My husband lost his ring 24 hours after our wedding
After Sir Andy Murray led a public search for his missing band, Marina Fogle recalls her own hunt
Many described it as an inauspicious start to our marriage. Less than 24 hours after I had solemnly slipped it onto his finger, in front of a packed church of our friends and family, my husband Ben lost his wedding ring.
The first I knew of it, people were acting weirdly. It was the day after our wedding in rural Portugal, and following a late night of festivities, we had invited those whose hangovers allowed to a lunch on the shore of a delightfully cool lake.
The sun was high in the sky by the time we all emerged, and most headed straight for the refreshing waters to cool off from the searing sun and relieve their aching heads. We had bought loads of blow-up lilos, and I have vivid memories of our guests languishing in the water, floating and chatting and reliving the excesses of the previous night.
And then something changed; in an instant the calm, relaxed vibe turned into a sense of panic. A pitchfork was brandished and I wondered what they were trying to do in the sediment at the bottom of the lake.
It turned out that, like Sir Andy Murray this week, Ben had lost his ring. We attach a great deal of importance to this little band of metal.
It marks the significance of our vows and the eternity of our union. So it didn’t look good when Ben’s ring didn’t even last a day. We’d chosen simple platinum bands, a metal so stable it would last forever, like our marriage, we hoped. No wonder my mother-inlaw was panicking.
Sir Andy managed to last six years before misplacing his ring, which he attached to the laces of a pair of trainers, as he can’t play tennis with it on. The slightly smelly shoes were then left under his car overnight, as he didn’t want to “stink the [hotel] room out”. Come morning, the trainers had been taken and with them the ring, leaving Murray with little choice but to issue a plea for their return on social media. “Needless to say I’m in the bad books at home so I want to try and find it,” he said on Instagram.
Back at my wedding celebration, frenetic conversations in hushed tones had replaced the carefree laughter.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, increasingly concerned. Worried looks were exchanged and after a sharp intake of breath, the news was broken to me that Ben’s wedding ring was no longer on his finger, but had plunged to the bottom of the lake.
The Germanic contingent of the party swiftly sprang into action. Our guests were creative in finding tools that might aid in the search for a tiny piece of metal in sediment that had accumulated at the bottom of a lake over hundreds of years.
But as the long shadows of parched cypress trees wended their way across the lake, we realised the battle might have been lost. By now, the once clear waters had turned a muddy brown, and a detritus of equipment that had failed to find Ben’s ring was led back up to the house.
The wedding band that Ben had
carefully placed on my left hand the day before, remains where he put it. If I take it off and look carefully inside, I can see our names, the date of our marriage and the tiny hilltop town in which we took our vows etched inside. In those middle-aged moments of forgetfulness, when I can’t remember our anniversary, I slip it off.
Ben has a funny relationship with his wedding ring. He says that having never worn one before, he was fiddling with it in the lake, which is why it dropped off. He attempted to replace it a year later, when we were in Formentera at the wedding of some great friends. He found a local jeweller who made perfectly imperfect wedding rings, little bands of gold, irregular in their shape and each completely unique. We ended up having an informal renewal of vows on the beach, officiated by the excited couple who’d just got married for real.
But today, Ben has no ring on his finger. When he climbed Everest, he’d been warned that his fingers might swell and so put it on a thin piece of rope around his neck. He doesn’t like wearing rings and while I could interpret that as a sign that he’s unwilling to have an outward symbol that he is indeed betrothed, I choose to believe that he’s simply someone who isn’t a fan of jewellery.
I’m the opposite – I’ve never taken my wedding band off, mainly because I know that if it’s not on my finger, I’m bound to lose it. And so my ring finger is now etched with a deep ridge of muscle wastage where my ring for the last 15 years has sat, becoming so much a part of me that I’d feel lost without it. Hopefully the Murrays feel the same way, not least because Sir Andy’s internet plea worked and his trainers, with the ring still attached, were returned the following day.
Sometimes Ben’s ring hangs around his neck, often it doesn’t. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen it for a while and it’s not impossible that he hasn’t lost this one, too. But I don’t mind, because the rings we put on each other’s fingers didn’t matter, it was the promises we made. And there’s a part of me that is quite happy that sitting at the bottom of a murky lake in rural Portugal, in a place that marked the beginning of a truly happy union, is a small platinum band bearing our names, buried there forever.
‘Frenetic conversations in hushed tones had replaced the carefree laughter of guests’