A Missing Wedding Band from a New Hampshire Brewery Showed Our Best, Worst Sides

Within the last year or so, it seems like if there have been any cases of missing or lost wedding bands, the call to action on any Facebook posts has always seemed to be about finding the owner(s) and creating a happy reunion. That's why this recent story about a lost wedding band found at a brewery in New Hampshire is interesting because the comments section took us on a wild ride.

A lost wedding band was found at the Portsmouth Brewery

Late last week, a story started making the rounds after a Facebook post to The (un)Official City of Portsmouth, NH group mentioned an employee of the Portsmouth Brewery finding a man's wedding band after he had indulged in a late-afternoon lunch. The post from Marissa Rustici reads:

I work at The Portsmouth Brewery and a gentlemen left behind his gold wedding band around 2:30PM this afternoon. If anyone knows someone that lost their wedding band today, please give us a call or message me.

A pretty generic, informational post with no underlying tones other than "if you lost your ring or know someone who did, give us a call/shoot us a message. However, as mentioned above, while other lost wedding band/ring stories have been met with a rallying to try and find the rightful owner, some of the commenters on this post took very different approaches to this information.

Some users became seriously worried for the man's well-being

Unfortunately, the last 20+ months have been beyond taxing on all of us and have either created a lot of battles surrounding mental health or magnified already-existing mental health battles ten-fold. For the most part, that has led a lot of people to become more sensitive and understanding to the topic of mental health, which was apparent in some of the reactions to Marissa's post.

"Make sure to report to PD." - Heidi Krassner

"Please try to ID him and ask the PD to do a welfare check." - Bruce A. Dean

Other users suspected more nefarious reasons to leave a wedding band behind

While the very first comment advised Marissa to report the missing wedding band and incident to the police, with another comment going more in-depth about the reasoning behind contacting police, other commenters weren't so convinced it was a possible issue about the man's well-being. In fact, they suspected something at the absolute opposite end of the spectrum.

"Every woman in Portsmouth area is now checking their spouse’s left hand. " - Suzanne CB

"Waiting for him to comment so I can ask him why he took it off." - Adrianny Morales

"I will admit some servers can cause this to happen spontaneously to men of a certain ummm...moral flexibility." - Matthew Tirabassi

"Hmmm...he took it off at the bar..." - Donna Marie Marcotte

Even though those comments may be a bit harsher and leaning more skeptical than worried about the man's well-being, it's obviously not unheard of for this exact type of mentality and incident to happen before.

It's interesting to see the immediate reactions some people have when hearing about a man leaving a wedding band behind at a bar -- in this instance anyway, it immediately becomes about someone's well-being (quite a heartfelt response, honestly) or just assuming it's a cheating spouse who messed up (sad that it's an immediate response, but again, not unheard of).

Not once was it considered that perhaps the man had ordered a meal that was messy -- a super juicy burger, some wings bathed in different sauces -- and didn't want to get his ring (and the skin underneath it) covered in food.

Thankfully, this story has a happy ending, as Marissa updated everyone in the comments section of her original post, saying the band had been returned to its rightful owner over the weekend.