That Bad Advice: Help! My Wife Won't Throw Out Her Old Wedding Ring!

[minoanmiss]

My wife and I are both on our second marriages. We’ve been married for 23 years. Recently, she showed me her wedding band from her first marriage. I asked her to get rid of it. She refused. She said it’s part of her history. This bothers me: The ring was given to her by another man with whom she exchanged vows and to whom she was married for six years. Your thoughts? — Honoring the Past?

Dear Honoring the Past,

That your wife of 23 years recently showed you a wedding band from a man she was married to decades ago is clear evidence that she is actively engaging in a sordid affair about which she is desperately trying to hide the evidence, and you are lucky to have discovered it now through your extreme cunning and wile, which is to say, because she showed it to you of her own volition because it is not a big deal whatsoever.

Worse, your putative “wife” is lording over you the shocking revelation that she existed on planet Earth before you came along — something you could never have known purely by virtue of the fact that you are her second husband. Who was she married to before this abrupt and traumatic reveal? Why, her imagined prince charming — you, of course! Obviously she has only and ever been married either to you or to the hope that she would find you, personally, somehow.

It is cruel indeed for your secretive wife to suddenly divulge out of nowhere and with no compunction whatsoever, that she, a formerly married woman who was completely open about her prior relationships, had in fact been formerly married to a real-life human man rather than preserving for you specifically her womanly gifts, as you had every right to believe up until the specific moment when, because you had never seen it before and thus it could not exist purely because she told you it had happened and we all know how women do be making these things up, her previous marriage. Your cruel wife has casually revealed to you the horrifying evidence of her desecration of the marriage vows which she had not made to you because you were not her husband, and this insult shall not stand!

This ring is only part of her “history” if your wife is allowed to believe that the sorry play of her life had worth and value and meaning before you made your entrance onstage. That’s no platform on which to build a relationship; the only way to know if your marriage is secure is to abandon her for her infidelity to you, a man she has been married to nearly three times longer than the man who gave her that ring all those decades ago. If she takes you back, you will only know it’s real if she throws away the ring over which she exchanged vows with a total stranger lo those 23 years ago. [n.b. actually at least 29 years ago]