Version 2
August 2024
Palladium, sterling silver

Version 1
November 2013
Platinum, platinum sterling silver

This is my wedding ring.

I've made many rings for Jewish clientele with Hebrew phrases on them, usually from the Song of Songs, typically with the classic and beautiful inscription "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine." Before I proposed to my wife, I decided to take search through this most romantic book of the Hebrew Bible to see if there was something that spoke more personally to my relationship with her. I reasoned that when I found the right verse, I'd know I was ready to propose. I found that in verse 2:10 - 2:11, קומי לך רעיתי יפתי ולכי לך כי הנה הסתו עבר (kumi lach ra'yati yafati ul'chi lach, ki hinei has'tav avar), "arise, my love, my fair one, come away! For now the winter has passed." I nearly wept.

Some backstory: I'd known my wife for most of my life before we started dating, as she and I had gone to high school together in Honolulu. Shortly after we got together while we were both living in Washington DC, we decided together to move home—which, due to logistics, she wound up doing a month before I did. Additionally, just before we reconnected I'd started pulling myself out of a minor depression (or as I had been glibly calling it, "my general malaise"). While being with her did help my attitude, I'd already been doing the work—else we never would have lasted.

When I read the verse above, I heard it in my wife's voice: "arise, my love, my fair one, come away! For now the winter has passed!" During our many phone and video calls in the month between our respective moves home, it was as though she was exhorting me to leave DC and fly home to her. We'd moved back to Hawai‘i in the springtime, so not only was winter over but I was never going to have to live through a full winter again. Because she had helped accelerate—or had at least coincided with—my recovery, our relationship represented to me the passing of the winter of my own discontent (to steal a phrase). The winter of being single was over. The winter of living on the US mainland was over. There could be no other verse that better summarized the joy, celebration and intent of our love and our life together. This verse is my wife calling me to her, comforting me and telling me that everything will be alright.

Naturally, since this is my wedding ring, it's not only the verse that is special—I had to get fancy with the construction as well. My original design, which was finally realized in version 2, involved creating a hollow ring with a helical design of Hebrew letters pierced through it, which subsequently had a second similarly-colored metal cast inside of it—in this case, a palladium tube with sterling silver cast as the second metal. I chose palladium (which is in the platinum family) because it's slightly darker than platinum (for better contrast) and because, as I'd learned from version 1, platinum is really heavy. The result of the bi-metal casting is that despite looking like silver inlay, the letters are actually all part of a single piece of silver—meaning the ring is two separate solid pieces of metal that are neither soldered nor fused together, but are completely inextricable from each other without destroying the whole thing—which I thought was an excellent metaphor for marriage.

When we first got married, though, the casting house that I was working with didn't have the technology to make my actual vision for the ring come to fruition. Instead, they suggested I cast the inner core first, and then the outer surface would be cast around it. Because platinum has the higher melting point, the core had to be platinum which also inverted my vision of the color profile. The construction wasn't well done, and the silver started flaking off after a few months. Efforts to repair it just made it worse, so I decided to re-make it once the technology was there, and in a lull when I wasn't scrambling to finish client projects! I never took the crumbling of the ring as an omen, at least not for me—but the casting house that failed to carry out my original vision is out of business, while our marriage is still going strong!

My wife's wedding band has a great (and far more lighthearted) story as well, and was also done in two-tone white metal. See it here!

Rings