I know I've touched on this on WW, so some of you may know a little backstory -- but I'm going to try to keep this as short as I can (lol)
My fiancé and I have a very close knit, very large friend group. All of the guys work together in a pretty tight profession, and all of the women have in turn become extremely close. Our wedding party is almost entirely made up of this group.
A few months ago, I decided to drop one of the bridesmaids (for plenty of justifiable reasons). We will call her Liz and her fiancé Josh. This has obviously caused some friction. I didn't completely understand the gravity of kicking someone out of your wedding until reading posts on here about how it's totally friendship ending and bridge burning. I still feel like I made the right decision by asking her to step down, now more than ever, but it has absolutely caused some serious tension. I've reached our on several specific occasions when things have been extremely awkward to more or less squash the drama -- mutual friend baby showers that she won't go to since I'm there, etc. Liz and I weren't very close for long, I know I shouldn't have asked her to be in the wedding to begin with, and for whatever reason I assumed we would just become cordial, rather than the tension being thick enough to cut with a knife. I was way wrong. She is pissed. Which is beyond me, because my reasoning for kicking her out was totally justified.
I saw Liz and Josh this weekend at a function that our friend group planned together. I tried to go out of the way to be nice and cordial with both of them to, but neither her nor Josh had any interest in even being pleasant to myself or FH.
The issue has kind of spread. Josh is also in our wedding party as a groomsmen - when we had our falling out, the guys talked about how they weren't going to let it effect their friendship and how they were just going to "let us have our squabble and figure it out", and insisted that they were okay - even laughed about our drama. Since this, mind you, months ago, Liz and Josh have blocked me on every social media platform, after I liked their engagement photos. I thought it was weird because Josh and I had always been friendly and nice with each other, even after the falling out.
They've recently set their wedding date to the month before ours. Josh hasn't mentioned anything to my FH about being in, or even at, the wedding. My fiance's feelings are extremely hurt, and I feel terrible that our falling out has caused so much tension. He is now thinking that he should have a conversation with Josh and figure out what the deal is, and possible ask that he just attend as a guest if he is comfortable. During premarital counseling, our reverend has drilled into our head the importance of community and how your people play such a role in your marriage. Especially with us having an intimate wedding, we want people with us who love and support us. We are both kind of done with the weird tension and drama, especially after so many attempts to squash it for the sake of the guys' friendship.
This is more or less advice to give my fiancé on how to handle it.
Thanks for reading until the end!!!
