Wedding Band / Purity Ring
At
the first Airbnb we rented in USA, Kristin had slept in the bedroom and I had
slept on the living room couch. After a while, she said she didn't want to sleep on the same
floor as me and demanded that we get a two-story place. As townhouses are expensive on
Airbnb
and we didn't know where we will be at the end of the summer,
we moved to the rural outskirts of a different city and
rented, month-to-month, an unfurnished two-bedroom townhouse apartment; she slept on an air
mattress upstairs, which had both bedrooms and the bathroom, and I slept
downstairs in a sleeping bag on the living room carpet.
One day, she came downstairs, showed me the picture of a beautiful cross-engraved wedding band that was made of yellow and white gold and cost almost $1,000, and asked me to buy it for her to wear as her "purity ring," and then as her wedding band when we get married. To her credit, this was the first expensive item she had ever asked me to buy her. Even though her many alters had asked for purses in their preferred shades in the pink to purple spectrum, she had never asked for expensive clothes or handbags.
Still, I replied that we should buy our wedding bands just before our wedding and also commented that the wedding band she wanted, although very beautiful, was arguably too expensive, too conspicuous, and too extravagant for a missionary.
One of Kristin's virtues is tenacity, without which she wouldn't have survived her father's horrific abuse for twenty years. In the ensuing days, she and all of her alters relentlessly pressured me to buy her the wedding band. The child alters were particularly insistent, reminding me how pretty the "purity ring" is and how much it will encourage Kristin.
In the end, I gave in and agreed to buy her the "purity ring," but the communication to order it with the custom engraving that she wanted on the inside of it hit surprisingly many snags and took over a month of email exchanges.