Some stuff just came to a head this past weekend and it is causing me extreme anxiety and I feel like I’m going to lose one of my closest friends over it and I’d love some advice.

I got engaged in Jan 2018, and asked two of my great friends (who were together at the time) to be in my wedding party. I have known both of these people over 10 years, but I have been much closer to the male (I’m also male), but the female in the relationship was still one of my closest friends. My partner and I are both having a 6 person wedding party.

Fast forward a few months to end of April 2018 and my male friend and I hang out one night and he tells me he is breaking up with his partner, and tells me how living with her is impossible, how her mental health is terrible and not under control or managed at all, and how she is making his life hell and he needs out. They have been in a relationship for like 8 years but he can’t do it any more. I find myself in a hard place because I’m close with them, and I try to manage the situation and break up as best as I can. I’m supportive of both and hang out with both and help both out as best I can, and try to to what I can. It’s hard. Very hard. The female got super emotionally disregulated for a long time after and was over-bearing and did not practice healthy boundaries at all and it got to the point where I had to tell her to chill out and had to put some boundaries up because it was too much for me to deal with. This happened about 2-3 months after the break up. It got better, we didn’t talk for awhile, and we thought about how we would go about asking her not to be in the wedding since she was clearly super messed up and we didn’t know how it would all go at the wedding with both of them in it. But we smoothed stuff out in October of last year and while we don’t really hang out all that much, we still chat and the expectation is that she was still in the wedding party because she has been doing much better and is dating, etc. Seems like she is in a much better place.

We hosted an engagement slash meet and greet party this weekend for our family and wedding party. The female was not there, and I didn’t think to mention it to my male friend that she was still in the wedding party as I asked them at the same time so I thought he knew. He never asked me either, and I was under the impression that he didn’t really care all that much either way. He never said anything to me about it, and she was at another mutual friends wedding that I thought went fine.  I feel like we both dropped the ball RE communication on this aspect.

Anyway, he is in a new relationship, they have been together for about 8 months, and she asked my fiancee if anyone was missing from the wedding party. My fiancee didn’t think to not saying anything about female friend, so she named everyone and when asked about that person by my friends new partner, she was like “ya, well it’s your partners ex.”  She lost it. Dragged my friend outside. They argued about how he didn’t tell her. She stormed off called a friend had her pick her up. My friend was beside himself and left soon after.

Today he messages me about how he is upset with this whole situation and feels let down. He feels like I purposefully withheld information from him and that he would have found out the day of the wedding and that that really hurt him and feels disrespectful. He basically said that he did not want to be at another wedding with her at it, so I really feel like he is saying that I either have to uninvite her or he will uninvite himself. This is terrible. He is one of my best friends, I don’t know what to do. Uninviting someone from your wedding is a sure fire way to basically completely end that friendship, but by not doing so I feel like my friendship with this person will completely crumble and that would also be horrific, especially since I’ve been adopted into his highschool friend group slowly over the last decade and consider many of them my close friends too and they are all invited to my wedding.

Any sort of advice would be helpful