Hi ok first I apoligize for how long this post is.....
My fiance and I are paying for our wedding ourselves. I am a graduate student and he just started a new job so we had a extremely tight budget. We are having a wedding in the town that I grew up in even though I have not lived there in a while and he has never lived there. My family all live there and his family is spread out throughout the country so thats why we made this decision
However because of this we invited a lot of out of town guests and with our limited budget we decided we could only pay for about 100 guests so we invited about 150 people. Inorder to please my future MIL I invited her cousins and friends who I have not met and we also invited a lot of friends from out of town. A lot of our out of town guests were really excited about coming but with the economy the way it is not many at all are attending.
Anyways now I am 20 days away from my wedding and only have about 70 people coming to the wedding. Since we had such a tight budget I was not able to invite some friends that I would really have liked to but didn't because I needed to include "family" These are friends from high school who I talk to every once in a while but are really nice and I would love to see, but I passed up inviting them because I needed to invite "family" who ended up not coming anyways.
Soooo I really would like to invite some of these people (about 5 people) by phone or take them out to coffee and invite them, but I don;t want to hurt their feelings and make them feel like "second-string" friends.
I know by traditional rules this is really rude but I wanted to see if anyone else was in this situacion and had some advice. I am so worried about this I literally wake up in the middle of the night wondering what I should do. Please help.
Thank you!