Not invited to friend’s wedding dilemma

[ScullyD]

I was part of a friend group at uni 15 years ago and from that group I remain closest to my friend Emma. In particular me, Emma and Fraser were close for years and took trips together. Sometimes me and Fraser, or just me and Emma, or all 3 of us. Then when he got a gilfriend he seemed to drop us and it was very hurtful. I missed him.

i remember meeting the new gf twice and each time she looked me up and down quite nastily which I took to be feeling threatened of the platonic friendship. 5 years later he suddenly reappeared making an effort with Emma and I went for lunch with them. But crucially he has never kept in touch with as he used to and according to Emma she’s only invited to the wedding because she’s managed to befriend his girlfriend.

long and short of it - Emma lives out of town and I live next to the venue. Therefore Emma wants to stay with me while she attends the wedding. But I think I’ll find this upsetting and difficult although it’s not Emma’s fault. AIBU to expect her to make alternative accommodation?

she said she might angle at if a guest can come but even still the fact they haven’t invited me still stands.

I do understand it and have had to move on from friendships were i was badly treated. I focused on my positive friendships.

Fraser made his choice and let his soon to be wife decide who he could still be friends with. This says a lot about the type of person he is and op is better of without him.

Emma is still her friend so personally I would let her stay but tell her I only want to hear any juicy gossip details about the wedding nothing else because fraser hurt my feelings with his behaviour.

Moving on is sometimes accepting that someone has hurt you because of who they are not you.

If ever you complain about an expectation to be “reasonable,”

1. That’s about the very least we should expect from other humans (in the first few minutes after bad news, no, of course not; but in our treatment of others, absolutely).
2. Usually, it means they’re not being reasonable currently.
3. They won’t understand why their current actions are unreasonable.

If I was still angry about things that happened 15 years ago, I’d never have time to live. 😂

I would say no to Emma. She’s using you as free accommodation. ‘Sorry you can’t stay over as I’ll be out.’

It's not gender stereotyping to accept that men have different friendships with other men then they have with their women friends. Female friendships with men or women offer more emotional support - this is quite well documented.

Men connect in a different way with other men, there's nothing wrong with that and it's healthy to have those differences. The trouble is most men are friends with women to get more emotional support but once they find partners who offer this emotional support, their needs for a friendship change.They're not looking for a deep emotional connection friendship anymore, unless their romantic relationship doesn't offer it. It is this change OP has struggled with which has led to the complete breakdown of their friendship.

You can argue this all day long. It won't change the fact that OP is still unhappy and has a gap in her life (15 YEARS LATER), and Frasier and his fiancee are not. The only person hurt in all this is OP, and she can choose to either move on and find someone who will prioritise her or live nostalgically in the past for a time she was prioritised.

Does Emma have a plus one? Is she going to the wedding on her own? Does she know anyone else there apart from the bride and groom?

Do you think Fraser used to have a bit of a thing for you maybe and has told his girlfriend this? Might account for the not resuming friendship and not inviting you to the wedding

I can't help but wonder what the girlfriend would say if asked about you. I mean, I know you said she looked at you funny but is it at all possible that YOU were not particularly welcoming of someone you may have perceived as threatening your friendship?

Not that it really matters. You aren't friends with this couple so it is not surprising that you weren't invited to the wedding. Emma, however, has made an effort to know the girlfriend and to socialise with them as a couple. She is clearly a friend and, as such, is invited to the wedding.

If Emma always stays with you, as you've indicated, then saying no because she was invited to her friends wedding, and you were not, seems really petty.
Of course you can say no to her but if that's not something you usually do, you need to weigh up any potential consequences and be ok with them

I think that interpretation doesn’t fit with what the OP has said, though — this was a group friendship from university fifteen years ago, not some kind of one-on-one offering ‘deep emotional support’. And Fraser, Emma and the OP seem to have been equally close as a subgroup within the larger group, yet Emma has continued to be friends with him in a more distant way after he started a serious relationship with him. We don’t know why the friendship continued and the OP’s didn’t.

Some friendships continue and others don’t. The only friends I still see from my undergraduate degree in the 90s are people I wasn’t that close to back then. In one case it was because they went to a lot of effort to get back in touch. The other was a fluke — we ran into one another at a gig that ended early because the bass amp exploded.😀

This is an extraordinary amount of projection you've applied onto a very short post.

You’ve invented an entire backstory for OP, - that she must be single, emotionally unfulfilled, secretly in love with Fraser, hasn’t made new friends in 15 years and is resentful of his relationship. None of that is actually stated. It’s a huge leap. You've now said she has a gap in her life- how do you know that? what a rude presumption. I dont recall anywhere OP saying she was unhappy in her life at all- being sad about losing one single close friendship does not indicate a person is globally unhappy with their entire life, what presumptive nonsense.

People drifting apart in their 30s is normal. Feeling hurt when someone you were genuinely close to disappears from your life is also normal. The two things can coexist without anyone being possessive, fragile or secretly pining for a relationship.

The sweeping claims about “men not attaching emotional meaning to friendships” are also pretty questionable. Plenty of men value long-term friendships deeply. They might maintain them differently, but that doesn’t mean they only keep them around for memes until a girlfriend comes along to replace them.

Most importantly, you’ve largely ignored OP’s actual question. She isn’t demanding Fraser justify his life choices or asking to be invited to the wedding.
She’s asking whether it’s awkward to host a friend who is attending a wedding she herself wasn’t invited to.

Many people would find that uncomfortable and hurtful, and it doesn’t require a psychological profile to understand why. Its obvious.

It’s entirely possible that Fraser simply moved on with his life. It’s also entirely possible for OP to feel a bit stung by that. That’s a fairly ordinary human response, not evidence of some deep character flaw or secret yearning for him.

It’s also a bit odd to keep insisting that OP is the only unhappy person in this story when you’ve had to invent most of the evidence for that. Sometimes people can acknowledge that a friendship ended in a hurtful way and still have perfectly full lives.

Agreed. Emma is being tacky here. And too tight to get a hotel room.

I don't get the narrative about punishing Emma by not letting her stay. Are there no hotels in this town?

Apparently not. OP’s spare bed is the only suitable accommodation for miles, and to deny anyone the right to stay there under any circumstance is the most extreme form of punishment, worthy of unfriending after 18 years.

At a bare minimum, OP must hand over the keys to her own home to Emma, and go stay at a hotel at her own expense.

I think most people would feel a bit cheeky for asking for a room for the night even if the wedding was that of a stranger. Knowing you’ll probably be getting in at gone midnight, having spent zero time with your host - it just seems very odd. But do it in these circumstances is just bizarre.

Oh come on - I haven't said any of that. I have made a simple observation (like many other posters) that OP is posting like the friendship ended recently and her comments since indicate she IS very upset at not being invited. If she wasn't upset about it - she wouldn't be posting here!!

And it quite logically follows that if OP has made another close friend like Frasier in all these years since uni or had an emotionally fulfilling friendship or relationship like she did with Frasier - she wouldn't still be so upset about the loss of him from a decade ago. No doubt she has other friends, maybe she even has a partner - which is why I asked her if she did - but for some reason no one can replicate what she had with Frasier.... If they could, she wouldn't still be upset about him. She'd be too busy focused on these people and feeling joy and contentment with them, rather than being bitter about someone from her past. So she needs to prioritise finding people like Frasier instead of just missing him. It's exactly like moving on from a romantic breakup.

So no, I don't believe that OP has moved on in the last 15 years. Because if she had, she wouldn't still expect to be invited to a wedding where she doesn't like the bride and doesn't speak with the groom. On what basis was she expecting an invitation??

None of the below from OP is about her friend staying over so her post isn't just about that.

I also lived abroad for a few years and Fraser regularly came to visit me. So yes for me to not be invited to this hurts a lot

and again - the fact they know she will stay with me to attend their wedding says something not very palatable about them imo

people seem to think I should get over it because what, time passed? We were close friends and he just cut me off.

YES! YES! You're supposed to get over breakups and friendships ending when a decade has passed. Not expecting a wedding invite for the the love of god.

Hmm I do see why you feel hurt OP, esp considering he came back into contact with Emma and not you. I'd be really upset as well. Did you make an effort to try and arrange meet ups with them after he stopped talking to you, or were you just put off by the gf? I'm not sure how much you can assume from a 'look'. Maybe he just feels as though it's been so long since you were friends that there wasn't any need to invite you. If you really don't want Emma to stay at yours, you'll just have to be 'out' for a few days but I don't know if you guys hv stayed at each other's houses previously without the owner being there.

"we all had lunch like old times and it was great. Like no time passed. He said he’d like to hang out more"

This happened last year, not a decade ago.

But none of that is Emma's fault so why punish her

But, given that Fraser didn’t follow up on this at all, and there’s no indication the OP did, we can assume that it was one of those ‘We must have coffee sometime’ platitudes that are tacitly accepted as meaningless social filler?

This ‘just like old times’ lunch had been preceded by five years of no contact at all between Fraser and the OP and only seems to have happened because Fraser was picking Emma up from the OP’s house for some reason.

If I was Emma, I'd be embarrassed to ask if I could stay at yours for the wedding... knowing you hadn't been invited to the wedding. She sounds a little insensitive. If you don't feel you can be honest with her about your feelings, you could invent an excuse - family staying that weekend or whatever.

As for Fraser... sadly I think it's just time to accept the friendship has ended.

Sure, but it happened a year ago and so I think it's understandable that it stings to then be the only one of the group not invited to the wedding when she and the groom were once very close and had seen each other relatively recently. it's odd that posters are trying to portray her as some sort of Miss Havisham. The OP has clearly been singled out as the one person not invited to a wedding being held in a venue right where she lives.

OP will be a good friend to Emma in not being pissed of with her for asking to stay and Emma will be a good friend to OP in not being pissed off with her for saying sorry, but no.

Crazy amount of grief and spite over a wedding. Is it some kind of huge honour, in the UK? Because I wouldn’t give a shit not to be invited to someone’s wedding if I was not currently a close friend. And I wouldn’t feel spited or left out because they invited a mutual acquaintance.

I think this is just a Mn thing, where people who aren't very fluent at friendship congregate in large numbers and see 'exclusions' everywhere, whether it's a child not inviting a child he doesn't like to a birthday party or a man not inviting a former friend he's seen precisely once in six years (and only then because of a mutual friend) to his wedding.

Yep

Basically generally it’s posters that struggle to forge and keep friendships but see it as everyone’s else problem rather than maybe, just maybe, something to do with them.

See also 'It is the duty of anyone standing peacefully talking to their friends in the school playground to be permanently scanning the area for anyone standing alone in case their behaviour is making them feel 'excluded'. It is never on the person standing alone to make eye contact and say hello if she would like to chat.

Yes, if they held a special place in my heart.

OP and Fraser were extremely close. He meant a great deal to OP, and probably vice versa too.