Why I Gave My Husband Back My Engagement Ring

About three years ago, I did something unthinkable in the land of marriage. I gave my husband back our engagement ring.

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I wasn’t mad, I didn’t throw it at his face like the movie The Parent Trap suggests, and I wasn’t declaring a divorce. I was asking us to burndown the foundation of rotted wood we had built our marriage on and start over. I need his total buy in that he was in this with me, that he would take this ring back, and keep it till he was ready to make it “my” ring…”our” ring and not just a family ring.

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At first I fell for the trap that he needed to fix himself. (Which to be fair he would tell you that he did need to work on himself) I saw the work ahead of us though as a man problem. I also saw this in my girlfriends and clients. A repeated question of how did this man grow up to be “a man child”.

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Growing up in the era of 80s/90s sitcoms with “the dumb dad” has done our generation no favors…not the men, not the women. Women have been primed to see men as “the dumb dad”. We have been primed to look for their flaws and we have been primed to over-function and fix as a way to control our reality.

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What we were never taught was how to tend the hearth.

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We were never taught how to stand at the center of a relationship without losing ourselves. We weren’t taught how to own our own magic without burning out, or how to love men in a way that invites their strength instead of compensating for its absence.

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This—rather rudely—I came to understand was my work.

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Not because men are incapable.
Not because women should do more.
But because this role has always existed, whether we name it or not.

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In early Roman culture, the term mater familias referred to the woman of the household. Not simply a wife. Not only a mother. It was a recognized social and moral role: the woman who held the household together. The word matrimonium, from which we get matrimony, comes from mater—mother—and refers to the condition of entering this role. Marriage was named not after romance or even partnership, but after the woman’s function in sustaining the life, rhythm, and continuity of the family.

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Men held legal authority.

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Women held relational authority.

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Somewhere along the way, we lost the meaning and kept the burden.

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As I studied more and the more work I took on for myself through therapeutic training, neuroscience, and motherhood I began to see this pattern repeated everywhere. Mirror neurons show us that human beings regulate one another emotionally. Our nervous systems are constantly reading and responding to those closest to us. This is called co-regulation, and it begins in infancy.

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I lived this first with my children by watching how my calm steadied them, how my dysregulation rippled outward (especially my anger and back around this time period BOY was I angry).

And then came the quieter realization: I was also co-regulating with my husband. Not intentionally. Not skillfully. But constantly. The emotional tone of our home shifted with me, just as it did with my kids.

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This doesn’t mean women are meant to manage everyone’s emotions though it does mean we hold power here TO set the tone and “tend to hearth”. Women have been trained, biologically, socially, and relationally into attunement. Men, by contrast, were rarely given emotional maps. They were not taught how to name, track, or regulate internal experience. Many men long to show up more fully but don’t know how. Many women feel exhausted from standing at the center without language or support or even the consciousness knowing that they are standing in the center. These women’s centers become a tornado instead of a steady calm beat magnetizing their marriage.

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When we misunderstand this dynamic, women collapse into martyrdom and men retreat into confusion or defensiveness. But when we understand the dynamic then the hearth is tended consciously and something entirely different becomes possible.

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Even our metaphors for reality reflect this truth. In systems theory and physics, coherence stabilizes systems. Disorganization spreads instability. Relationships are no different. Emotional coherence matters. Presence matters. And the person most practiced in attunement often becomes the reference point for the whole system—whether she wants to or not.

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Mater familias no longer has to mean control over women. In fact, its original essence may never have been about control at all. It was about role definition in a time when love was not the organizing principle of marriage. Someone had to hold continuity. Someone had to tend the relational fire. That role was named, honored, and understood and yes later it was most certainly distorted.

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When a woman learns to stand at the center of a relationship without disappearing, that is when she tends the hearth and herself without becoming crushed by the weight of responsibility. And when that center is held with clarity rather than resentment, men are freed to rise into their importance. Not as projects. Not as dependents. But as partners.

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This is the part of the story where I can tell you: my husband did take the ring back.

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And he didn’t give it back quickly.

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We did the work. Slowly. Imperfectly. With honesty that at times felt unbearable and devotion that had to be chosen again and again. The ring returned to my finger not as an inheritance, not as a placeholder, but as a symbol of a marriage rebuilt with intention.

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How that unfolded and what it required of both of us is a story for another time.

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For now, it’s enough to say this: we both developed Relationship Intelligence. It required us both to tend to our marriage differently. And when we did that is when everything changed.