When I shopped for an engagement ring in 2012, there was a clear cohort of women who significantly valued a diamond from the ground. Fortunately, my (now) wife and I saw through the marketing gimmick, and laughed all the way to the bank.
> I'm genuinely curious why you bought a diamond
You do know that engagement rings don't have to be diamond, right? Mark Zuckerburg bought his wife a $25,000 ruby ring: https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/pic-mark-zuck...
I bought Moissanite. It was a reasonable price, the ring is gorgeous, my wife loves it, and it helps with family / cultural pressure around diamonds.
(It also leads to interesting situations with people who don't understand Moissanite. My wife used to get a lot of "what does your husband dooo???" questions before people understood the changes in the jewelry market.)
e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo... (spoiler: it's harder to do than you'd think, and you won't get anything near what you pay -- and that in the 80s, before synthetic diamonds pushed the market down further)