in Ferndale, eight miles up from our flat in Detroit, one block away from our US besties. A little blue house with a loft bedroom, a tiny veranda, and an overgrown wasteland of a garden that we slowly transformed into a sanctuary. When I look at my wing ring, I always think of that time: of opening the box at our kitchen table in Channing Street.
I think of the cats, who we officially adopted in 2016, of lying in the hammock in the garden as the fireflies blinked off and on around us, and of the house itself: still my favourite I’ve ever lived in.
Karl and I grew so close in those years: we worked together, lived together, and socialised together. We were barely apart. We had our moments, but when I look back at our relationship during that time, I mainly think of how much fun we were having and how much more I was getting to know and understand him.
Chapter Three: The Storm (2021)
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The third ring doesn’t look much to speak of on the surface: just a thick, sterling silver band. But the story behind it is one I love.
When I walked down the aisle in 2011, I did so to the song Into My Arms by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. In the early years of our relationship, Karl and I often listened to the album The Boatman’s Call, and it had been the song (Are You) the One That I’ve Been Waiting For? that Karl had always said he’d wanted us to dance to on our wedding day. But with the first dance out the window (save our impromptu tipsy hoedown to Meatloaf and Cher), we had turned to Into My Arms. It felt like a better fit: simpler, but more ceremonial, and with beautiful lyrics (returning always and evermore to each other), it felt right to us both.
Fast forward ten years and Karl and I were in the middle of what would become our own ‘annus horribilis’ — a period filled with both expected and unexpected loss that would have ripples for years after. It was February and Karl’s mum was dying. We were working sporadically and splitting our time between Sussex and Surrey, while still reeling from the news that IVF was recommended if we wanted to start a family. Our first round had been scheduled for January, but with Karl’s mum’s illness progressing, we had opted to postpone.
Things felt unsteady, but Karl and I were solid. We had only been back in the UK for a short time before lockdown had hit, and after the closeness we’d developed in Detroit, were feeling more co-dependent than ever, clinging to each other as the world exploded around us.
During this strange, liminal time, I received an email from The Vampire’s Wife — Susie Cave’s (sadly now defunct) fashion brand, announcing the sale of some limited edition silver rings, inscribed with the words Into My Arms — the same song we had played at our wedding. I rushed to purchase them, and they arrived a few months later, in May, just before we were due to set off on a 6 week road-trip around Wales and Scotland in our campervan — a recce of sorts for the next phase of our life, we hoped.
Karl’s mum had died and our first round of IVF had failed. It felt good to drive away from the wreckage on a unremarkable day in May, with these rings on our fingers. It wasn’t August yet — our anniversary was still a few months off — but we allowed ourselves to skip ahead a little.
We wanted to focus on something else: to remember that we still had each other and that we weren’t broken, even though everything else felt unsteady. The van was our biggest shared purchase to date (property aside) and we were so excited to have done it. It represented everything we were dreaming of: freedom, independence and the ability to live life on our own terms.
Despite the heaviness of the previous months, hope flickered in our hearts as we drove away.
Chapter Four: The Return (2026)
Our newest rings arrived last week, just in time for our anniversary. Karl has been talking about getting wooden rings for a while and he found a beautiful company who make bentwood rings shot through with Welsh slate — a design which felt perfect for our current life. Unlike the brass knuckle dusters of 2016, these rings are so light — I can hardly feel it when I’m wearing it.
It feels good to have a new ring on my finger at this point in our relationship. I’ve written many times about the gulf between the expectation and reality of our move to Wales. So much was hard and different to what I imagined — the damp house, the overgrown and unmanagable land — but I had never dreamed that Karl and I would become part of the problem. Throughout our time together, Karl has always been my anchor — I had never doubted us, not once. To have that change was terrifying and almost broke me.
When the cracks began to show, I was in disbelief. I avoided it for a while. But try as I might to bury my head, things were different between us. What had worked up until that point was no longer working. It crossed my mind that maybe we wouldn’t make it. With the benefit of time passing, it’s obvious now how burnt out we both were from loss, unmet expectations, and feelings of failure. What was different is that for the first time in our shared lives, instead of turning towards each other with our pain, we turned away.
With some distance, I can now see that the rupture was necessary. Grief is a leveller; it changes people. It changed us, and to pretend it hadn’t would have been a recipe for further suffering down the line.
Last year, on the 19th anniversary of us getting together in 2006, we renewed our vows, just us, wearing our wedding clothes, in a windswept coastal churchyard in the foothills of Snowdonia. There were no rings at that ceremony, but the moment marked a turning point where we recommitted to our life together.
I look back to that couple who got married in 2011, who hardly knew each other, really. Life was so much simpler then: we were in love, we went to work, we hung out with our friends in Brighton — in the pubs, on the Beach, at the Dials. 15 years on, those easy, golden days seem like another world. Things are much less straightforward now, and we’ve seen each other at our worst. And yet we are still choosing us regardless.
I thought I knew all there was to know about Karl and our relationship, but recent years have shown me how much more there is to learn. It’s been a scary and painful process, but at this juncture, it’s also exciting: what don’t I know about this man who has sat beside me for the past twenty years? What might happen for us now that things have diverted from the path we thought was laid out?
I don’t know what the future holds, but reflecting on the last fifteen years, I’m open to what’s possible. As the disappointment and the heaviness of the infertility years recede, so we return to each other.
Karl will always be the greatest love story of my life. While we move through the world in almost opposite ways, we agree on the big things, can talk for England, and never seem to get bored of each other’s company. Aside from our recent challenges, we have always been annoyingly happy: with each other and our shared life, lived completely in each others pockets.1 I’ve always hated being apart from him and still do. I usually cry when we say goodbye for longer than 24 hours, my mind immediately flooded with catastrophic thoughts about something terrible happening to one or the other of us while we’re seperated. I’ve been known to say dramatic things to him like “I couldn’t live without you,” my eyes prickling with tears at the mere thought. And while I know now that I could, I’d really rather not.
It once seemed impossible for our lives to be any more intertwined than they were in Detroit, but Wales is proving that assumption wrong. With our decision taken not to pursue family life further, and as we make choices about our land and livelihood going forward that will throw us even closer together, the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been for our relationship.
And yet I cannot fathom another way of existing on this earth, if not with him.
Fifteen years is a long time to be married to someone. In our earlier years, I was certain that we’d never have any significant quarrels, but I’ve learned the valuable lesson of late that marriage isn’t the place of consistency and continual safety I once thought it was. On the flip side, I also know that things can be complicated, painful, and uncertain, and that we can survive it.
When you’re in the middle of something it’s often not possible to be aware of what’s important and what isn’t — it’s only with the benefit of time passing that the bigger picture reveals itself. I look at the rings on my fingers, and I see us in all our eras to date: the love and the pain, the laughter and the tears, the adventures, and the stillness. I don’t know what we’ll take away from the period we’re currently in, but I’m looking forward to five years from now, when it will — inevitably — all have become clear.
Originally published at https://jessicahamlin.substack.com.
