Boyfriend saying he loves me indirectly ...

I wonder what female brains are like

Not sure why but this has been bothering me recently. Me and my boyfriend were pretty much serious from the get go. I knew I loved him 2 months in and spent such a long time pondering over whether I should say it first.

Our 3 month anniversary happened to fall on my birthday... he’d planned a lot for my birthday (fine dining at a Michelin star restaurant, overnight stay at another city the following day with more fine dining and sightseeing). On my actual birthday, we’d also made plans for him to meet my parents... this was after our meal.

So we were in this amazing restaurant together and I was speaking about how my friend tried to set me up with her brother. My boyfriend then said ‘well, at least you’ve got a nice back up option there’ and I replied ‘no, I like my Duncan’ (boyfriends name)... he then replied ‘well I love my Emily’. This came very suddenly and I wasn’t expecting it... I kind of felt it wasn’t a serious declaration of his love for me especially how it was thrown in to a conversation which was ultimately to do with another boy. If he said ‘I love you’ at the end of the evening I would have returned it. But on this occasion I was very pleased and said ‘awwww’. I also wasn’t sure if he said it because he felt pressured to say it before meeting my parents and also because it was my birthday.

He then told me he loved me a month later, and I said it back.

I’ve wanted to bring this up with him since, to tell him that I knew I loved him then but that he caught me off guard. Is it worth me doing this?