Isn’t the wedding ring dumb?

Rooted in slavery, it belongs in history’s dustbin.

Why am I having trouble with the idea of someone putting a wedding ring on my finger?—as if saying, “I own you now.” In loving, do I belong to someone? Does the ring remind me, and the world, of that fact?

Thinking about rings as symbols of marriage, I look up information about them, and none of it has anything to do with me. “It generally is accepted that wedding rings symbolized possession of a person, like a slave,” notes the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

It wasn’t until World War II that husbands wore them. The ring, until the war, which brought on spasms of jealousy from men being shipped off to fight and die, was for the woman.

It showed she was owned. I’m not into any of that.

Historically, the ring is a symbol of a woman being owned.

The wedding is a transfer of property. This was true throughout the ancient world. In the Bible, in Genesis 31:15, Rachel and Leah note their father “sold” them when they married their husband, Jacob. But the mentality persists in wedding traditions practiced now.

Her name changes; the man’s does not. In the traditional vow, they are “man and wife,” not “husband and wife.” The man didn’t change, only the woman…