My grandad told it to my mother. My mother told it to us.

It is almost certainly not true. It reaches us mostly through Heine, who was a poet rather than a reporter, and it has been buffed by every mouth it passed through since.

Isn’t it lovely that the most famous story about punctuality and timekeeping resists the very thing both seem to promise: precision? It was handed on, improved slightly, and handed on again.

To my grandad and my mother, punctuality was never just about arriving at the agreed hour. It meant discipline. Reliability. Character. Being predictable in the good sense — the sense in which people can count on you, build something with you and around you. A person whose movements could set the clocks was a person you could trust.

I did not inherit that kind of relationship with time.

But don’t get me wrong, I love it when somebody says four and means four. When they say they will do something and then do exactly that. There is something deeply attractive about that kind of follow-through.

I have simply never managed to be that person entirely. Often, somebody, somewhere, is waiting slightly longer than I told them they would.

In my defense, I could point out that historians would probably side with me here. The idea that character can be read off a clock is not especially old; it can be traced to the factory and the foreman — the bell, the gate, the docked wages. Making punctuality mean something about a person is a fairly recent learned behavior.

But what really delighted me on this little expedition into luxury watches was not the historians. It was discovering that the people who take watches most seriously — those building and buying some of the finest watches on Earth — seem, in their own extremely elaborate way, to agree with me too.

Elaborate, and expensive. Swiss, mostly. At prices I will not be typing here.

Huh, I thought. Maybe I have not been getting this entirely wrong.

Now, I should say plainly where I’m standing, because it matters for everything after this.

I am not a watch collector. I am not a man. Almost every watch mentioned here was made for men, and I wouldn’t wear them.

(Or would I? I am increasingly suspicious that a man’s watch on a woman may work like an oversized something of his: not yours, and it shows, but wear it right, and it can be mildly sexy).

Still, I fell in love with one of these watches, before I ever saw it in person.

I found the IWC Le Petit Prince in the Style section of the Financial Times and had the extremely sophisticated reaction of: OH MY GOD, I LOVE THIS.

A watch tucked inside one of my favorite stories.

Then, not long after, there it was in my own Madrid neighborhood, in a window on Ortega y Gasset that I walked past all summer: the Little Prince on his tiny rocket, the watch sitting below him on the moon.

I took a photo.

Once the time is taken care of

As I started properly looking, I found myself following a trail: what do some of the finest watches on Earth actually do?

And almost none of them is trying to tell the time better.

Your phone does that perfectly well. Everyone making these watches knows it. Everyone buying them knows it too.

Which is where things get delightful.

Because once the hour itself has been taken care of, all that extraordinary craftsmanship seems to turn toward something else entirely. Something, in fact, much closer to the opposite.

As wonderfully ironic as it seems, the fact is, nobody is spending this kind of money to become more punctual.

And they say so themselves, which is the part I did not expect.

Watch forums are full of men explaining these purchases to one another in the language of service intervals and movement references. But every so often somebody puts the vocabulary down. One notes what everyone on the thread already knows and nobody minds: measured purely as timekeeping, a Swiss mechanical watch loses to the cheapest quartz on the shelf. Another, asked how much is too much, says that anything over five hundred dollars is money for a feeling.

Nobody argues with either of them.

So: money for a feeling. The question is which one.

A time that does not exist

The Hermès Arceau Le Temps Suspendu looks, at first, like a perfectly serious watch. A beautiful one, because Hermès.

Then you press the button at nine o’clock, and it lets go.

The hands lift away and settle into a V above the twelve, reading 11:62. A time that does not exist. The date disappears.

Underneath, nothing has stopped. The movement keeps counting faithfully in the dark, and when you press again, the hands sweep back to the correct hour as though nothing happened.

Which means somebody at Hermès took one of the most sophisticated mechanical objects we make for knowing the time and engineered into it the possibility of simply... not knowing.

At least for a few seconds.

You haven’t lost the hour. It is still there, being kept perfectly for you somewhere underneath. You have just asked not to be told.

Not stopped time, then, but unwitnessed time: the hours go on accruing in the dark, correctly, and all you have bought is the right not to be summoned by them.

And then there is Van Cleef & Arpels.

In 1751, Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who gave us much of the system we still use for naming living things, imagined a garden planted with flowers that opened and closed at different hours. Arrange them correctly and, in theory, the garden itself could tell you the time.

Van Cleef put the idea on a wrist.

Twelve flowers sit on the dial, opening and closing throughout the day. To know the hour, you have to count how many are open.

You cannot tell it at a glance. You have to look. Really look, and count. Stay there a second longer than you meant to.

Which may be the closest watchmaking gets you to ‘stop and smell the roses’.

You cannot smell them, of course. But you do stop and you do look. If only for an extra second, the watch requires you to be completely where you are.

The flowers do not decorate the time. The flowers are the time. If you close your eyes, can you smell them?

A private sky

Mo Coppoletta — a tattoo artist in London and a serious watch collector — said something to the Financial Times that made me smile, because it makes me smile when men talk like this.

He was describing a De Bethune with a night sky on the dial.

“Being a complete devotee of everything celestial, dreamy and romantic, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”

Devotee. Celestial. Dreamy. Romantic.

Doesn’t it make you smile when a man talks like that?

Plus, in a business newspaper.

De Bethune then offered him the choice of which sky he wanted on the watch.

And what he wanted only adds to my smile, because he didn’t choose the most beautiful constellation, or the most famous one. He chose his — the exact sky that was overhead on the day he was born. Which, as someone whose favorite day in the year (right up there with Christmas) is her birthday, I totally get.

Mo wears his De Bethune every year on his July birthday.

And I find that almost ceremonial. Like a little ritual of placing yourself inside something infinitely larger than you and saying: this was the cosmos when I came into it. Honoring it, yourself and your existence.

As one must, am I right?

That night happened once. The sky moved on. Everyone in it moved on.

But with this watch, you can ask for it back.

The watchmakers begin with titanium polished to a mirror and coax it into blue with heat rather than pigment. Tiny white-gold stars are set by hand into perforations of different sizes, because of course stars are not all the same size. The Milky Way is cut into the surface and finished in gold leaf.

Et voilà.

A specific sky that disappeared decades ago — your sky — made small enough to wear.

A wrist between wrists

And then, can we look at the Bulgari Monete?

An ancient coin covers the dial. On one version, a silver denarius carrying the face of Caracalla, Roman emperor from 198 to 217. On another, two coins: his father, the emperor Septimius Severus, and his mother, the empress Julia Domna. Around them, diamonds and a heavy gold chain.

In a time-is-money kind of way, you have to lift the money to get to the time.

But in this case, it is not just any money.

The coin is like this little artifact that says: yeah, I was there. I lived through eighteen hundred years of conquest, human ambition, grief, trade, love. Humans in their grandiosity and their complexity.

I saw empires emerge and disappear, languages change. Someone got paid with me. Someone saved me. Someone lost me. Someone held me up to the light and wondered whether I was enough.

With today’s technology, you could reproduce the coin almost perfectly. The metal. The weight. The worn edge. The softened profile of an emperor’s cheek.

But what you cannot reproduce is the fact that it was there.

Walter Benjamin — the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural critic — had a word for something close to this: aura. Not the woo-woo kind of aura, but the strange authority an object acquires from having existed in one particular place, through one particular stretch of time. Not because it is flawless, but simply because it was there.

And now somebody has set that little survivor into gold and diamonds and put it back against a human body.

Isn’t that like, almost mystical?

Because when you look at it, eighteen hundred years stop being just a number. And the Romans stop being just the Romans. Suddenly, there is this sort of thread connecting you.

Or like Patek Philippe puts it in its famous line running since 1996:

You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.

Just like with the coin, a fine watch can belong to you now. But its timeline doesn’t.

You are, in this existence, one wrist between wrists.

Habiller le cœur

Which brings me back to my mother.

I reread Le Petit Prince this year, in French for the first time — small yay me, dragging high-school French back into existence in my thirties — and returned to one of my favorite characters: the fox.

He asks the Little Prince to come back at the same hour every day.

If you arrive at four, he explains, then at three I will already begin to be happy. As four gets closer, I will become happier and happier.

Without an appointed hour, he would never know when to habiller le cœur.

When to dress his heart.

And isn’t that true? That sometimes all it takes is telling somebody you will arrive at four, to make three different?

I sure know it is. Four o’clock doesn’t change, but somehow it reaches backward and changes three.

Which also means that when four comes and goes, you haven’t only been late. You’ve taken somebody’s three.

That, I think, is much closer to the kind of time I understand and inhabit.

And I suspect, after all this, that it is much closer to the kind of time they understand too. The collectors. The people spending a fortune on a watch and then asking it, politely, to stop. Or to tell them the hour in flowers. Or to hand back a sky from a night they cannot possibly remember.

None of us wants the precision. Nor the perfect number that a part of us thinks we must submit ourselves to.

What we really want is to take time and grab it. To hold on to it, and play with it. To feel very small inside it, and then, briefly, enormous. And, if we get it right, to alter it a little.

We want it to stop. We make flowers tell it. We ask for that one night back. We put eighteen hundred years on a wrist. We make it for people who have not been born yet.

I think about that IWC window again. On the back of the watch, on the side nobody else sees — the side that lies against your skin — there is a small gold medallion of the Little Prince standing on his asteroid.

An extremely serious instrument for measuring time carrying, against your wrist, the little reminder that whispers: hey, you, serious adult, do not take yourself — and time — so seriously.

Perhaps the beauty of it all is that one day, if you got it right, life will teach you to say — smiling, meaning the apology, and glad of the reason: Sorry I’m late.

I was looking at the stars.

I tried some on. My hands — long fingers, should-have-been-a-pianist fingers — looked a-ma-zing.

My father said: do you want one? He says this often. He is extremely generous.

My mother said: nope, not this time. She runs the finances in that house, for reasons I don’t need to explain.

But the interesting thing is what went through my head. It was an easy, breezy thought, with total confidence and no supporting evidence whatsoever, given that I was and remain single:

No need. My future husband will obviously buy these for me.

Plural. I thought it in the plural.

In August, the chief executive of Swarovski told the Financial Times that cheaper lab-grown stones are “enabling self-purchase for women” — where before, he said, “in most instances it was a man offering a ring to a woman.” Now a woman comes into the store, tries something on, and says: you know what, let me get it for myself, I’ve earned this.

“We find that,” said Alexis Nasard, “very endearing and encouraging.”

Encouraging, sure. A woman buying herself something beautiful for a promotion, a birthday, a year she got through in one piece: I love it.

But endearing? Endearing is what you say about something slightly cute. A child insisting on carrying her own suitcase. A dog bringing you its toy. There’s real affection in it, and also a tiny asymmetry: I am observing you doing this adorable little thing.

So the undertone becomes: aw, look at women buying themselves their own diamonds now. Good for them.

And underneath the compliment there’s a script that seems to say:

Great news! You can now court yourselves. 💕

Um, no? But thank you.

But this is where it gets interesting.

That script assumes that women are making do. Second prize-ing. He didn’t do it for her, so she did it for herself. Buy your own flowers, buy your own diamond, and sing to it, Miley Cyrus style (gotta admit, it’s a catchy tune).

But making do requires a substitution, and as it turns out, there hasn’t been one.

Look at what — and, importantly, where — women let themselves buy diamonds.

Cocktail rings, tennis bracelets, studs. Everything except the left hand.

And because nobody spends this kind of money anymore without asking the internet first, there is a record, in their own words, of women doing exactly this.

One woman, describing the ring she had just bought herself:

“This ring is a gift for me from me; it is NOT my engagement ring. (I hope that it won’t repel potential suitors.)”

She wanted the ring. She was worried it might accidentally say she didn’t want the other ring.

A divorced woman in her fifties, considering a five-stone ring for her right hand, put the same fear to the forum more bluntly: “Will it send a message that I wish I were married and make me look pathetic?”

Another woman commissioned her own. She chose it, she paid for it, but:

“I did ask for my husband’s input on budget, and showed him the final drawings before the ring was made. I just wanted to feel like he was part of the process.”

Which is a very particular sentence.

She wanted to buy herself the diamond. She also wanted some trace of him inside the buying of it.

And then there is the woman selling a 1.91-carat lab-grown oval she had bought herself — roughly ten thousand dollars in, listed for three and a half.

“I’m selling because it’s too nice. Seriously. It completely outshines my e-ring and it’s mKing me feel so guilty as I bought it for myself it’s not my e-ring!”

Too nice.

Not too big. Not impractical. Not a financial mistake.

Too nice to wear next to the one she’d been given. The one that counts.

And my favorite, perhaps, because it is so wonderfully unsubtle:

“I told myself if I didn’t get a proposal before the end of 2022 that I’d buy myself something sparkly.”

That is not substitution.

That is a deadline.

She can buy the sparkly thing whenever she likes. What she cannot buy is someone deciding to give it to her.

And women seem perfectly capable of holding both thoughts at once.

I can buy my own diamonds.

And:

I still want that one from you.

Which means my thing — the thing I assumed was my own private inconsistency, the woman who buys herself the trip and the dinner and a spa costing an amount I will not be typing here, and still wants the diamond given — is apparently not my own private inconsistency at all.

It’s a fairly common position. We just seem to hold it apologetically.

I hope it won’t repel potential suitors.

Will I look pathetic?

Nobody says it without flinching first.

So let me say it without flinching.

When it comes to diamonds, I want to be wanted.

Not because I can’t buy one. I obviously can.

But because, if I’m being honest, what I want is never just the diamond.

It’s the someone choosing it for me. Someone making a wildly unnecessary gesture and meaning me by it. Someone wanting to give me something excessive and beautiful because I matter to them.

You can buy the thing.

You cannot buy that.

Marcel Mauss, the French anthropologist who wrote The Gift a little over a hundred years ago, argued that gifts are never merely objects. Something of the giver remains attached to them; the object carries a relationship with it.

Which sounds very academic until you meet a woman prepared to lose two-thirds of what she paid for a perfectly good diamond because the one she bought herself had somehow become too nice beside the one she had been given.

The stones were both hers.

One did it for her, the other did not.

Which is, I now realize, exactly why Old Mine diamonds do it for me.

I said on Instagram a few weeks ago that I love them for being hand-cut and flawed, made before anyone had decided what “correct” was.

Here’s a second thing I love:

You cannot really order one to spec.

A modern brilliant can be filtered down — carat, color, clarity, cut — until somebody finds you something remarkably close to the brief. That is what the modern diamond market is built to do.

An Old Mine is different. Because they are antique stones, cut by hand before modern technology standardized diamond shapes and proportions, no two are quite alike. You can say what you’re hoping for. You can ask for a size, a shape, a certain warmth.

But then somebody has to go looking.

What turns up will almost certainly be a little wrong. A little smaller. A little warmer. Older than expected. Wonkier. More beautiful in some way you had not thought of.

Nobody goes through that kind of effort to find a stone for a woman he’s just fond of.

You do that when you’re falling into a damn beautiful rabbit hole of a woman’s universe, and boy oh boy, do you wanna keep on falling.

In other words, when you want the hell out of her.

Which is also, I suspect, the answer to the obvious objection — that I only want the diamond given because a century of effective marketing trained me to read a man’s spending as proof of love.

Maybe. But then look at what I am actually asking for.

Not the biggest one. Not the flawless one. Maybe not even the most expensive one — I said on Instagram that if somebody handed me a diamond as an investment, I would sell it without blinking.

What I want is special. A unique, slightly wonky stone that somebody had to go hunting for.

No campaign in history has tried to sell me that. (Well, maybe except National Geographic, with the penguins.)

And then look at where the diamond market has gone in the other direction.

The modern brilliant already gave us precision: choose the specs, find the match.

Lab-grown takes that promise further. More size. More availability. More predictability. Less money. Less waiting. And increasingly, the person doing the choosing and the buying can simply be you.

The promise is almost the exact opposite of the Old Mine one:

You don’t have to wait for anybody, or for anything special to turn up.

Which in a way, I must say, is liberating. But it is not the same feeling. What made the Old Mine worth having was the evidence attached to it — that somebody wanted you enough to spend months looking for something that might not exist.

The thing whose whole value was that it couldn’t be manufactured. Manufactured.

And I suppose that’s what I’ve been circling this whole time.

Being wanted isn’t only about being desired — desire is generic, anyone can generate it, it costs nothing. Being truly wanted is being known, accurately enough that somebody can choose an object and be right about you.

It’s what I want from a stone. And it turns out to be what I want from a man.

And here’s perhaps the most surprising part, and my favorite one.

The ritual — a man going out, choosing a diamond, and asking — isn’t dying. But (and I actually love this but) the road toward it is becoming less traveled. More intentional. And not only because men stopped walking it. Among American twelfth-graders asked whether they want to get married someday, boys moved two points between 1993 and 2023. Girls fell twenty-two, and crossed below them.

And it isn’t only the seventeen-year-olds. Ask me, or most women I know in their thirties, and you get that same word back: special. Freaking special, if we’re being precise about it. Decent enough no longer settles the question.

Which is not, by the way, one gender complaining about the other. Fewer and fewer of us are willing to take the one that merely meets spec. Most of us — dare I say all of us — are holding out for the one that couldn’t have been ordered.

When the road is uncommon, arriving on it means something it could never mean when everybody took it automatically. Nobody ends up there by drift. If a man ever does go looking, for a long time, with me in mind — and if I say yes — we’ll both know exactly why we’re standing there, because neither of us needed to be.

Now that I find endearing. And encouraging.

I hope he’s out there looking.