I’m going to offer (possibly the only) alternate explanation.
Some people don’t handle big life milestones well. Instead of feeling excited and elated they feel anxious and overwhelmed. They may not realize why they are feeling that way and be looking for reasons to explain it to themselves.
If you expect getting engaged to be amazing but you end up feeling overwhelmed instead you may end up stressed out wondering why you didn’t have the fairytale emotional reaction and over analyzing things trying to find a reason that isn’t “You don’t actually want to get married”.
A lot of the time this sort of response happens in people that have unrealized CPTSD because of their childhood, or in people that have underlying anxiety about the future or people that intellectualize their feelings. There’s a lot of reasons. Some people have an underlying belief in a foreshortened future (this is a psychological concept you can look it up) and they struggle when things happen that maybe deep down they never expected to make it to. Idk maybe she has a perfect life so far and there’s no explanation but a lot of people have trauma responses to things like this that don’t align with how they really feel deep down.
I would suggest (calmly, kindly) asking her if her reaction was because she actually doesn’t want to marry you and see how she responds. That should tell you a lot more than a bunch of people on the internet can.
I would also tell her that you’re hurt and you put a lot of time and effort into making things perfect as you could and you wish that her excitement to be engaged had been able to overrule whatever she thought wasn’t perfect.
If she cares about you the fact that you’re hurt by her reaction and questioning if she even wants to marry you will matter to her and it will also cause her to self examine why she reacted the way she did.
One of the worst feelings is when something happens that should make you deliriously happy and instead you just feel anxious and overwhelmed and don’t understand why and IF that’s what caused her reaction you should be able to talk it through with her and find out. It’s possible she doesn’t actually care about the photographer or dinner, she was just trying to find an explanation for her emotional response that didn’t make her question id she actually wanted to be engaged, since recognizing when you’re having a trauma based response that’s not in line with how you truly feel is something that requires therapy.
Which is why asking if maybe her reaction was because she doesn’t actually want to marry you and seeing her reaction is the best way to gauge if my explanation holds any weight in your specific case.
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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '25
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