Irony

I'm trying to decide where to begin with this little anecdote because there are several good places...

A couple of summers ago I bought myself a ring and had it inscribed with "La Vie en Rose" to remind myself to wait for that instead of continuing to waste my time and love on guys who so were not worth it.  It was, essentially, a promise ring for myself.  Fairly nice piece of jewelry and it had a meaning to me.  

Eh, I dated a few doozies since then.  

Eventually, I stopped wearing the ring every day because sometimes I'd wear a different ring or just go ringless.  But I decided to start wearing the ring again yesterday so that I would remember that somewhere out there is the guy for me and that I should be patient-ish until he shows up.  I'm not saying that I think I should hide out in a convent until Prince Charming shows up, but that I want to move beyond the casual, never in a bajillion years going to be anything relationships and, more or less, save myself for more serious encounters. So I put the ring back on.

While on campus today, I reflected to a friend that I felt like I should write my list of love rules because I'm getting the feeling that I'll need them in the near future.  You know, rules like "I won't be with a man who doesn't inspire me; I won't be with a man who still sleeps on Superman bedsheets; I won't be with a man who calls his mother more often than he calls me," etc.  I don't know what is going to happen, but I get these premonitory feelings occasionally and lately they've been accurate, although things haven't exactly worked out 100% like I envision the whole scenario.  For example, my premonition that I'd fall for an older man.  Figuring that I wouldn't meet any older men until I finished with grad school, I just accepted it.  But I fell for a PhD student who is older.  Maybe I'll need to love rules because I'm about to fall in love, maybe I need them to help a friend through her own relationship issues.  Who knows?  (Naturally, I know which one of those two possibilities I'd prefer...)


On the ride home, I was still thinking about these rules and my promise to only be with a man I could see myself settling down with and that ring I had bought myself to symbolize that promise.  I reflected on the doozies I'd been with since making that promise and buying the ring.  I remembered reading a couple of years ago a piece that talked about someone having promised herself so often that she was going to go on a diet and she would soon broke that promise, that the words had lost all meaning.  So, she'd say the words, but her subconscious was all, "Yeah. Right. Whatever."  I began thinking that maybe I'd done that, except with men.  I'd tell myself, "No more pathetic losers" and then I would rationalize being with the next guy who came along regardless of how big a loser he was (and trust me: they were NOT even close to being winners).  So I started thinking that since I had broken that promise symbolized by the ring that maybe I should just buy myself a new ring and make a new promise.  I got home.  I looked at a local jewelry store's website.  Didn't really see much because the website wasn't fantastic.  Decided to go in to the store sometime soon.  A couple of hours later, as I was driving my friend home from coffee, I noticed that the stone (which was just an onyx) had fallen out of my ring.  I couldn't find it.  

The irony hit me: my promise ring broke on the same day that I was thinking about how often I'd broken the promise.


I had to laugh.