Wedding Ring as Talisman (Dining Alone)

I thought I was going to have A Lot To Say about dining alone in restaurants. In Milan my first days here, it was so deeply strange; I felt humiliated (by myself) when I’d ask for a table for one, at dinner specifically. Then by the middle of my week in Bologna, I was getting used to it. Not one single “them'“ or “they” or “everyone” punched me in the face, tripped me, pulled my chair out from under me, laughed at or talked about me (to my knowledge) because I was dining alone!

Because as with most of anxieties and fears, the demon was in me and what I was really humiliated by, which no one in Italy but me had any way of knowing, was my new perception of myself. Though I’d traveled by myself before, now I was really alone: dining not just solo at that moment, but as a newly single, formerly-married adult woman.

For a decade, I’d had what I believed to be the social protection and power of someone else’s approval, of having been chosen, having been deemed acceptable enough to have a visible symbol on my left ring finger, and now I had been cast off.

(I know there are ~462 dissertations about the wedding ring as branding of property, antiquated dowry shit, so on, and I also know that not all healthily coupled people wear rings. The ring doesn’t make the relationship, of course. But this is about me.)

I first explicitly noticed my twisted coding of my wedding ring when I went to Mexico alone for our 8th and final wedding anniversary last October. We’d been discussing the future of our marriage for about four months, and I had recently, like the night before I left, switched from problem-solving mode to ‘well, fuck you then’ mode. I’d been cutting and mean the way a really hurt person is, because I’d been lanced by the clarity that the problems of this relationship wouldn’t be solved by my stubborn commitment alone.

About a month prior, I’d replaced my wedding rings with a turquoise and silver ring I got in high school that I wore a lot in college and loved. It was a step down, to ease away from the familiar feeling on that finger, and maybe a re-commitment to who I had been. But when I went to Mexico, I didn’t wear any rings, just the indentation on my finger after almost a decade of wear. This shadow ring felt so visible, and the empty space so psychologically sharp that I actually wondered if “people” could tell that I was there on a “my-marriage-is-ending” trip.

Once I settled in at the resort, I texted my sister “what if someone talks to me?!” I had no idea what I would do or say, yet I was mad that no one had approached me. I wanted to be validated as a woman, which to me I guess meant to be desirable by a man. But I was also cautious and defensive.

I hadn’t worried about this particular strain of validation since we got engaged in 2012. In my twisted code, my wedding ring meant that I was acceptable: approved of as a woman (chosen by someone) and therefore also not available (to be chosen by anyone else) so as not to be bothered by unwanted attention. It was an affirmation and a protection, a talisman. Now I notice people’s rings, especially men’s, maybe because I think that they’re not available to me, as a woman, which is again, a thing that is desirable to a man, or maybe I’m sad seeing other people’s outward symbol of a commitment that I don’t have now, and I didn’t even have when we were married, a fact that made me sad but I tried to play it cool, which is exactly what not to do in a marriage, to play it cool. But as long as I wore my ring, it meant half of something which I thought was better than nothing at the time.

I have a scar-like shadow on my left ring finger and he has no trace.