As fans of her family know, Joy-Anna Duggar married Austin Forsyth over Memorial Day weekend.
Duggar children aren’t permitted to engage in any physical contact beyond hand-holding and side-hugs prior to marriage, so there’s little doubt as to how the young couple has passed the time since saying “I do.”
Surprisingly, however, Joy-Anna and Austin have ventured outside on more than one occasion, and not only to rehydrate and load up on carbs.
On a few occasions they’ve snapped photos of their Israeli honeymoon.
The couple (Joy doesn’t have her own Instagram page, but shares one with Austin.) posted the above snap yesterday, along with a caption reading:
“Celebrating our 1 month anniversary in Israel! #loveyouforeverandalwaysbabe #seaofGalilee #holyland #GodblessIsrael”
Yeah, that’s a whole lot religion and politics shoehorned into one otherwise innocuous honeymoon photo.
But it’s not the random zionist hashtags that have caught fans’ attention.
Rather, it’s a small detail that would probably have escaped everyone’s notice were it not for the fact that there’s a legion of online loonies who are just crazily obsessed with all things Duggar:
Joy-Anna is not wearing her wedding ring. Or her engagement ring.
The sight of that naked digit ironically led to much finger-to-jewelry contact, as pearls were clutched all over Duggar Nation.
In the comments, some fans expressed shock – shock! – that Joy-Anna would allow herself to be photographed ringless so soon after her wedding.
There was many a “Where’s her ring?!” comment written in such tones of breathless concern that’s impossible to imagine the authors not saying the words aloud as they typed them.
Fortunately for Joy-Anna, there were just as many rushing to her defense and offering level-headed explanations for Ring Crisis ’17:
“She’s newly married and not used to wearing valuable/sentimental jewelry. I always take mine off at the beach as well,” commented one fan.
“Last week at the showing of her wedding [on TLC] her wedding band barely fit if you paid attention. Maybe she is more comfortable not keeping it on all the time,” wrote another.
Others offered disturbingly specific details, writing:
“She’s getting it resized. If you watched the wedding episode, you saw Austin couldn’t get the ring on her finger.”
And we assume many others simply hurled their laptops at the wall before dragging their telekinetic daughters out of bed to pray off the sinfulness of the Internet, a la some 2017 remake of the movie Carrie.
The point is, we’re all just spending way too much time and energy worrying about Joy-Anna’s ring, when she clearly took it off for purely practical reasons.
Look at yourself, for example:
You just read a 500-word article about this situation on the Internet.
You’re totally obsessed, we say without a trace of irony.
Don’t forget, you can always watch Counting On online with your finger on the pause button in search of other etiquette breaches from television’s most rule-happy family.