My wedding anniversary is coming up. It will be 25 years next month. To say our wedding was small is to overstate it. Our wedding party consisted of me, my soon-to-be husband and a friend of his from work acting as a witness. I remember waiting outside the Brooklyn courthouse near the subway for his friend to arrive. It was getting late and we were beginning to think he wasn't going to show. A witness was, of course, mandatory to make the ceremony legal. The man I was about to marry was here on a 3-month fiance visa, which was expiring. (The visa gives you 3 months to either get married or leave the country. I had taken an enormous, lust-driven leap of faith to bring him here.) We had waited until the 11th hour of the last day. It was now or he was going to have to catch the next flight back home which was 7,000 miles away.

My not-yet husband started eyeing people walking on the street. He was fully prepared to walk up to a perfect stranger and ask them in his broken English to be the witness at our wedding. "Are you insane?" was my response. I didn't know it at the time, but that was typical behavior for him. I would have 25 years to learn it, try to understand it and eventually accept it.

His friend emerged from the subway station in the nick of time, we went in, awaited our turn. A very brief, no-frills ceremony was performed and that was it. I was married to this man I barely knew.

I didn't even have a wedding ring.

My desire for a ring and his lack of interest in getting me one has been a bone of contention for the past 25 years.  It's silly, I know. It's the marriage, not the wedding and all that. But for the past 25 years I've had this nagging desire for a ring on the third finger of my left hand as proof. Proof that he loves me. Proof that he wanted everyone else to know that fact. And proof that simply because it meant something to me, he was willing to perform this romantic gesture. Even though, as I was soon to learn, he is the least romantic man on the planet Earth.

It's become a not-so-funny running joke between us. We'll be watching a movie where, in a romantically cliched moment, the  man gets down on one knee, opens the ring box and utters those four little words, "Will you marry me?" I often use the opportunity to one more time say, "So, when am I am going to get my ring?"

His standard answer for the past 25 years has been, "Don't worry. You'll get your ring. I'll surprise you." And he gives that half-cocked grin that overconfident men tend to have. I believed him for about 1o or 15 years. Now it just pisses me off.

I had a lovely wedding ring for my first marriage. Didn't seem to improve the odds of that working out. So, why, after 25 years do I still have this inexplicable desire for him to offer up a symbol of our established union? I'm not sure, but I think I'm emotionally stuck, still waiting outside that Brooklyn courthouse, hoping he's going to profess his undying love for me, get down on one knee, open the ring box and, just like in the movies, say, with all the emotion he can muster, "Will you marry me?"

I think I've got quite a wait ahead of me.