Ringless

I have stopped wearing my wedding ring.  (Don't panic.)

There are all kinds of reasons for this that people would expect; perhaps my marriage is a mess, I am trying to have a sneaky affair, or I am worried about sports related injuries.  None of the above are correct.  Instead it is something extremely mundane.  I took my ring off to do my weight lifting the other day and took a look at my finger and realized that the skin under my ring on the front of my hand my finger was kind of flaky and crunchy and looked distinctly wrong.  It isn't any sort of crisis but I decided I should leave the ring off until it fixes itself, and since the ring has been a constant resident for the past 12 years that might take awhile.  Who knows how long it has been like this!

It feels WEIRD.

I am constantly touching the base of my finger and being surprised by what I don't feel.  I go to rotate the ring as a way to fidget and nothing is there to play with.  My hand just feels constantly, subtly wrong.  It is like biting your mouth or tongue by accident; you aren't aware of the shape of your mouth until something changes and than you suddenly can't be aware of anything else.

It is kind of funny though because I have been thinking about taking off my ring for a couple years now.  I like my spouse and my marriage, but the institution of marriage itself has all kinds of issues that trouble me.  I dislike the history of patriarchy that is embedded in it.  I grumble at the assumption that a marriage's success is based on somebody dying rather than the joy that it brings while it lasts.

Becoming polyamorous brought new issues to the fore.  I am wearing an obvious symbol of one particular relationship but not symbols of any other relationships.  I have chosen to announce to the world one thing through my bodily decoration, and I don't feel like this is the thing I *should* be announcing, if I can only pick one thing.  I don't want people to think I am "taken" because I am not, and I don't want to pile on additional veneration of my domestic, legally binding partnership because it doesn't need any help being seen as the most important thing.

I don't like jewellery in general, and I don't like my wedding ring in particular.  I like my marriage, and initially I was happy to have a simple symbol of it, but that glow has faded.  I have changed, and my views on my golden symbol have shifted too.

It isn't as though I have some seething, festering hatred for my wedding band - I have plenty of more important things to seethe at.  However, I do feel like it is not the right thing.  It is a symbol, and the point of symbols is to tell other people about me.  But much of what people conclude when they see the symbol is incorrect.  When I look at my wedding ring now it it a thing that just isn't quite right anymore.

There is a cost to taking it off.  People make assumptions when they see a finger that obviously had a wedding band on it for a long time but is now bare, and those assumptions are not likely to be correct.  There is also the real concern that people will assume that this change reflects a negative change in my marriage and I don't like that conclusion.  It does reflect a change in my marriage to some extent, but that change is a good thing, not a bad thing.  However, I can see people who are skeptical of polyamory seeing this as a sign that everything is falling to bits.

I suspect Wendy wears her band for another reason that was never really mine - to prevent harassment.  It is a preemptive strike, a way to signal to men that they ought not to hit on her.  "Sorry, I have a boyfriend" should not be the best way to get men to leave a woman alone, but sadly it usually is, and a wedding ring is pretty much that phrase in jewellery form.

Being hit on by people I don't want to be involved with has never been a struggle for me, for a variety of reasons...

The more I look at my hands, newly not decorated, the more this seems like the right thing.  I don't need to make a decision yet, not until I lose the plausible deniability of my finger healing up, but the more I don't wear the ring the more I lean towards putting it away forever.