My mom said I deserve a perfect engagement and now I desperately want to back out of it.

I know this will sound confusing, but it’s exactly how I’m feeling right now.

My boyfriend (27M) and I (22F) have been together for close to three years now. Since I met him I feel like I can’t get enough of him. We get along great, have a great communication, I love him to pieces, I admire his strength and how sensitive he’s, how loving and caring he is, how he’s amazing with me, his friends, his family and my own. My little brother is obsessed with him and I swoon every time he goes above and beyond to make the little guy happy. We’ve discussed the future from the get go, and have plans of starting our own family soon (get engaged, move in together, get married… you get the idea). We will both graduate university soon and plan on starting new jobs so that we can then move in together and spend a few years engaged to then have a beautiful wedding ceremony.

It is very important for the both of us that these milestones are thoroughly celebrated since our parents and family members haven’t really had a chance to make a big deal out of moving in with someone and starting a family. And I was super excited with the possibility of getting engaged pretty soon, I honestly cannot think of a better way to spend my life than sharing it with him.

Yesterday he tried to pry from me my ring size, which I don’t really know, & had no way of checking atm. I told him as much. Later on my mom came with this suspicious look on her face, mentioning how she saw that the designer of one of the rings that I wear was on sale, and that she wanted to check how the ring held up (she gave it to me 4 years ago). I obviously knew what was up, especially when she was surprised to find out that I don’t wear said ring on the wedding ring finger, and asked me about it. (They were NOT smooth on the execution lol)

This morning, I got upset because of something not related to it, and I ended up spilling to her that I knew what she was doing yesterday and that he could wait another three days to measure it himself as we are going to see each other - keep in mind that his intention is not a surprise, just agreed that he would surprise me with the moment and deciding when to do it - but she wasn’t having it. She said I was making it harder for him, and that I was ruining something that a person who cares deeply about me was trying to do. We went back-and-forth about it until she understood that I was just upset, and that I wasn’t trying to make his life any harder. I simply couldn’t measure my ring size at the moment.

She proceeded to say that he’s doing his best, she asked me to allow him to do (like “please don’t make it difficult”)cause I deserve the best and she wants me to have an amazing, beautiful & rememberable moment getting engaged. Theoretically, that sounds cute, right? My mom recognizes that I have a tendency to downplay moments where I’m in the spotlight, and she was worried that I might make it harder on my boyfriend to… diminish the moment I guess?

Well, the thing is it kind of got me spiraling. Now I have this sudden urge to backtrack and tell him to never mind and just go with the flow like our families did before - wait until we can move in together, not make a fuss about it, buy rings at some point down the line and call it a day.

But I don’t want him to think that I’m rejecting his thoughtful planning, his love and affection. I’m not. It’s not that I don’t want to marry him & mix my life with his, I just felt this terrifying sense of suddenly being too visible and vulnerable and it honestly scares me.

I love the idea of having a private moment with him, but to think that this somehow enables the entire world to enter such a personal and precious piece of me and what we live together makes me… uneasy.

Idk what to do, how to proceed and how not to let these feelings tarnish the one moment we get to make it official.