[gwbas1c]

One of the extremely frustrating things that I experienced when purchasing my wife's engagement was the pressure from my family to buy diamonds:

When I was a teenager in the 1990s, and moissanite came out, I listened to my older cousin go off on how she would dump any man who tried to pass off a moissanite to her.

Then my mother kept confusing moissanite with cubic zirconia, and kept telling me stories about cheap men who bought their fiancées rings that broke.

I bought my wife a moissanite, but I was so afraid that she was just saying that she wanted a moissanite to merely humor me. What I did was give her matching moissanite earrings a month before I proposed to her. She loved the earrings, so I knew she'd love the ring.