Confused...

No matter what it's mind games and you need to figure out what you want for yourself. What she wants doesn't matter because it's your life.

Re the ring.
Three points.
1 - it is an oversight on her part
or
2 - it is some sort of bullshit signal on her part
but in any event
3 - it is an irrelevant side bar whether it was 1 or 2 that drove the behaviour.

The ring is just one more of an endless series of rabbit holes your wife has sent you down. In the meantime, I think you are missing the more important item on your agenda... the 3 month deadline you set when you started couples counseling has expired. When you started counseling it seemed very clear to many or most of us that your marriage was beyond repair. You insisted on giving the counseling 3 months to provide some chance for some evidence of meaningful progress. From your diary posts I don't see any improvement. Quite the contrary, your marriage has spiraled down into an ever more toxic condition. But perhaps I missed some important posts?

In some ways, however, I do see some meaningful progress, at least in terms of clarifying the situation...

Your wife has made it as clear as possible that she has no interest in changing or remodeling her fundamental personality, which is quite intimacy averse. She is comfortable and content in her world that exists in her head and she has no plans to change it. She won't even entertain the idea of individual counseling, presumably for fear of upsetting her comfortable intimacy averse world. Perhaps not such a bad position to take because she could spend years in therapy just to get to the point where she acknowledges a need for change but that is just the starting point for even more years of therapy to actually affect some change, if it is indeed even possible. And in the meantime you are already solidly counter-refusing, having turned down cold an offer of a full month of sex. Where would your head be 5 years from now when she hypothetically gets her head fixed and makes a more serious offer for intimacy?

Your wife has made it equally clear that YOU are the one unhappy with the marriage, not her. And if it weren't for you desperately demanding she change her fundamental personality, things would be a whole lot better (and in principle she is quite correct on that point). She has also made it quite clear that "you need to straighten your own shit out with your individual therapy". And again, she has a good point. If you have any hope of salvaging your marriage, it is YOU that needs to change. YOU need to somehow find happiness in your celibate and intimacy devoid misery. And perhaps a therapist can do that for you. I'm certainly not recommending that strategy but you need to make your own choices if you plan to stay in this marriage, with this intimacy averse personality that is dead set to stay just as she is. You can't change her intimacy aversion, but you might be able to turn yourself into a happy eunuch?

So in closing, I think you need to seriously consider that expired deadline. Perhaps I've missed some important positive progress? If you just sweep that deadline under the carpet you could be here 20 years from now, still spinning your wheels and running in and out of rabbit holes. If you extend it, shouldn't that extension be based on some significant positive progress? If so, exactly what progress has been made since late July? You have yet to even get your wife to admit she is even part of the problem!

What  am suggesting Brother GC, is that it makes not one iota's difference what the rationale was behind the 'removal of the ring'.
It is merely one more peripheral incident, in a string of peripheral incidents (that come up time after time in Brother CT's run of stories here) to make up the total ILIASM shithole picture.
Any one of these previous peripheral incidents 'could' have been *the* trigger, but none of which have yet proved to be *the* trigger.

cagedtiger, it may not be a fair characterization, but her behavior to me sounds like "suicide by cop", where she's forcing you to a conclusion because she's too gutless to declare for herself.

She refuses to make an effort, and she refuses to face the music. She chooses to ignore reality, hoping the problem (your complaint) either goes away or you'll ultimately make the hard decision and she won't have to participate (enabling her to claim victim status).

You're absolutely right. And I don't know for myself how to go about doing that. Time to bump up my next visit with my therapist.