Tales of a crazy girlfriend - Pt. 1

A Pinterest page for engagement rings – I wonder what she’s trying to tell me.

Today, I went about my normal weekend business. I travelled to and wrote in a café for an hour, returned home and cleaned the house, prepared some breakfast, created a to do list for the day and greeted my better half when she swept through the living room after waking a mere two and half hours after me.

A glorious process, which I must admit I love.

She wandered in and puckered up next to me. As I suckled on God’s teat (sipped at yet another coffee), adorned in the finest cloth (a hoodie and a pair of Adidas trackies), lumbering on a bed of gold (my Ikea couch) and revelled in the finest of all entertainment sources (binged a concoction of barely watchable Netflix shows) my girlfriend dropped her phone next to me.

Actually, dropped is the wrong word. More like ‘tactfully placed’ her phone next to me.

Usually I can’t even wrestle it off of her, for fear that I might ruin all the hugely important momentum she has gathered in her campaign to get to the very end of Candy Crush. Little does she know, or care – take your pick, that there is no end to Candy Crush, it is a continuous and never-ending landslide into darkness, and her addiction reflects that most accurately of an addict’s affinity for drugs. But that is beside the point.

In steps crazy girlfriend, for on her screen was a Pinterest page. As clear as day. A whole Pinterest page dedicated to the one object, the one desire of hers. A Pinterest page dedicated to… engagement rings. Cushion cuts, solitaires, slim bands, radiant cuts (all terms I found out post this highly traumatising event). I looked at the phone, then I looked at her, she pretended to act engaged in the Netflix program on the television, I looked back at the phone, she looked at me, I looked back at her, she again pretended to be interested in the show. It was a Mexican standoff between the unsuspecting, the crazy and a battered iPhone.

This sly, crazy girlfriend of mine was dropping the least subtle nudges I had ever experienced in my life. She could have slapped me in the face and shouted out for me to buy her a ring already and I wouldn’t have seen it as clearly as I had through this way.

I picked up the phone, much to the delight of my crazy girlfriend who was perched up on her pedestal of reverse-psychology genius and perused the contents. Although the images were incredible, I didn’t dare follow any of the images to their original page for fear of what the price might do to me. My guess was force me into some sort of premature cardiac arrest. I was later assured that the majority of rings heralded from a little place called Tiffany’s, so I’m calling my guess a definite win.

I did stumble upon one image though, one right at the bottom of my girlfriends dedicated page to engagement rings. One that appeared the humblest, the most realistic for what I might be actually able to afford. So I clicked on it. I was transported to a place that perplexed me at first and perplexed me even more after. Where did this image take me, you ask? It took me to another dedicated page for engagement rings. Another entirely fan-built dedicated page (“It’s a fucking board, not a page” I hear ricochet out of my crazy girlfriend’s telepathic mind, through the open space between us and crashing into my frail and naïve mind centre), that sampled all of this user’s favourite and hopeful future engagement ring selections. Exactly like my girlfriends.

And that’s when I realised… My girlfriend wasn’t crazy in the realm of females… Among peers, she was normal, for there is nothing odd about a dedicated Pinterest page to engagement rings… Or so it appears, anyway.