What Does a Ring Mean?
A ring is supposed to mean something. At least, that is what I’ve always thought.
It is a small thing, really. A circle of metal, simple enough to fit around a finger. Yet somehow, we have given it the weight of a promise, the shape of forever, and the power to make a future feel certain. We look at a ring and imagine commitment. We imagine two people choosing each other, not just for the easy days, but for all the ordinary, difficult, unremarkable days that come after. We imagine a decision that has already made.
I keep thinking back to the ring nowadays. Not necessarily a ring that anyone can held in their hands, but the idea of one. The promise it represents. The future it almost made real. That means something, doesn’t it? Or does it?
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There is another thing I am slowly beginning to understand. I had to make sense of what happened without knowing how the story would end. That changes a person. I discovered that there is a space between where love still exists, but also, trust has questions. And I am allowed to stay in that space for a while. I guess.
So, what does a ring mean?
Maybe it means everything to the person who gives it. Maybe it means forever to the person who receives it. But to me, right now, it means a question I am no longer willing to answer on someone else’s behalf.
I need to remember that I have a choice, too. Because the most important promise is not the one someone almost made to another person.
It is the one I make to myself: that I will not measure my value by the future someone else almost had, and that I will not mistake being someone’s return for being someone’s certainty.
Maybe a ring is a symbol of a promise. But love, the love I am learning, is not a symbol. It is a choice made in real life, by real people, over and over again.
The question is not whether that person would give someone else a ring. The question is whether I can trust the person who comes back without one.
