This is long... but please bear with me, because I am in desperate need of advice!
My childhood best friend is getting married in September. Two months after she got engaged, she formally asked me to be her Maid of Honor. Last week (six months later), she called me and said that she'd decided the wedding party had gotten too large and she was only going to have her fiancé's sisters as bridesmaids. I was completely and utterly shocked by this announcement, especially because the sisters have been kind of disrespectful and pushy with her throughout this process. It was a short phone conversation, and when I tried to call her back later that night, she did not answer.
Two days after that, she sent me an email in which she wrote that actually, she was concerned about my wedding date conflicting with hers (side note: I am not even engaged yet. She knows I want to get married on my grandparents' anniversary, which is a week before her date in September 2018. Because of that potential conflict, but mostly for financial reasons, my boyfriend and I decided last fall to get married in 2019. There was never even any concrete discussion around me getting married in 2018). She said it would be "best for our friendship" for my boyfriend and I to also be able to get married sooner than 2019, so she wanted us to have the freedom to do that. I would still be an "honored guest" at her wedding.
Finally, I got a second emailing citing a THIRD reason for the decision. This one feels the most honest - it seems that because I have a more dominant personality than her, she feels uncomfortable sharing her wedding ideas with me because they may differ from my own. She wrote that she is "struggling with the boundary between distinguishing what you want for your wedding and what I want for mine", and says she is now preemptively choosing her opinions before she shares them with me based on how she thinks I will react.
Full disclosure - I am a direct person. I talk openly and honestly and when I'm asked for an opinion, I do give it. But I've been that way my entire life, and we've been friends since the age of 12. We've never had a dramatic friendship or had any major fights, we're both pretty tolerant people and are content to do our own thing. She also lives across the county now, so I feel like in some ways there's not even enough overlap in our lives to have many disagreements. I don't think this is the case, but it makes me wonder if she has always felt uncomfortable or unable to disagree with me? If that's really the nature of our friendship and I've actually been steamrolling her for our entire lives, I don't understand why she would even want to be friends with me, let alone call me her "best friend" and talk to me daily about her wedding.
I know wedding planning is stressful and often doesn't bring out the best in people. I've watched her withhold her opinions from other people because she wants to avoid confrontation. It's an active pattern right now, but I truly had no idea that she felt that way about me.
So what do I do now? Can our friendship recover from this? I suppose it's positive that she still wants to include me and make me feel "special", but I can't believe that we're now at a point where she doesn't even want me in her bridal party. I don't know why she would sit on these feelings until she decided that the best solution would be to remove me from the ceremony entirely. I can't imagine going to the wedding now and having it be an enjoyable experience. I don't really want to end our friendship over this, but I don't know how to get past it.
