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

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

 Evan Porter
04.22.16

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!"

"Post it to Facebook immediately!" Photo via iStock

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.

marriage love wedding money wealth wedding rings engagement rings status engagement
More

Anyone with a slightly sick sense of humor will be enchanted by this twisted love story.

Image by Brent Connelly from Pixabay and sixthformpoet / Twitter

Twitter user Matt, who goes by the name @SixthFormPoet, shared a dark love story on Twitter that's been read by nearly 600,000 people. It starts in a graveyard and feels like it could be the premise for a Tim Burton film.

While it's hard to verify whether the story is true, Matt insists that it's real, so we'll believe him.

Keep Reading Show less
love story graveyard funny stories twitter
Culture

Left-handed people have one advantage over right-handed counterparts, study finds

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Approximately 10% of the population is left-handed, and the balance between lefties and righties has been the same for almost 5,000 years. People used to believe that left-handed people were evil or unlucky. The word "sinister" is even derived from the Latin word for "left."

In modern times, the bias against lefties for being different is more benign – spiral notebooks are a torture device, and ink gets on their hands like a scarlet letter. Now, a new study conducted at the University of Oxford and published in Brain is giving left-handers some good news. While left-handers have been struggling with tools meant for right-handers all these years, it turns out, they actually possess superior verbal skills.

Researchers looked at the DNA of 400,000 people in the U.K. from a volunteer bank. Of those 400,000 people, 38,332 were southpaws. Scientists were able to find the differences in genes between lefties and righties, and that these genetic variants resulted in a difference in brain structure, too. "It tells us for the first time that handedness has a genetic component," Gwenaëlle Douaud, joint senior author of the study and a fellow at Oxford's Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, told the BBC.

Keep Reading Show less
popular

A plant is learning to take selfies in the name of science

E & T

Pete the Plant is a maidenhair fern living in the Rainforest Life exhibit at the London Zoo, but Pete the Plant isn't like other plants. Pete the Plant is also a budding photographer. Scientists in the Zoological Society of London's (ZSL) conservation tech unit has been teaching the plant how to take selfies.

The ZSL held a competition in partnership with Open Plant, Cambridge University, and the Arribada Initiative for the design of a fuel cell powered by plants. Plant E in the Netherlands produced the winning design. The prototype cell creates electricity from the waste from the plant's roots. The electricity will be used to charge a battery that's attached to a camera. Once Pete the Plant grows strong enough, it will then use the camera to take a selfie. Not too bad for a plant.

"As plants grow, they naturally deposit biomatter into the soil they're planted in, which bacteria in the soil feeds on – this creates energy that can be harnessed by fuel cells and used to power a wide range of conservation tools," Al Davies, ZSL's conservation technology specialist, explains.

RELATED: This plant might be the answer to water pollution we've been searching for

Keep Reading Show less
Innovation