Don't want to attend best friend's wedding...

[FrogInAHat23]

My best friend (we’ll call her F) of 25 years has decided to get romantically involved with the guy who is my boss and old school friend (we’ll call him M).
I tried to warn F initially about M – he’s got a strong (what I believe to be) narcissistic streak where he refuses to take responsibility or accountability when he’s in the wrong. He also needs to be seen as the smartest guy in the room. I’d butted up against this at work, and so had my colleagues, so much so that people had been talking to their union reps about him. He has a dictatorial management style and insists he knows best, and has made some really crappy decisions we have to live with. As you might expect, his behaviour at work put a huge strain on our friendship outside of it but I wasn’t surprised, since I’d seen this side of him before. I never wanted him involved in my work life – he took the position without me even knowing (I worked at the firm first).

F and M are about 2 years into their relationship now. M and I are no longer on good terms since he’s caused such chaos at work, but I did try and repair this rupture since F and I are friends. M and I ended up having an email exchange where he just blame-shifted, deflected, and essentially made me out to be the problem. I wasn’t surprised by this, unfortunately.

(This was ChatGPT’s assessment of his email:
"He is presenting himself as reasonable, willing, even patient while subtly painting you as the one who is overly critical, withholding, or unreasonable. It’s clever positioning — his words look conciliatory on the surface, but the subtext is that the problem lies with you and how you’re approaching him. He’s not meeting you in the middle, he’s more concerned with protecting his self-image than with genuinely understanding your perspective. There’s a thread of defensiveness and blame-shifting throughout.")

F really wants me at her small, intimate wedding. They’re not engaged yet, but she wants to get married and she's desperate for him to propose. She was bridesmaid at mine, and she wants me to be maid of honour; I’m her closest friend. I want her to be happy, and I have to trust she’s making the right decisions for herself romantically.

I know it’s only a day, but I’m not sure I can stomach it.

AIBU?

If you’re worried about how a split from her will affect your friendship group, make it all more lowkey.

Make it a longer-term plan to move away from her, with no sudden moves.

Go to the wedding if you have to. Leave as early as you respectably can. Talk to other people you like as much as you can, staying away from the centre as much as possible.

Separately from the wedding, start to see her less. Initiate less, be available less and so on. But do it gradually, until one day you’ve both forgotten that you used to be best friends.

And if she challenges you on it, tell her you love her but it all seems to have become more difficult doesn’t it. Such a shame but it seems there’s nothing either of you can do.

And if your friends question it, just tell them the same thing.

I had a similar situation. Best friend basically had a cock lodger who could see that it was marriage or lose his meal ticket.
He’d threatened to harm her before. And used suicide as a weapon to “keep her”.

I could not have attended that wedding. We both know why even if it’s not explicitly been said.

Im probably projecting but: I’d want no part in this car crash should it occur.