AITA for refusing to invite my fiancé’s cousin’s brand new boyfriend to our wedding?

We are getting married and I (33F) am paying for a good chunk of the wedding.

I personally wanted to elope at this stage of life and take a long vacation in Europe. My fiancé (37M) wants to have a blow out wedding. We decided to compromise and have a wedding in our home state and keep the guest list to 80 and under. Especially since I’m paying for a majority of it out of pocket.

His mom started out this wedding planning process saying, “ You should do whatever you want. It’s about YOU. Don’t let anyone influence your decisions.” Turns out she means that as long as SHE is the biggest influence on our wedding. Beyond insisting she wear a CREAM colored dress, sharing our wedding website with people without asking if that was ok, wanting her son’s hair to be styled a certain way… she’s been extremely difficult.

Her latest endeavor has been inviting people to the wedding without our approval. She’s invited 5 of her friends without asking and her excuse was that “I just assumed that they were invited. They invited me to their children’s weddings.”

The newest problem is that her niece (40F) who lives across the country just broke up with her boyfriend in October of last year. I’ve met the niece a handful of time and she’s a great girl and we want her at the wedding. But her ex boyfriend was awful and I was happy that they broke up tbh.

She let us know that the niece is dating someone new and she should be given a plus one. I refused to give her one and told my fiancé: NO. He’s been telling his mom no, and she’s saying we’re not being very nice and that the cousin will be alone. My argument was that we’ve never met this new person, they just started dating, and she will NOT be alone she will be around family. I guess her siblings are all married, so in that sense she will be alone. I also am trying to save us as much money as possible and never wanted to have a huge wedding anyways. So one less person is a win in my book. But I still feel like my justifications are sound and I’m right for not budging on this.

AITA?

UPDATE:

I was not expecting this many responses and wanted to just say thank you all so much for your honest and blunt feedback.

Many ppl asked why I decided to bankroll a wedding I had no desire to have: I really love my fiancé and want him to be happy. He kind of knew how to pull my heartstrings by insisting it’s not right to get married without our family and friends. The funny thing is, my friends constantly joke that they just assumed I will elope one day and come back married because a huge wedding was never really in my cards and is not really me. While I offered many other solutions (i.e., renting an Airbnb and travelling with immediate family somewhere special, courthouse and having a small get together) he insisted that this is what he wanted for us.

I am planning it because I really truly love to plan things. I wanted to be optimistic and look at it as a creative opportunity. Also he is an exceptionally bad planner. It felt as though if I didn’t step up, it was never going to happen if left up to him.

I know my fiancé and his mother’s relationship is weird and inappropriate. She is a decades-long professional victim. Whenever I bring up boundaries, it is always flipped around and turns me into a villain.

There has been so much sadness and many tears shed these past few weeks. It’s felt as though I’m on the verge of a breakdown and not a happy milestone for our relationship.

My therapist told me today - “you have not been compromising, you have been conceding.” While she is my hype woman and gives me genuinely amazing advice, to see her same sentiments echoed here really shook me to my core.

A lot of these comments made me laugh out loud and I really needed some laughter. And a kick in the ass. I’ve invested so much into our relationship and was so happy when he finally proposed, but it’s always been one-sided. While I was typing out the post this morning, it made me step back and realize how insane it sounded LOL and I couldn’t believe it was my life. If it were anyone else, I’d be asking them to know their worth.