I put my wedding band in the mail this morning to be sold. I remarked to someone that, while I don’t feel any strong attachment to the ring, I still felt very odd about doing it. I have sent away the greatest single physical symbol of my failed marriage, and someone is going to send me a check in return for it, as if to say, “This is what the last 10+ years of your life is worth as a dollar figure.”
Even though I had no desire to keep the ring, and the money will be used towards financing any remaining divorce expenses, it still feels somehow as if my relationship’s history has been cheapened by selling off the ring. Having said that, I don’t have any regrets about having done it. Even if I wasn’t using the money for the divorce, I wouldn’t feel bad about selling it. It just feels…odd.
So, for those of you who have lost a spouse (or even a fiance(e)) to death or to some other end of the relationship, what did you decide to do with your ring(s), if anything? How did you feel about your decision at the time, and did your feelings change upon later reflection? Please share your experiences.
With an ex-fiance, I gave my ring away to someone here on the board. On the one hand it was doing something useful and helping someone else out at the same time, while on the other it was indeed “cheapening” the relationship. Which is what I wanted and it felt great to devalue something that had meant so much to me but had hurt more than anything I’d ever been through. That’s been a long time ago now and I’m still happy with my decision, as it really did put the relationship in the correct perspective.
Well, we never got engaged, just got married. So I never had an engagement ring, and my wedding ring cost all of £36 in 1987. I did get a nice eternity ring on our 15th wedding anniversary.
I now wear the eternity ring on my right hand, and the wedding ring sits in a wee drawer in my jewellery box. One of these days I’ll figure out what to do with it.
I kind of fit both the descriptions in the thread title - I was separated and filed for divorce, but he drank himself to death before the divorce was finalised. Official status: widow.
My wedding ring is in a box. It’s white gold and essentially worthless. Then again, with “we buy your gold” stuff going on, maybe I’ll get a few quid for it.
Her wedding ring and engagement ring are platinum with diamonds and are actually worth something, and I’ve suggested she sell them, but they’re still in a box too.
She did give me back the Art Nouveau heirloom my mother gave to her to get married in, but it’s an heirloom so I’m not selling. It’s in a box as well.
That said, they’re all just chunks of metal. It’s a good ideal to try to abandon the symbolism of the object - and the sense of failure one attaches to that symbol - but it’s hard. Well done for making a step to do so. You have inspired me to do it too.
Many years ago, my ex-fiancee and I broke up. She returned the ring. I put it in my safe deposit box at the bank, where it stayed for the next, oh, 15 years or so; when I retrieved it because I moved cities.
My wife returned her wedding rings and engagement ring when she left me. She had two wedding rings–one was bought specifically for her, the other was my mother’s. Likewise, her engagement ring had belonged to my mother also. Note that Mom died long before I met my wife, and all concerned thought it would be nice if we could use my Mom’s rings when I got engaged and then married. I bought my wife another wedding ring so she had something specifically hers.
Perhaps because I don’t hate my wife or my ex-fiancee, and two of my wife’s rings are family heirlooms, I hang onto all of them. At the very least, they remind me of happier times. It’s nice knowing I have them, but I don’t look at them often–once again, they are in my safe deposit box at the bank.
Both the wedding ring and the engagement ring are in a box in my dresser. The wedding ring is my great grandmother’s, so I’ll hold onto it for family reasons. I’m even considering wearing it with my grandmother’s engagement ring which I wear on my right hand.
The engagement ring was purchased from an estate jeweler. It’s exactly what I wanted and, thus, I can’t bear to part with it. Maybe someday I’ll wear it on my right hand, but right now it just seems strange (I’ve been separated for over a year and divorced for 8 months.) It’s an aquamarine, so it doesn’t look like an engagement ring, but I know what it is.
I left my rings on the table when I left as a passive aggressive “fuck you” to my ex. That was worth far more to me than any money I could have gotten for them. (And they weren’t worth anything because he was a cheap bastard).
A previous engagement ring I have meant to sell for 10+ years and haven’t gotten around to it and am not sure if I even have it any more.
If I ever leave a guy who didn’t deserve it and he had given me nice jewelry or family heirlooms, I would return it to him.
When we got married, one of our presents was a tiny silver ring box. I liked it, so I got another one for Christmas. My ring and my late husband’s rings are both in the one I got for Christmas. I would like to put them in the wedding gift one for the symbolism of it, but Rick had huge hands and his ring is too big to fit in that one. I will never sell them.
I still have mine somewhere, I think. I know my mom has some of my wedding memorabilia but I don’t think she knows I know where it is, it could be in there. It really is a nice ring and I liked wearing it, but it would be weird to wear it now, and it only fits on that one finger anyway.
Her rings had already been lost prior to the divorce and now I’m glad I didn’t replace them.
On a slight hijack, when does the ring line go away? I have been divorced two and a half years and I can still see where the ring pressed into my finger a little bit. I was married for almost 11 years.
My wedding ring went in the bin. It was a cheap and crappy thing, much like my marriage turned out to be. I still have my engagement ring, but that’s because I bought it myself, although I rarely wear it anywhere.
Widowed; my wedding ring, a silver dragon clutching a jade chip. is on the ring finger of my right hand. Actually, the ring I’m wearing might be my wife’s; for some reason which I can no longer remember we had both stopped wearing our rings and they had gotten misplaced (along with some other jewelry). Then shortly before my wife died I was cleaning house and found one of them in a box. Since we both wore about the same size ring, I couldn’t tell for sure whose it was, but I decided to start wearing it again. About a year after she died I moved it from my left hand to my right.
When I was packing to move from Chicago to NC I found the other ring. It needs cleaning badly, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. It’s in one of my dresser drawers.
I sold mine. The jeweler offered to incorporate it into something for Airman, but I said no. I’d know where the gold came from and it didn’t seem right. Besides, Airman doesn’t do gold.
I had an old engagement ring (from a previous relationship) that I swapped for a harmony ball at the Stampede.
For clarity, the Stampede is like a big radio with a big state fair attached - I was in one of those buildings where they have the booths to sell the Ronco Slicer/Dicer, the Miracle Shammy, etc. There was a booth where the gal was selling harmony balls - which are for further clarity the metal balls that have something in them that jingles around and makes a pretty sound. Mine is covered in mother of pearl.
Anyhoo - I showed her the ring, asked for a swap and she agreed.
I’m married to someone else now so it worked out well.
The actual, official rings were my grandma’s, so I got them. He never got me an actual ring. I sort of picked one out with him once in Wisconsin Dells when I started getting nervous about wearing heirloom jewelry all the time–that was a $30 silver band with couple of small black hills gold accents. I still have it in my jewelry box, 'cause it’s not worth anything and I was the one who paid for it.