On the right there— and holy hell, does hi-res make it clear that I need to polish my rings– is my wedding ring. I got married in 2008. On the left is my class ring, which I probably acquired in 1996 or 1997. I almost never take either of them off, so it’s not unfair to say that that class ring has been physically on my finger for nearly 100% of, at least, the last 24 years.

I think it’s probably time to admit that my class ring is too small now. And that was the original impetus for this post, that I’m hitting the point where this ring is getting harder to move than it really ought to be and that I wasn’t super excited about the idea of not wearing it any longer, and yes, I’m aware that I can lose weight and I absolutely should lose weight but that’s not going to happen instantly. And then I got on this kick where I started looking around for men’s rings on the Internet (because not wearing a ring on my right hand is not an option; I just want one that allows blood to travel through my fingers) and I found a ring size chart and printed it out.

And I discovered that near as I can tell, my wedding ring and my class ring are exactly the same size. Which means that somehow my right ring finger is considerably fatter than my left ring finger, or maybe that “comfort fit” thing I vaguely recall the wedding ring people talking about makes way more of a difference than I thought. Because it is a lot easier to remove my wedding ring than my class ring. Or maybe it’s the shape? The class ring does have more surface area touching the finger.

So, two questions, I suppose: has anyone out there got experience with resizing rings? I feel like it’s a bad idea, because this size was good enough for nearly 25 years and permanently altering the ring rather than taking steps to make my fingers less chunky seems like a poor decision. Also, am I a sucker if I order a new ring from Etsy? Because there’s a lot of cool stuff on there, but they all look too cheap to be real.