Wedding Blog

I’ve had my wedding ring since Mr. Mary Jane proposed, but the time has come to get serious about finding Mr. Mary Jane a wedding ring. He’s not a flashy guy, so he’s not in it for the bling. But he doesn’t necessarily want to settle for the cheapest, plainest possible band available, either. So we basically wanted to find something in between these two styles:

First of all, have you noticed how much harder it is to find men’s rings to gawk at online than it is to find ladies’? A lot of the sites we went to only had a handful of different men’s styles. Finally, I stumbled upon Jewelry Vortex. We’re planning to buy Mr. Mary Jane’s ring from River City Jewelers (the same local jewelry store where we got mine), but Mr. Mary Jane needed some inspirations to figure out what styles he likes. Jewelry Vortex had hundreds of men’s styles, categorized by metal and design. Perfect for a couple of window-shoppers! (The source for all of the images in this post is Jewelery Vortex.)

When we first started talking about his ring, Mr. Mary Jane was liking some of the tungsten and titanium styles. The dark metals were appealing and we’d read about how wonderfully durable they were. They’re also inexpensive compared to other metals: an added bonus.

An example of a tungsten ring.

After speaking with our jeweler and doing some more reading, we decided that these harder metals were not for us. See, the same qualities that make these metals so resistant to scratching and dents also make them very difficult or impossible to re-size. Mr. Mary Jane and I both tend to fluctuate in weight enough that it was important to us that our rings be re-sizable. If you grow out of a tungsten or titanium ring, most jewelers will not re-size it. Instead, they’ll exchange it for an identical ring in a different size. Not necessarily a bad deal, but you won’t have the same ring you got married with. We weren’t down with that.

We started browsing gold. I liked styles that had diamonds like this:

While Mr. Mary Jane leaned toward styles with a hammered or textured finish, like this one:

Together, we sat in front of the computer and chose about 15 different styles. I was surprised to see that Mr. Mary Jane favored many of the two-tone and yellow gold options. Since I personally prefer white gold jewelry, I hadn’t even been thinking of yellow. But it’s his ring, and I want him to get exactly what he wants. We copied and pasted each ring image we chose in to our wedding planning Google Doc, and promptly forgot about them for about 6 weeks.

Then a few days ago, I started feeling the pressure of our self-imposed June 30 deadline. I decided it was time to make the decision. (Rather: I decided it was time to tell Mr. Mary Jane to make the decision!) He’s now narrowed it down to three possible options:

Personally, my favorite of the above three choices is the first one (but I likes me some bling!). Remember, since we’re not buying our ring from the Jewelery Vortex site, these really are just inspirations. We plan to bring his favorite(s) to River City Jewelers and ask them for options and/or suggestions. Who knows - we may stumble upon a completely different style that he loves more!

Did your mister look at a lot of ring styles? Is he having trouble (or did he have trouble) picking one he loves?