#5 of Fleur's 10 Best

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We're currently in the midway of Fleur's 10 best countdown before all fresh content will be showcased here to enliven your passions. Soon, in addition to this home, Fleur Consultancy will be featured in a brand new venue~ more details to come!

For tonight, please enjoy this reprised post on Fleur's favorite topic: Love~

Dear Fleur,
Sometimes I feel like I am from Mars because I still believe in the equal rights amendment. Did you know that Illinois is one of 15 states that have still not ratified it? Only three more are needed...But that's not the point. The problem is that while I'm so passionate about this old unresolved quandary of whether women deserve to be legally recognized as equal, I simultaneously long to be on a beach somewhere flipping my top up for every random stranger and -hopefully- captured on film in the act!!! Please advise.

My Dear,
One year ago I was led into Tiffany's on the arm of a true gentleman. The experience was sublime, not only because I was madly in love with him, but because I was in a place recognized as one of the quintessential American archetypes of romance. The air there is the result of a thousand different women's perfumes in floral notes dancing with each other like lithe fairies while a hundred men's colognes sing the bass note of open wallets below. At Tiffany's, the age-old ritual of high idolatry sexism shines on and it polished me to a glossy complicity beyond critique. The snowflake silvers and the clean trademark aqua coupled in such a way as to utterly convince me of the perpetuity and glamor of marriage, as once... I was convinced utopia could be achieved. The high ceilings in the grand space filled with dazzling jewels kindled a reverse vertigo to the point that I felt I was floating and the only thing keeping my feet on the ground was the -forgive me- ginormous sparkle on my third left hand finger.
I said yes the next day when my gentleman knelt in the dust beside a Central Park Zoo bench and proposed. And we celebrated -I must tell you although it is wholely irrelevant- at a French Bistro. If you have not lived as solitarily as have I, then it may be difficult for you to imagine how for me to become engaged was as if the moon had just been landed upon for the first time. The ring reminded me of when as a child I used to try to watch one bit of water in the waterfall as it fell the whole way. Now that glistening chip was captured and attached to me. And I was overcome by a feeling of belonging to a club from which I'd always previously been excluded: the wives club. Or the pre-wives club, to be specific which reminds me of pre-war apartments, but that is another story. The weight of the ring lent me a legitamcy I'd never felt before: when I washed my hands and saw it, I felt responsible enough to consider what I would make for dinner, as my mother always had. When I saw the ring on my hand holding my purse, the shine reflected in the patent leather mirrored a certainty that I was spoken for, the deal was sealed, the long soul searches were over and the questions were answered and I could march like a good little girl into my castle of Disney dreams.
Slipping it off then happened almost by accident, almost as a funny little dare. I had told myself that I would never take it off. In the few short weeks I'd worn it, somehow a groove had already been worn and I'd become accustomed to thinking of myself as a bride. But then I started thinking the ring should go back to Tiffany's before the end of the thirty day guarantee because the cost of the ring in proportion to my annual income was obscene. Let that not stand as a warning to any future suitors for I do not discourage luxury! But who does not feel some hesitancy in the presence of one's moral standards struggling to subdue one's primal desire?
It came off like a sweater, a shoe, a post-coital condom, as it turned out. Easily, I mean, and with a certain fatigue as if it too was ready for some alone time.
My fiance who I still loved was away on business the night I put the ring back in its little box on the shelf in the closet. Even with the door closed, I could hear its heart beating, its breath misting the polyester lining of the box. Once it was gone, I realized how plain and bony my own ring finger minus the ring is.

Why, you may ask, why had I forsaken the sparkly promise? There's a runaway part of me, I admit, a heart-is-a-lonely-hunter part. My finger wanted a little more alone time. Just to be loose from the platinum orbit. Just to tiptoe like a skinny little girl finger into the dark wet grass in a nightgown and howl at the moon.

Continue your good work thinking about the E.R.A., child. Don't deny inside you are free. Refrain from giving free tit shows, as much as you possibly can. Best, Fleur