A ring is a tricky thing, overburdened with metaphorical significance: a perfect circle, with no beginning and no end, made of strong precious metal; durable; definitive. But also temporary, mutable. With enough heat you can melt it down and make something else, a thing that will bear no trace of ever having been a ring. They're not indestructible. My friend put a dent in her wedding ring after she took a hammer to it last spring. That was before she stopped wearing it altogether.

She talks about leaving her husband, but she doesn't. She might still, but she hasn't yet. You can't just up and leave when you have children, a house, a history. Even without those things, a long-term relationship can be impossible to get out of — you go round, and round, and one more time around, with the same problems, ghosts, bitterness. You react the same way you do every time, trapped in that ring of resentment. Relationships are not as easily destructible as we think. But they dent.

The night before I was going to look at dresses with my mother, he asked me if I thought we should call it off. I realized then that he had never been serious about his proposal. Or rather, he was serious — in the abstract, he did want to marry me — but he couldn't actually bring himself to do it, and my insisting on this commitment was revealing where the fault-lines lay. A fracture was imminent. We were locked in some kind of cycle of need, which made it easier to get engaged than to break up. I had mistaken entrapment for commitment. The ring became a symbol of what I would always want and never get from him.

Things shook down one night in Hong Kong. Sitting in a bar, after having spent a nice day on Stanley Beach, I raised the issue with all the calm and maturity I could muster. Why? I asked him. Just why? Why no ring?

He paused for a long time. "Well," he said, "I talked to my mother, and she said that engagement rings were gauche and American."

It was an excuse, not a real explanation, and it was the wrong excuse: his mother, who spent months on end with him in Asia whenever I was back in Paris. Who'd abandoned and neglected him in his early years, yet who reorganized our apartment every time she came, who slept in our bed with him, on my side of the bed. Who took the books I had left in Hong Kong and put them in cardboard boxes, so they'd be ready to mail back to me at any moment.

I don't remember what else was said. But I remember the flaming anger, the rage that sent me off my bar stool and out into the night, charging toward a taxi. He followed after, complaining that a taxi was too expensive. "I'll pay for it," I spit out. "Just get in the fucking car."

"No," he said, hangdog. "I'll take the bus."

"Get. In. The fucking. Car."

When I got back to Paris, I met someone else. Not a permanent replacement, just someone passing through, who reminded me that there were, as they say, more fish. I told my fiancé it was over. Leaving him, finally, was like stepping off the Metro. Once I was above ground, I couldn't believe how much time I had spent below. His side of the story is different, and he's entitled to it. But for me, it was simple. I had needed to back out, and by focusing on the ring, I had found my way. Had he given me a ring, it would have made it that much harder to leave him. Much as we might wish otherwise, engagement rings do have their own indisputable power.

He showed up at my apartment one night, passing through Paris not long after we broke up, to try to get me to change my mind. "I almost bought a ring on my way over here," he said.

"You almost did?"

"Yeah."

"But you didn't."

"No."

Always the right intentions. But the follow-through! Where was the follow-through? Is love enough of a reason to spend your life waiting for someone to follow through? I couldn't do it. But he still doesn't understand why I left.