u/Shot-Emotion4597

Please help, and no judgements please I would just love some advice. For context, me (29f) and my fiancé (32m) are getting married next summer and we are having a smallish wedding with around 70 guests

We have already chosen our bridal party which includes our best friends and my brother, we have not given any of the bridal party plus one invites and instead have invited all of the people individually because we are friends with and know them them all.

My bridesmaid (30f) has a boyfriend of around 2 years (30 something m) and she has approached us asking us why he wasn’t invited to our wedding; for a bit of background, I have met this boyfriend a handful of times and my partner has met him once (my fiancé does not like this man, at all), on each ocassion we have had uncomfortable experiences with her boyfriend being rude/creepy and making uncomfortable comments and statements that would normally cause a debate/serious conversation (political or sports related). He has met some of my family at a social gathering he was not invited to but showed up anyway (a whole other story) and all of our female relatives were not comfortable in his company. Any time we have come into contact with him I have never felt as though he makes an effort to be friendly or get to know us, for example will be on his phone the whole time or stay back and not even say hello.

As well as this, he isn’t exactly the best partner for my friend and it feels like every few weeks she is confiding in me about how she doesn’t want to be with him or see a future with him. He also just isn’t very nice to her.

So, on a night out my friend approached me and asked me why he was not invited, I explained that we don’t really know him that well and don’t want him there, we feel it would cause an uncomfortable atmosphere and at the end of the day, it is our wedding so our answer is no.

My friend is (understandably) not happy with this and keeps asking us to give her further reasons and explanations as to why the boyfriend isn’t invited and I can’t bring myself to say to her ‘we really don’t like this man’. She keeps saying ‘but what if this was you and your fiancé wasn’t invited’, and although I understand this viewpoint, if someone was paying £20k for a day and didn’t like my fiancé enough to have him there, it is not my place to argue. But I feel now as though this whole situation has drawn a wedge between me and my friend, since the original conversation my friend has gotten drunk and phoned me demanding a reason as to why he is not invited and asking to speak to my fiancé in an attempt to change his mine. When she is sober she is fine and normal, which worries me that she is still not happy with the answer.

I am now worried that I might lose my best friend and she will pull back from being my bridesmaid - what do I do?!

EDIT: I do feel like I should add that she has told me that if he is invited she will be leaving my wedding early because she doesn’t feel comfortable being there with ‘people she doesn’t know’, even when over the course of the past year I have been super inclusive in inviting her to my family gatherings, bringing her out with the other bridesmaid (to the point we are a group of 3 now) and even inviting her to my mums hen party.