When Reed and I were talking about combining our lives, he made it clear that if we were going to have a kid, he wanted to get married. I wanted to have some complex legal arrangement we could welcome more people into over time as equals if it made sense, but he said that was Too Much and could we please just do this one thing normally. Fine.

We got married back in 2019, and I started off with a family heirloom ring his grandfather had. Which I lost about 4 months later because I was climbing all the time and taking rings on and off (mostly off). Whoops and yikes. Reed bought me a simple gold band from Costco and told me I could lose as many of those as I wanted, within reason.

It’s been about 6 years since then, and I’ve kept track of the same ring the whole time. I think I’m ready for a Big Boy ring again! But this time, I want it to fit my aesthetic more closely. I also wanted to celebrate getting a new job, and this seemed like a nice way to do that.

So Reed starts Doing His Research Thing, and finds that there is indeed an entire market dedicated to simple black or grey rings with blue highlights. Do you want to guess where these bad boys come from?

They’re masculine rings for cop spouses. They’re thin blue line rings. So now I’m very joyfully wearing this thing that is blatantly flagging for absolutely the wrong thing, and I am delighted that if I ever get booked for my activism I might cause a lot of extra confusion. And, it’s spot on for my style!

But then, I didn’t want to give a cop ring website money, so Reed kept doing research and found enough water marks on enough photos like the one above to figure out all of these come from one manufacturer in China. So it also only cost like $40! So now I get to have backups, too.