The Full Suburban: In the right hands, these two rings have changed in significance

Logan and I got married five months after our first date. Yes, you read that correctly: five months. He asked me out in July, we were engaged by October and got married before Christmas.

I usually like to add at this point in the story – after the listener has picked up his or her jaw off the floor – that we technically knew each other for a year before our first date. But still, five months is crazy. Sometimes we’ll look at each other, shrug our shoulders and say, “Well, I’m glad that worked out.”

But believe me, falling in love and getting married so quickly wasn’t without some trepidation on my part.

“This can’t be for real?” I imagined everyone around us thinking. “Do they even know what they’re doing?” Sometimes I wondered the same thing myself.

On the night Logan proposed, he knelt down on one knee and presented me with an engagement ring. As I looked down at the ring he was holding in front of me, I squinted my eyes to make sure I was seeing (or not seeing) it properly. The ring was simple and beautiful, but the diamond was … tiny.

Where was the giant rock I’d seen in countless romantic comedies? Didn’t the size of the diamond directly correlate to the amount of love your future husband had for you?

“This is really just a placeholder,” Logan said quickly. “I wanted you to be able to pick out the exact ring you wanted.”

Tiny diamond notwithstanding, I happily said yes to Logan’s proposal. We hugged and kissed and rushed home to tell our parents the happy news. And before we parted ways that night, he asked when I wanted to go ring shopping.

If it hadn’t been 11 o’ clock at night, I would have suggested that we hit the stores right then. “How about tomorrow?” I said instead.

I worried about going into work the next day and showing my ring to my co-workers who already had their doubts about the seriousness of my three-month relationship. What would my friends think, those who knew that I was not exactly a tiny-diamond kind of girl?

I’m not a particularly materialistic person, but I wanted my engagement ring to scream THIS RELATIONSHIP IS FOR REAL, AND MY FIANCÉ THINKS I’M WORTH EVERY CARAT!

What can I say? I was 24, insecure and undoubtedly a little spoiled. I’m surprised Logan didn’t head for the hills, but, thankfully, he stuck around. We went ring shopping the next day, where I fell in love with a vintage-looking square-cut diamond ring. A few weeks later, he placed the new ring on my finger.

“The time will come when that first little ring will mean more to you than the one you’re wearing now,” my grandma said one day after I had showed her my upgrade. I didn’t see how that could be possible.

And then one day shortly before our wedding, Logan and I were sitting hand in hand when I happened to glance down at our intertwined fingers. My hands were delicate and manicured, the pampered hands of a part-time working girl for whom many of life’s good things had fallen into her lap.

Logan’s hands couldn’t have been more different. They were rough and calloused from his back-aching job as a roofer, which he went to every day so he could afford to, among other things, buy me the ring of my dreams.

Suddenly, the size of the diamond on my finger didn’t seem to signify quite as much as it used to, and his calloused hand folded gently over mine signified everything.

We’ll be celebrating our 20th anniversary this Wednesday. I still love and wear the second ring every day; it is, after all, the one I really wanted. But I keep the first ring mounted in a special frame on our bedroom wall.

Sometimes, I take it from its spot and slip it on my finger, if for no other reason than to recall that cold October night when the man I love most in the world took a deep breath, got down on one knee and promised me forever.

And I’ll tell you what: Grandma was right.

Julia Ditto shares her life with her husband, six children and a random menagerie of farm animals in Spokane Valley. She can be reached at dittojulia@gmail.com.