A woman responds to silly people asking her when she's going to upgrade her wedding ring.

Get Ready To Vote With Upworthy & HeadCount #VoteItUp

    
Stories Worth Sharing.
Explore more
HeroesFamilyMost SharedVideosMore

For People Who Give a Damn.
Explore more
PlanetInnovationDesignCultureCities
About GOOD IncAdvertiseEditorial StaffContact UsSend a TipJobs
Follow Upworthy :

| |

PS. You are doing great. Keep it up :<)

Some folks questioned the size of her wedding ring. She had a lovely response.

A woman responds to silly people asking her when she's going to upgrade her wedding ring.

It's easy to see why people get excited about diamond rings.

They're shiny, they're beautiful, and they're stunning visual proof of a moment of intense happiness for many couples.

"You're engaged?! Let's see the ring!"

But there's an ugly side to engagement and wedding rings, too. And that's the idea that the carat count ought to reflect a couple's status in life, the size of their love, or the strength of their commitment.

According to data from 2012 from the Jewelers of America, Americans spend an average of around $4,000 on engagement rings. Wedding website The Knot pegged the number somewhere closer to $6,000 in 2014.

If our obsession with fancy diamond rings is indeed rising, it's probably not because we're learning to love each other more.

We're just feeling more pressure than ever to keep up.

Rachel Pederson was getting a lot of comments from friends and family about the size of her ring. Eventually, she had enough.

Rachel is a marketer and social media personality, so she had the perfect platform to say what was on her mind.

It didn't take long for her response to go viral.

Here's the full text:

"Yes, I know that my wedding ring is small.

Friends and family often ask me when I'm going to have it 'upgraded'.... After all, it doesn't represent the level of success we are achieving.

I've even had one person say 'you could wear a bigger ring for important events, so people don't think you're not successful.'

Wait a minute.... Since when did the size of someone's ring become an indication of success?!

For me, the ring is SO much more.

My ring symbolizes a whirlwind, storybook, 'make you sick' love story.... It reminds me of how my husband and I met and fell at in love in one night at a Perkin's diner.

He worked as a window washer, and I was a single mother.

One short week later, and we professed our love to one another, him leading the conversation.

We couldn't stop dreaming of our future, so excited to have a baby, buy a house, and fall asleep together every night.

We couldn't wait for the future. So we didn't.

13 days after meeting, we eloped. I didn't even THINK about a ring until my husband surprised me before the ceremony. He drained his savings to gift me with a small token of his love.

I say small, only because it pales in comparison with how big his love is, even now, after years of marriage.

That, my friends, is success to me."

Bam! Thanks, Rachel, for the excellent reminder.

No one wins when we play the ring-size game. Ring buyers feel the stress of breaking the bank while ring wearers might feel pressure to eventually "upgrade" their ring if it's small or to explain away discrepancies between the sizes of their diamond and their bank account.

And, hey, some people really want to express their love with a big ol' diamond. That's fine too.

Let's just not forget what great marriages are really made of: love, passion, and a lot of hard work.

Next to those, even the brightest diamonds in the world pale in comparison.

Capital One

Capital One Impact Initiative

This organization is fighting homelessness one run at a time

Courtesy of Back on My Feet

True

Having graduated in the top 10% of Reserve Officer Training Corp (ROTC) cadets nationwide in 2012, Pat Robinson was ready to take on a career in the Air Force full speed ahead.

Despite her stellar performance in the classroom and training grounds, Robinson feared other habits she'd picked up at Ohio University had sent her down the wrong tracks.

First stationed near Panama City, Florida, Robinson became reliant on alcohol while serving as an air battle manager student. After barnstorming through Atlanta's nightclubs on New Year's Eve, Robinson failed a drug test and lied to her commanding officer about the results.

Eleven months later, she was dismissed. Feeling ashamed and directionless, Robinson briefly returned home to Cleveland before venturing west to look for work in San Francisco.

After a brief stint working at a paint store, Robinson found herself without a source of income and was relegated to living in her car. Robinson's garbage can soon became littered with parking tickets and her car was towed. Golden Gate Park's cool grass soon replaced her bed.

"My substance abuse spiraled very quickly," Robinson said. "You name it, I probably used it. Very quickly I contracted HIV and Hepatitis C. I was arrested again and again and was finally charged and sentenced to substance abuse treatment."

Keep Reading Show less

P&G Good Everyday

Let's Do More Together

One woman’s quest to unite the diverse Hispanic community is also helping battling COVID-19

Photo courtesy of Claudia Romo Edelman

True

When the novel coronavirus hit the United States, life as we knew it quickly changed. As many people holed up in their homes, some essential workers had to make the impossible choice of going to work or quitting their jobs— a choice they continue to make each day.

Because over 80 percent of working Hispanic adults provide essential services for the U.S. economy, the Hispanic community is disproportionately affected. Hispanic families are also much more likely to live in multigenerational households, carrying the extra risk of infecting the most vulnerable. In fact, Hispanics are 20 times more likely than other patients to test positive for COVID-19.

Claudia Romo Edelman saw a community in desperate need of guidance and support. And she created Hispanic Star, a non-profit designed to help Hispanic people in the U.S. pull together as a proud, unified group and overcome barriers — the most pressing of which is the effects of the pandemic.

Because the Hispanic community is so diverse, unification is, and was, an enormous challenge.

Photo credit: Hispanic Star

Keep Reading Show less

covid-19

Family

Daughter exposes MAGA parents' hypocrisy by saying her new boyfriend is 'just like Trump'

Electing Donald Trump to be president of the United States set an incredibly ugly example for the nation's youth.

We know how it's affected the national discourse of regular adults. But there's no denying the conduct of a president impacts how children around the world see the example being set for them. Every day for the past four years, children have been subjected to the behavior of a divisive figure that many of their parents chose to exalt to the most powerful office in the world.

Sure, adults can make excuses for him saying he's an "imperfect messenger" or that they "didn't vote for him to be reverend," but these are all just ways to rationalize voting for a man with zero character. What a message to send to children: Act awful and you'll be handsomely rewarded.

But what if you took away the "Trump" name and examined the character traits of him as an ordinary person? More specifically, what if your daughter came to you and said this was the kind of person she was planning to date? Well, one MAGA family found out and the results are funny, insightful and quite revealing about how we somehow hold our leaders to different and lower standards than we expect from ourselves in our day to day lives.

Keep Reading Show less

2020 election

popular

Delta Airlines has been adding people to the no-fly list for refusing to wear masks

File:Delta Airlines - Boeing 767-300 - N185DN (Quintin Soloviev ...

File:Delta Airlines - Boeing 767-300 - N185DN (Quintin Soloviev ...

Want to land yourself on a no-fly list? Refuse to wear a mask on an airplane. Delta is actually having to ban people from flights for not wearing masks. "As of this week, we've added 460 people to our no-fly list for refusing to comply with our mask requirement," Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in a message to employees per CNN. The number is up from 270 people in August. It's kinda nuts that people are so against covering their nose and mouth that they're actually willing to get kicked off an airline, but here we are.

We're a good seven months in to the pandemic, so having to wear some kind of protective covering isn't new anymore. Delta flights have been requiring face masks on flights since May 4^th, and has been barring rule breakers from traveling since June. Delta is also one of two major U.S. airlines that keeps the middle seat open (at least until the end of 2020).

Keep Reading Show less