Three rings of marriage are the engagement ring, the wedding ring, and the suffering.

This is a modern, anonymous piece of marital humor that circulates widely in joke collections, greeting cards, and quotation anthologies rather than in a traceable literary work. It plays on the cultural prominence of rings in Western marriage customs—first the engagement ring, then the wedding ring—and adds a third “ring” as a punchline. The line is typically used in light, sometimes cynical commentary about the gap between romantic expectations and the realities of long-term partnership. Because it is transmitted orally and through ephemera, it is often presented without attribution and with small wording shifts.

The line is a pun that turns “ring” from a literal piece of jewelry into a metaphorical stage of married life. The first two rings represent idealized milestones—courtship and formal union—while the invented third “ring” (“suffering”) undercuts romantic expectations with cynical humor. Its effect depends on surprise and on a shared cultural script in which marriage can entail sacrifice, frustration, or endurance. Read more gently, it can be taken as a comic acknowledgment that long-term partnership includes hardship alongside love; read more sharply, it functions as a sardonic critique of marriage as an institution that can disappoint or constrain.