AITA for not inviting my high school/uni friends to my wedding?

I (43F) am getting married in June. It is my first marriage and the biggest surprise of my life to find someone so wonderful. My husband-to-be and I both come from very dysfunctional families and both have good friends that we love in place of our families. We do not want the traditional wedding, so we are getting married at 3 p.m. in front of 8 people (our witnesses, the surviving parents and my sister and her kids) and then throwing a bash. I am very excited.

In my 20s and 30s, I had a group of 10 friends (give or take) that all grew up in the same small town and went to high school with me, but we didn't really all become friends until we were in college and university. I thought of them as my "forever family". For about a decade, we all did everything together, from a weekly Sunday night pub trivia to vacations and road trips to collective family care. When they started pairing off in our 20s, I was excited, and was a bridesmaid and MC for each of the couples - 7 weddings (and also gave nice gifts, even when it was a strain on my budget; I am really lucky to have grown my professional career and am now very successful in my own right).

As you can probably predict, we started growing apart in our 30s, as people got more established and families grew, but up until the pandemic, there were still lots of points of contact, including playing music together, pub nights, and a lot of dinners and parties. I was still really satisfied with this group and my place with them, and as a single person, often hosted (without asking anyone to contribute).

A year before the pandemic, my fiance came into my life. He was another professional that I knew tangentially, but not well, for years. We got to know each other, and then when the pandemic happened we bubbled, ended up living together and then he proposed in 2021, now four years ago. I was ecstatic.

The news landed like a lead balloon. Not only did no one in that group seem to care, but no one made an attempt to get to know him at all. In four years, we've never been invited over to anyone's home as a couple, asked out for a pub night (which ended during covid, so no one is doing them, as far as I know) or invited to a party, even though there have been a couple. These friends don't know him, so they can't be rejecting him, and everyone is currently parenting older children, so it's not like everyone is parenting 2 year olds (that said, I was auntie and babysat a LOT through those years, so it's also not like I don't know the kids). I threw a party to try and get some relationships going; I genuinely feel like people came, drank my booze, ate my food and left... and we heard nothing, barely a thank you. I have asked a few of the friends in this group to come over and have dinner- either they have and there has been no reciprocal, or they have not come. Kids are always welcome in my house, especially THEIR kids, so having families for dinner is never an issue and these are people who know that.

For 18 months, my fiance took the opportunity of a lifetime to work overseas (so proud!). I am well established in the US, so I didn't go, but visited frequently. No one of this group made any effort to check in to see how I was doing on my own or invite me anywhere socially. Then my dad died, someone many of these friends knew in person and knew how complex my relationship with him was, and even though I'd been to 4 parental funerals, no one showed up or checked on me after dad died. My fiance was on a plane within 3 hours of my phone call and my other friends showed up and sat behind me; I received a card from one of these friends.

I have 50 seats total at our wedding in the venue we want. In four years, I haven't heard anything from any one of these friends that makes me think I want them to be a part of something so deeply sacred to me and a step of moving forward in my life. However, one of them found out that the invitations went out last week and FREAKED OUT, and now I am facing a barrage of questions and social media messages about not inviting this group. So, reddit, AITA for not inviting these friends to my wedding?