I mention this because my wife is extremely unassuming, and socially and environmentally conscious, and she still couldn't shake the diamond thing. She was 100 percent aware of this and it bothered her but in the end decided it mattered to her nevertheless. We ended up getting a small polar bear diamond: the metalwork (by a local metal artist) is really more what you'd notice about her ring.
I'm still not sure what it was, nor is she. If I had to guess now it's that for her, once you decide to have a gem, it's all the same issues at some level, so why not use the one that has personal meaning for you, whatever that is, for whatever reason? We looked into synthetics, but at the time they weren't actually available. I think if there weren't other options she might have went with a repurposed stone? Maybe no stone?
Moissonite is a great option, one I wish were more used. We learned about it from the metalsmith who made our rings, and I noticed recently she had stopped actively promoting them.
I think to see a shift from diamonds, these types of conversations just need to happen repeatedly more than everyone thinks. The idea needs to be suggested when people are very young that different symbolic expressions of marriage are fine, and that what's important is whatever is meaningful to the members of the couple. By the time people are adults the schemas might already be indelibly fixed.
But then again who knows what marriage and commitment will be like for my daughter. I don't envy the young in certain ways.
I suspect this has already happened to some extent; diamonds are on the list of things that the dastardly millennials are no longer buying enough of, along with golf, and, weirdly, raisins.
I’m an early millennial (35) and my peer group’s weddings have been definitely a lot less traditional and more varied than my parents’ generation. I suspect a big part of this is that people get married when they’re fully-formed adults these days (average age of first marriage here in Ireland is now 35) and are more likely to do what they want to do vs what is stereotypically expected.
It's not really bullshit to want something but wrestle with the ethics of it, or to balance different options. Like I said, she probably would have went with a repurposed stone or none if we exhausted other options.
Moissonite for her was this thing she had never heard of, something that didn't have meaning outside of a substitute for something else. It was untested. Heck, my guess is if she lost her stone she'd probably be fine getting a moissonite stone as a replacement now just because it's been settling in her head for years and years now.
In the end this is just me inferring how she feels. From my standpoint, I just wanted to do what she'd be satisfied with... which is another angle on the issue.
Just to add later: she did like the color and brilliance of moissonite. I remember her worrying about the hardness and not having an intuitive sense of how durable it was. I think if someone had been able to say "this has the same hardness as diamond" scientifically speaking she would have been ok? I have no idea. It was a strange gem to her and she was just as skeptical of it as she was about claims of any given diamond's provenance, ethics wise.
It's fascinating to hear how people react to that over the years, mainly along the lines of "I wish I'd been that brave". So there's definitely a social pressure to conform.
Gems and workable gold allows are not that expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissanite
Diamonds are tainted in the modern world. It costs nothing for the internet to reveal that they're actually not that rare, that lots of corrupt practices go into making them expensive, and that there are perfectly acceptable alternatives.