Current mood:	giddy
Current music:	Unknown Artist - Hedwig and the Angry Inch - Of

A Tale Of Two Rings
So I threw the the ring into the woods. </p>

It was a good, solid throw, sending our engagement ring sailing far off into the overhead brush, the glint of it small and immediately lost in the dying sun. It landed in the autumn leaves somewhere, and we never found it again.

She had handed it to me, saying, "I can't take living with you any more!" - and in response, I had juggernauted my way to the back door of our apartment, flung it open, and just hurled with such force that my arms ached.

We looked at each other, and I growled, "So it's fucking over. Go home, you dumb bitch. I can't believe that you'd give this up, but if that's what you want, I won't stop you."

I stormed off as she tried to compose ourselves; after all, we had about thirty people from Borders showing up in about a half an hour from now for a party we'd planned for a month, and she couldn't afford to look stressed.

Me? All I could think was, Well, that's $75 I'll never see again.

Ha ha. It's funny, isn't it? That I'd buy a cheap $75 Celtic engagement ring for Bari and be upset about it? But that was part of the problem; say what you will, it was a pretty ring above all else, handcrafted by a skilled silverworker at the Art Fair, and I thought it was one of the nicest rings I'd ever seen, period. (Of course, I am enamored of Celtic art.) I said it was pretty enough for an engagement ring, and Bari agreed.

Bari always agreed. That was her problem.

If something upset her, she never thought it was worth fighting over; she'd agree, she'd nod, but deep down she'd hold all of her resentment packed tight like coal turning into a sheer diamond of hatred, pressed tight by the weight of denial. It would only come out in arguments, bright little flares of surprise of things that I had asked about five or six times, "Are you sure?" "Yeah." "You positive?" "Yes, sweetie!" "No, really, I want to make sure - I don't think you're okay with this. Speak now or forever hold your peace."

"It's fine!"

Three weeks later, we'd be having an argument about it.

So the ring was, in many ways, the emblem of our relationship. I was willing to spend as much as I could afford back then - $500 or so - on a solid engagement ring, but this Celtic design was gorgeous. If we could save the money, I had no problem with it; nobody needed to know it was $75. Aside from the fact that it wasn't studded with diamonds and it was a solid silver, it didn't look like a $75 ring.

But Bari? On the surface, she agreed... But deep down, she wanted the Big Ring, the huge sweep of engagement, the lavish spending that would somehow prove that I loved her. There's nothing wrong with that, and I was willing to indulge if she had said so... But she didn't really like the ring that much, either. She didn't think it was as pretty as I did, but she thought she'd better get the ring when I bought it before I changed my mind.

So you can see the conflict, grinding slowly but finely, like tectonic plates setting themselves up to dump California into the ocean.

And then The Party came. As God is my witness, I think that parties are responsible for more breakups than Jerry Springer.... Mainly because women and men have a different approach to parties.

Guys pretty much realize that it's about friends coming and hanging about. They get booze - and lots of it, because nobody wants to run out for more booze when you're half-tippled already - and a couple of bags of chips. Men realize that parties are about the people, and everything else is secondary.

Women? Christ. I've never dated a chick who could hold a casual party. They all believe that every person is coming to their house to judge them closely and carefully - "Is this house suitable for business?" - and if the answer is no, they will perform an impromptu Krystalnacht, shattering all the windows before they burn the house to the ground. Then they will send a chain letter to their entire email address book: "Tina and Jerry Lafontaine, of 104 W St. in Philadelphia, are foul people, and you must never associate with them again. If you do not forward this on to ten people within 24 hours of receipt, you will be forced to meet these walking lepers. P.S. - Their bathroom had a hair in the sink."

So driven by some nameless fear, they all go batshit. They stockpile food like nuclear war was imminent. Bean bag chairs full of potato chips get tossed into shopping carts. Entire reservoirs of soda are emptied into bottles and jammed into garages.

You know why the buffalo died out? It wasn't irresponsible American hunters - no, some Indian squaw decided she was holding a party and she needed burgers...

And they spend more money than they can afford - one hundred, two hundred, three hundred! - on shit that will never sell out. I remember recently, when Gini - an otherwise levelheaded, admirable person - was assigned to bring soda to a party. Said party was going to consist of six adults confirmed, who might - might - be bringing two additional friends.

She bought eight bottles of soda.

Yes, that's right - not only did Gini buy more bottles of soda than there were people expected to attend, but she bought two liters of soda for each of them. Apparently we were all going to be camels, sucking down entire bottles at a gulp and roaring, "So where's more Hi-C?"

We brought five bottles of soda home. She still defends her purchase to this day.

So I - trying to save money and time - have repeatedly pointed out, "Do we need all of this?" Oh yes yes yes. Can't run out. The glazed hypotism of subliminal conditioning shines bright in their eyes. I argue that we don't. We always have food left over at the end of the party, living on potato chips and brie because, well, we can't afford actual food. This matters not.

Because the one time out of thirty CostCo-draining purchases that we do run out of food is the one that statistically matters. Hard facts are irrelevant; we must have food.

Why do women do this?

So my mistake was in arguing with Bari, who bought $400 worth of food - an entire week's worth of pay for her - to sustain a small party, with me saying we couldn't afford it. This expanded, as it frequently did, to encompass everything that we had theoretically gotten sorted out before, and eventually escalated, like atoms banging around inside a reactor, into a full-out meltdown.

She left. The ring is still in the woods, insofar as I know.

It's still pretty. And still the symbol of a relationship that was just not meant to work out.

In other news, Gini put her ring on the other day.

This is a new sign, and it makes me feel oddly happy. As you may or may not know, Gini and I were in rough waters for a long time - although the funny thing is that we're starting to get past that. We've gone through a really interesting stage where we've both been ecstatically happy for almost a year, but we keep looking back with trepidation: "Will that happen again?" Sometimes we had fights where neither of us were ever planning to be pricks again, but we both operated from sheer rabbit fear that it might fall again.

And lots of minor reproaches: "Well, you were mean to me."

Now, like the spring slowly warming us in winter, we're starting to trust; to realize that eleven months of almost pure happiness isn't a fluke. Sure, we've had some blowouts, but I think any couple really needs to have them - and as my Uncle Tommy wisely said, "You can have all of the arguments you want, as long as you don't have the same arguments twice."

Bari and I always had the same arguments, because I'd use my amazing persuasive powers to anesthesize her emotional reaction... And two weeks later, she was still pissed and angry. Whoops. Every week, the same argument, like clockwork.

Whereas Gini and I argued like mad last year, and at some point she got an allergy to her ring. It left blotches on her hand, like welts. At the time, we were at the height of our fighting and the words "psychosomatic" floated through my mind, but what could I do? She did have a rash that almost turned bloody at some point. I couldn't argue.

When my ring fell off of my finger and rolled behind the bookcase, I saw that tiny glint of Celtic silver, one blurred flash before it was lost in the big blue sky.

I never went back for it.

But as it turned out, Gini and I were different than Bari and I; me and Gin had one long argument that lasted about a year. It was long, and hard, and we never slept, and the argument was always underneath us, flowing like a river through all of our thoughts... But eventually, we ended it. And ever since then, we've been slowly feeling, learning to trust.

I went into her room the other day to give her a hug, and she turned around; I held her hands in mine, and I felt the press of a slice of metal on my fingers, and I knew before I looked down what it meant.

That may qualify as one of the happiest moments in my last ten months.

Somewhere in Ann Arbor, a ring lies underneath four years' of rotted leaves, sunk into the ground or perhaps dug up by a dog; archaeologists will find it, not knowing that it was detritus, the evidence of a long-lost civilization that toppled under its own weight.

In Cleveland, a ring lies on my wife's finger, and who knows? Perhaps her skin cells are already planning another revolt underneath the gold. But for now, she put it on herself because she wanted to... And that, my friends, makes all the difference.