I now pronounce you marriage obsessed

When I'm nervous, I spin my ring around my finger.
I remember reaching down to play with it and it wasn't there.
Yes, it was a cheap silver ring I'd bought myself at Sears, but I wore it all the time.
It was always on my ring finger (but on my right hand.)
This was back in university days when I lived in an apartment the size of Nicole Richie. It wasn't a big place, which meant it should have taken no time to find it.
After hours of looking behind sofas, in dirty laundry and in the trash, I came to the only logical conclusion: My boyfriend had obviously swiped it at some point so that he could use it to determine what size of engagement ring to buy me.
For days, I walked around elated. I'd check out the rings on other girls' hands at the grocery store. I thought about how I was going to tell my parents. I laughed at myself for thinking for weeks that our relationship was going down the pooper. Obviously, he'd been distant, cranky and uncommunicative because of all the stress on his shoulders about giving me the perfect proposal.

A few days later, I found the ring in a pile of stuff on my kitchen table.
I must have taken it off before I washed dishes.

Soon after this Oh-my-god-I'm-such-a-loser moment, we broke up.

And I was back to hunting for a husband. Did I say husband? I meant boyfriend.

I forgot about how marriage obsessed I was until this week when I went out with some gals, and inevitably, the conversation turned to proposals and weddings.

Why is it that for so many of us women, being with someone isn't enough?

Why do we have to have the ring?

I think a lot of girls want The Day, a whole Cinderella event with confetti, doves, white satin gloves, hundreds of people, The Macarena, The Chicken Dance, The Achy Breaky Heart dance and all eyes on them.

I just want to be able to say "husband."

There's something really juvenile about having to call your significant other "boyfriend" when you're 29 years old and you have a family together.

The other option seems to be even more confusing. More than a few people have thought I am a lesbian because I sometimes call my man my "partner." Apparently, if you have short hair and you use the p-word, some people will assume you're gay. Hey, which is A-Ok, it's just not correct, 'tis all. (My Grade 7 teacher used to say when you assume you make 'ass out of u and me.'

I just want to be able to say, "I'm sorry. My husband's not available right now. Can I take a message?" Or "Have you met my husband?" Or, "Hey husband, we need to buy some toilet paper today."

When we were in our 20s, my friends and I were naive. We thought that a ring would keep our husbands faithful.
We know that's not true.

Christie Brinkley = Married. Now divorcing husband over alleged affair with teen.
Sara Evans = Married. Now divorcing husband over alleged affair.
Leanne Domi = Married. Now divorcing husband over alleged affair with Belinda Stronach.

We thought a ring would give our relationships permanence.
Also not true.

We thought a ring would mean we had true, pure love.
So not true.

If my girlfriends and I took back all the time we'd spent talking about marriage over the past decade, we could have solved world hunger, or an even bigger conundrum: The Madonna Malawi adoption fiasco.

It's not just us young gals who want to be married. "Married" gazillionaire gals also want to be married. Kiss bassist Gene Simmons recently told the world that he still refuses to marry his longtime love, Canada's Shannon Tweed, the mother of his two teenage children and a former Playboy playmate. (You know when a man refuses to marry a buxom blonde with big, ah, bank accounts, he's got a major hangup about saying "I do.")

The 57-year-old musician said marriage, for men, is like quicksand.

"You women should grow up," he told The Canadian Press, complaining that women are always trying to rope men into a marriage.

"You have to get over that stuff, because it will drive men away. And then you wonder why he's mounting your sister instead of you."

Simmons said that he knows the reason studies say married men are happier than their single counterparts.

"Because if they say otherwise, their wives will kill them," Simmons said. "Do you know why men die before their wives? Because they want to."

The sad thing is, after 23 years together, Tweed still wants to marry her suga-suga.

It's an ongoing theme on their A&E reality TV show, Family Jewels.

Simmons rolls his eyes at her when she walks around their mansion subtly humming the Wedding March. If they've been together for more than two decades and they have two children together, what's putting a ring on her finger really going to do to their relationship? All of a sudden, she's going to let herself go and start wearing mom jeans, dickies and sweatshirts?

It's sort of a Kiss off, don't you think?
And here is the rest of it.