I
The ring.
Like most stories about jewelry, ours starts with a love story.
A few years ago, I was getting engaged. In Germany, where I'm from, we don't have the American tradition of spending months of salary on a ring. I had a budget — a meaningful one, but a German one.
So I walked into a jewelry store with that budget, expecting to find something beautiful.
What they showed me was a diamond so small it barely deserved the name. I immediately knew — this wasn't how my proposal was going to go down. There was no way I'd show up to the person I loved with a ring that small.
I walked back out.