Help! My fiancee and I are getting married next May with a guest list of about 75 people. All close family and friends.
I recently celebrated my birthday at a bar with several people, all but 1 are invited to my wedding. 8 of the 9 people there are very close friends who I had either grown up with or had known for quite some time now. This other person is more of an acquaintance. I only see him when there is a party or a large group gathering of some sort, have never had a telephone conversation with him, and had not planned on inviting him to our wedding at all. There are SEVERAL of other people that fit right in his category that are not invited. If I invited all of those people our guest list would be well over 100 people, and well over our budget.
Anyway, long story short, there was some chit chat about the wedding going on and I was showing the girls photos of my dress. In retrospect perhaps it was rude of me to talk about it in front of a person who I wasn't planning on inviting, but it certainly was not the entire focus of the evening and he easily could have turned to the person on his left who was talking about movies. He actually continued to bring it up himself when we were talking about unrelated topics. Asking me what day it was, where it was, etc. At one point in the evening he asked me "Am I invited to the wedding?" To which I kind of froze, thought 'did he really just ask me that?', 'is that an appropriate question to even ask??' and due to my incredible fear of telling people no, the extreme awkwardness that would hve followed, and probably the amount of drinks I had consumed by that point I blurted out "sure" albeit not a very enthusiastic response but, he seemed pleased with it and then proceeded to talk about how he will be sending me his address. I sort of mumbled about how The wedding is still awhile away and I'm still working on the Save the Dates. A bit later as he was leaving he again mentioned sending me his address. I just kind of said a generic 'okay' and left it at that. I take full responsibility for not being strait forward, but I think it was incredibly rude of him to so bluntly ask that and put me on the spot like that in front of everyone.
Is there a graceful way to back out of this? I mean, more graceful than just NOT sending him the invitation he is expecting which has crossed my mind.
Or should I just suck it up and include him since I never said anything when he asked?
What am I to do?