Wearing A Ring To Signal You’re Single Is Back
If you hate dating apps, you may want to consider a single ring.
If you hate dating apps, and the mortifying ordeal of crushing on someone without knowing if they’re even single, you may want to consider a bright green ring.
Apparently, TikTok knows I am single because it won’t stop throwing TikToks of the Pear ring onto my FYP. So, I decided to investigate if wearing a bright green ring checks out as an alternative to the apps.
We know that more and more people are abandoning dating apps, at rates so high Tinder’s stock investment has dropped 70 percent in the last 12 months, with people turning more towards lo-fi meet cutes. There are even apps trying to limit people’s use of apps: Thursday only lets its users contact matches on Thursday and set up a date within 24 hours before the match disappears, and Hinge is famously “designed to be deleted”.
But app burn-out comes for many of us – even the New York Times called it out. Getting back out there is still tricky, though, especially when two years of avoiding people hasn’t exactly fostered A+ social skills (I’m speaking for a friend). Enter… the single ring.
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Single Rings Have A History
Wearing a ring to signify you’re available is far from a new concept. For many decades, people wore a ring on their right-hand ring finger to indicate they were looking for love. The practice goes as far back as 1800s Ireland where Claddagh rings passed down between mothers and daughters were worn on the right hand until one became engaged. Claddagh rings typically sported hands clasping a heart. When worn with the point of the heart facing toward the wearer, it was a symbol of availability.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, wearing a pinky ring to signal your lack of interest in pursuing a relationship goes as far back as the Victorian era. Basically, the trend of wearing rings to signal your relationship status outside of just marriage has never fully gone away. A ring worn on the right hand continued to be a trend for singles wanting to mingle over the years. I even found an article from 2006 exploring why single women are donning right-hand rings.
Of course, people wear rings for loads of reasons outside of broadcasting their relationship status. Personally, I used to have a ring with a little dragon on it that I wore on my right hand all the time. Did I wear it to indicate I was single? Nope, I wore it because I love dragons, and because if I wear jewellery on my dominant hand, I am less likely to lose it.
The point is, a ring on a right hand is no longer a sure-fire symbol of singlehood. But it’s certainly more subtle than wearing booty shorts with, “DATELESS” splayed on the back. And, for many, it definitely beats Bumble.
Are Single Rings Right For You? What About Me? Sorry, I Meant… What About My Friend?
The Pear ring social experiment is the latest attempt to modernise the idea of the singles ring. (A previous attempt was the SingleRing, which was founded in 2006.) This ring is marketed as part of a wider mission to foster “IRL connection”. Under the hashtag #NotADatingApp, it’s clear the start-up is tapping into the very real phenomena of dating-app burn-out.
Why do they call it a social experiment? Well, for one thing, they seem pretty dedicated to helping singles find one another. As their website claims, 100% of profits go towards growing the reach of the rings, and creating free events for singles to meet one another.
Unlike single rings of the past, Pear can be worn on any finger. That bright green is pretty unmistakeable, which is kind of the point. In theory, if you see someone else with a Pear ring, you know they’re (probably) open to a date.
With the Pear ring being so new, it’s difficult to say how much of a success it has been so far. Across Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, Pear has amassed around 60,000 followers, and claims to have sold about half a million rings worldwide since February. So it’s fair to say it’s still early days.
Writing in The Guardian, Elle Hunt said she wore the ring for two weeks and it went “mostly unnoticed” so you might need to be a bit more obvious. Keep your hands up near your face or out in front of you so people can get a clean look. Research (probably) shows that if you talk about your hands a lot, someone’s going to look at them at some point. Not that I would know anything about that.
Regardless, it’s a product that only works with participation. Kinda like ancestry DNA, except this ends with you maybe gettin’ some lovin’, rather than an expensive pie chart. All of it might sound like work, but it’s got to be better than the dating apps. Or you could try the booty shorts thing.