The difference between the straight bride and the lesbian bride.
Straight girl: “Ooh, look at my ring! Isn’t it sparkly?”
Lesbian girl: Silent. No fancy ring. No public acknowledgment. No coos and oohs and aahs.
We were at a New Year’s party full of coworkers. Two of them had recently gotten engaged and they spent quality time thrusting their hands under the noses of other people.
I sat adjacently, quietly, giving a quick glance at the rocks. One woman’s diamond was larger than the other woman’s, but they were both pretty gracious about it. Another woman proudly showed her own engagement ring, now coupled with the wedding band she wears, having been married within the last year or two.
This wedding club is like a club we’re not invited to, although I think some of the exclusion is self-imposed.
We’re not out at work, at least not widely. A few select people know, and I’m sure more people think they know. But it’s never talked about. Politely not talked about. People at our workplace tend to put on blinders.
So here we are, hearing other women cooing over expensive, sparkly rocks, and we can’t talk about our upcoming ceremony. We don’t have fancy rings to show for it, either.
We’re frugal, as I’ll keep repeating. A couple of years ago, we bought each other rings that were unspoken commitments to each other, I think. Jade kept insisting on calling them our going-steady rings. Which irritated the crap out of me.
But we were a little loathe to call them engagement rings because that word was scary. We didn’t know whether we’d have a ceremony, and while the domestic partnership issue had come up, it came up so early that it was too scary too, and we promptly ran away with it.
I’m not a girl that wears a lot of jewelry, but I wanted a pretty ring to connect me to my girl. So we started ring shopping.
We went to different jewelry stores, trying to figure out what we wanted. We sort of wanted to match, and Jade doesn’t like the bloody toll diamonds have taken on people, and so she had ruled them out. And I like sapphires. To complicate matters, my fingers are large, fat and chunky; in fact, my ring finger will fit my father’s old wedding band. So it’s pretty hard to just get a ring in my size.
We still weren’t comfortable telling random clerks that we were buying each other rings. “Are you getting married? What’s the occasion?”
In the end, one of us would pick out a ring and the other would pay for it. Nothing was said, but the clerks surely must’ve drawn their conclusions without our help.
We quietly started wearing our rings (which did turn out to have tiny diamonds in them). My dying grandmother saw it in her hospital room and said slurringly, “Are you engaged?” And it pained me to lie to her for the first time in my life, to tell her no, that “sometimes you just have to buy pretty things for yourself, because you can’t wait for someone else to do it.”
We also didn’t wait to figure out what we should call the rings, or where we thought the relationship would end up.
Now the wedding date is looming close, and we still can’t talk about it with many people. We still can’t wave our hands with giggling glee.
I’m not sure I would have wanted to. I don’t like a lot of attention. I think my hands are ugly, anyway. Would I start waving a hand with a ring I’ve worn for a year and a half?
It just doesn’t seem fair, though, to keep quiet. It’s self-imposed, I know, but how would people react if we were open about it? No matter what people might say, I still don’t think that most people would’ve been comfortable with the whole notion of these lesbians acting just like normal folk, getting married and trying to cheapen the whole thought of that sacred commitment between a man and woman and god.
We have to make our own normality, and be comfortable with ourselves. Too bad that I don’t think the day has come when it’s really OK to be doing this.
We’ve met some *family* at the church we’ve been going to, and they all say they’re so happy to see us getting married. They barely know us, and yet they’re happier than my real family is, let’s say. Because we’re so much younger than these other gay folk, I wonder if it’s a generational thing. They might not have had the opportunity to get married openly like we do.
Maybe the next generation of kids coming up won’t think twice about gay marriage. Once all this nonsense about trying to legislate committed love gets sorted out, perhaps it won’t be an issue any more. Perhaps two women 20 years from now won’t have to think twice about getting married in a park. Or about buying rings. Or about buying dresses or flowers.
Our money is just as good now, but we’re not comfortable with ourselves, with other people. Salespeople still blink or bat an eye. It’s subtle, but it’s still there.
