Some thoughts on ace rings
I’ve gotten a couple of asks about ace rings,* so I figured I’d just make a post rather than repeating the same information over and over in asks.
*If you don’t know about the ace ring, it’s a black-ish ring worn on the middle finger of the right hand.
I wear an ace ring. It’s made of hematite (and it’s magnetic, so sometimes I come home with staples stuck to it, which is kind of awesome). I’ve been wearing it non-stop for…almost a year and a half now. Before that I wore it on a chain around my neck some of the time and on my finger some of the time. Almost all of my ace friends wear ace rings. I don’t know if they wear ace rings because of peer pressure or what; you’d have to ask them. When I went to the ace meet-up a few weeks ago, I’d say roughly 1/3 of the attendees were wearing rings. So, yeah, it’s a thing in the ace community, but it’s not a universal thing. If you want to wear an ace ring, you should. If you don’t want to, don’t.
That said, when people ask me about ace rings or just when I’m trawling the ace tags, I see some…interesting reasons to wear an ace ring. I think some people might not understand what the purpose of the ace ring is/what exactly the ace ring does. It does not grant you the power to be magically and painlessly out to everyone ever. It does not act as a homing beacon for other aces. It will not make people be less hostile to you when you come out. Sorry, but this is the reality we live in. That said, there are some really good reasons to wear an ace ring! So, anyway, I decided to write a post outlining some of the good (and not so good) reasons to wear an ace ring.
Agreed with all of the above! I’ve been wearing a ring for more than two years now, and I think I’ve used it to for signaling to other aces twice—once in a discussion where someone I didn’t know outed themselves while answering a question, to show solidarity, and once I noted one on someone else’s hand and… completely failed to bring it up, because it was in the middle of class and then the class got canceled a lot. Oh, and once at a meet-up it was vaguely useful for identifying people who were wandering around looking lost. That’s it.
It’s a pretty nice personal symbol, but I would not expect everyone to know what it means when you start wearing it or care too much to ask. It might feel like that when you first start wearing it, though. I was pretty nervy and felt like everyone must know when I first started wearing mine, because it was the first symbol I put on when I made the decision to be more open about it. But that feeling’s more about you than it is about everyone around you, honestly.
