Things I want my kids to know

I take my wedding ring off all the time.

Not when I am out and about in bars or on trains or anything like that. It stays on when I am out and about, but I take it off at home. When I go to sleep. When I do the washing up. When I am cleaning something gross. When I moisturise my hands or put suncream on the kids. When I am typing for a long time. When I work out.

In fact, I have just taken it off now, because typing about it made me really aware of it.

Now the thing is, me taking my ring off is actually really annoying. It becomes annoying because I take it off all the time, but then immediately forget where I have put it. So, my wife has to deal with me wandering about the house being unable to locate it. Sometimes cursing myself and getting frustrated that I have done this YET AGAIN. Recently I misplaced it and couldn’t find it for over 48 hours. There was doorbell camera footage of me returning home in the evening with the ring on, and leaving the house the next day without it on, so we knew it was in the house, but hadn’t the foggiest idea where. It turned out it was in the pocket of my winter coat, but we still to this day haven’t worked out how that happened, because at no point in that time did I have cause to put the coat on, because A) I was inside and B) it was warm.

So, with all this kerfuffle going on, my wife asked a perfectly reasonable question:

“Why can’t you just keep it on?”

My wife doesn’t get this tendency to remove rings at all. She sleeps with hers on. The suncream thing, yes, because she doesn’t want to scratch the kids. Fair enough. The rest of it, not so much. So to her, it is hard to understand why I would feel the need, because it only causes problems.

The thing is, my experience of wearing a ring is very different from hers.

I can feel it. Almost all the time. There are long periods of time where I won’t be aware of it, but whenever I do think about it, I can just feel it on my skin and for some reason it feels annoying. When I sleep, my hands get hot and if I have fallen asleep with it on, I wake up feeling like my fingers are swollen and being restricted. They aren’t really, but it is enough to make me feel uncomfortable. When I put cream on my hands or anything else oily (I will also take it off when baking or mixing stuff in a roasting tin, for example) I can feel it even more. When I am typing, I become aware of it rubbing. It doesn’t leave a mark or anything like that. As rings go, it is the most comfortable I could have hoped for. This isn’t about the ring. It’s about my experience of having things on my skin.

So, that is what I said to my wife. I asked her if she is aware of the rings on her fingers as she goes about her business and she said that yes, now we were talking about it she could feel it, but that it didn’t register as an issue, and most of the time she is pretty much unaware.

That was our starting point. We have had conversations before about the different ways our minds work and we had an analogy we could use here.

Previously, we have spoken about the fact that my wife is more bothered by mess and clutter than I am. When our kids were small, she would find it hard to relax unless all the toys had been tidied away, whereas I would be able to sit in the lounge in the middle of all the chaos and feel the same as if it was entirely clear. Don’t get me wrong, I still appreciate a tidy room, but it doesn’t bother me if there’s stuff on the floor. For my wife, it does.

The analogy we had used to get a shared understanding of this is: it is like the clutter is louder to her than it is to me.

Because we had that language already, I was able to use it to express my experience of wearing my ring compared to hers. It is like the sensation of something on my skin is louder to me than it is to her.

She could get that. She doesn’t experience it herself. But she could make an allowance in her mind for the idea that I do.

The understanding that someone else experiences the world differently to you is such a useful thing to have in any given relationship. When there is something that somebody does that you just don’t understand, having the conversation about what is going on there and being able to make space in your own mind for the fact that there might be something that you just don’t experience in the same way, means that you can make space for one another. It might also mean that you find your way towards language that you can use to make it easier to get a hold of.

Saying that, I am working on being more thoughtful about where I put my ring.

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Thanks for reading. Until next week,

Ted

P.S. I was on the driveway when I discovered my ring was in my pocket and the doorbell camera captured it. I will see if I can clip that up and share it as my reaction made me laugh!