Boyfriend doesn’t want to get married but…

Talks about it frequently. My boyfriend and I started dating at the beginning of the year and weren’t really serious until mid summer, but we’ve known each other for several years. We made it official at the beginning of October. For the most part, we’re great together. We have amazing chemistry and he treats me and my daughter very well. He has always made it clear that he never wants to get married or have kids (calls himself a professional bachelor), which I understand and accept because I’m not in a place in my life to consider that right now. I have expressed to him that someday I would like to be married again (have been married 1 time), but will never try to change his mind but want him to know that someday when I feel ready, this can obviously have an impact on our relationship if we’re still together at that time. Multiple times through our relationship he has brought up moving in together, having kids and seemed very excited when we had a pregnancy scare, then crushed when he found out that we weren’t actually pregnant. He has also made comments about how he would want his wedding to be if he ever does get married. Says that I’d absolutely get a ring if we had a baby.

A week ago we had an argument and he again made it very clear he doesn’t want to be married unless there are kids involved (he brought this up, not me), so I explained to him that it’s unfair of him to ask things of me that I consider to be things you ask of a wife but not actually want to make me a wife, which he became very upset about. I told him this is not me asking him to propose, it is just explaining that I respect his boundary of not wanting to get married so he needs to respect mine of not wanting to have children or becoming financially co-dependent with someone who can’t/doesn’t want to promise me a future. When he’s mad he can sometimes be childish so his response was “fine go buy a place on your own and we’ll just keep things the way they are”. I explained to him that since I already have a child, I need to consider how every decision I make in this relationship impacts my child, and if that is what he’d like to do we can tailor our relationship to that and I’ll be happy to match his energy. To which he actually admitted he never realized that I had to think of things this way and apologized for the things he had said.

Fast forward to two nights ago, he brings up wanting me to meet his best friend (we’ve kept our relationship private until making things official) because that would be his best man at his wedding if he were to ever get married. This conversation only came about because we were scrolling through tik tok and I told him how someone I knew got over 1 mil likes. He then said his brother got that on a video of his best man speech, which then led him to make that comment. I told him for someone who doesn’t want to get married, he seems to have given it quite a bit of thought. He just stated that he’s just been in so many that he thinks of how he would do it, then we moved on with the conversation.

These comments are always initiated by him as I steer clear of wedding talk due to not wanting to make him think I’m implying anything.

I honestly am so confused at this point. Has anyone else experienced this with a man? What was the outcome? I don’t want to cut him off as I am happy with what we have for now and he has shown a lot of growth and positive changes that he has decided to make on his own. I just don’t know that I understand what he wants because of the mixed signals and don’t know that we will ever actually build a life together.