Matt - Getting the Ring

I had been planning on getting married to Liz for a while. We'd had long, serious talks about it, and had soberly decided that in the interests of not unsettling our respective parents, we'd "go out" for at least a year before making things all official. I was okay with this idea. I'm pretty sure Liz was okay with this idea. Her co-workers were a completely different story. Out of a completely different book, in a different library. And while I'm sure Liz didn't pass on even half of the comments, it was fairly clear that even though we're not teenagers anymore, peer pressure still is a force to be reckoned with. So 'round about March, the idea of getting engaged was being brought up with astounding regularity.

But wait! I had been planning for this, right? Yep. But boy do I have bills. Student loans, car payments, car insurance, credit cards . . . they add up. And even though I was having some of my paycheck automagically routed to my savings account, it wasn't building as quickly as I would have liked. How long have I heard that weasely rule of thumb of three months salary for an engagement ring? A real long time. Fortunately for me, Liz and I had a conversation where she admitted to not really wanting a diamond engagement ring, but was more partial to sapphires or emeralds.

We started looking at rings. My plan was to get a feeling for what Liz liked in ring styles, and then surreptitiously sneak to a jewelry store and get the ring. What happened was Liz and I would walk into a store and head for the rings. Liz would point at a little panel of 4 or 5 rings and say, "Okay, which of those rings do you think is the best?".

Let me pause here and explain something, because odds are you don't know me. I have relatively no fashion sense. I can recognize that the shirt Discover card sent me with the radioactive green and lilac purple is suitable only as a Hallowe'en costume, but past that I'm fairly well lost.

So here I am, looking at these rings, thinking, Well, they're all made of gold . . . with blue stones.. Through sheer luck and persistence I managed to get the right answer about one third of the time. The other two-thirds of the time Liz would patiently explain to me why the ring I pointed at, while not so atrociously ugly that it scared small children (as some of them were), just wasn't what she was looking for in an engagement ring. My confidence slipped. I began to think about the possibly apocryphal story of Richard Gere proposing to Cindy Crawford with a ring made of aluminum foil. Goddamn movie star uses a ring made of a couple pennies worth of aluminum, and here I am trying to evaluate stone arrangement and band design.

So I had pretty well discarded the idea of going by myself to get the ring, since it seemed like a disaster just waiting to happen. The only problem was I couldn't think of who I could drag along with me. The only advantage to dragging this out was that my savings account was steadily growing, and it had reached a level where I felt I could buy the ring and not send the account into the single digits. Liz had stated that at this point, she really didn't mind going with me to get the ring. I suspect her officemates again.

A good friend of mine was getting married, and we were going to the mall to the stores where they were registered to get them a gift. As Liz and I were going to sleep, my brain fuzzily reminded me that there were a plethora of jewelry stores in the mall, and tomorrow would be a good time to get the ring.

I love teasing Liz about the wedding, because although she tries not to, sometimes she gets a little too caught up in the minutae of the details and forgets that we're supposed to be having fun. Despite the fact we weren't officially engaged yet, she'd been doing some light planning, nothing too major, but enough to get occasionally very absorbed in. Enough that I felt justified in lightly teasing her about getting the ring.

I told her that I thought the next day would be a good day to get her a present . . . maybe a ring.

She was very happy. And so was I.

So we went to the mall to get a ring. The first store we stop in is Zales. A saleslady walks over to us and smiles, and suddenly I'm as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of turbo-charged rocking chairs. We wander over to the sapphire rings. One catches Liz's eye. She looks at it closely. "Do you like it?" I ask. "Yes." she answers, staring at the ring. YES!! I thought I was going to get out of this easy! I haul out my wallet and start to hand the beaming saleslady my credit card when Liz comes back to reality. Very smoothly she catches my arm and tucks it around her. "Can you hold this for us?" she asks. The saleslady's smile twinkles some more as she assures us that's just fine.

There are four main jewelry stores in the mall, all at a crossroads where two of the mall's "roads" meet, one on each corner. So at least we didn't have to walk far. The first store we go to after Zales has a ring Liz shows feeble interest in, and the salesperson immediately starts trying to encourage that spark into a conflagration of purchasing. It doesn't work. We go through the third store in under 30 seconds, nothing of interest. The fourth store, 20 seconds. Nada. Back to Zales. The saleslady has been able to watch our rapid circuit of the stores and is waiting for us when we arrive. I hand her my credit card, she enters enough data about me into the store computer to impress the federal government, and we leave. Without the ring, which needs resizing.

But damn, did it feel good to have it over with! I felt free!

I had no idea what was coming...

Back to Liz and Matt's wedding page
See the ring!