Happy in a left handed kinda way

You know, the overwhelming reaction to the news of my engagement has been happy. Friends have reached out to express their excitement for me. My family (with the exception of my brother, who, of course, never replied to my email) has been thrilled.

There are two exceptions to this; two of my closest gay male friends. Both of them are angry at me in a way for 'leaving them out of the loop'. Mind you, these are guys who seldom get in touch with me. At the times in our lives when we were close (in college and just out of college respectively) I did see them on a regular basis. Since then, our lives have gone on and we've stayed in touch mostly by email, sometimes by phone and maybe once a year with an in person meal of some kind.

So, when they both got the news, their reactions - 'how dare you email me after all the time I've put in being your friend,' was one and the other called me twice when I was in Maine with no cell phone reception and just sent me an obnoxious email about me not having called him back, seem off base to me. Pay no mind to the fact that both of them go AWOL for months at a time here and there, not returning my calls. With the local one we often make plans for dinner and he cancels with a promise to call me and doesn't. Both of these messages have been couched in an "I'm so happy for you" beginning, but what gives? Either you are happy or you aren't.

I realize in a perfect world I would have time to call all my friends about the engagement. However, since we've made the choice to keep the guest list very small, many of them won't be invited and when we first got engaged we didn't know who was on the invite list, so I felt like calling not knowing if they would ultimately be invited was going to create a potentially bad situation. The reality is, I also just don't have time to make 70 phone calls to people.

It is almost like, in their minds, I need their approval to do this with my life and how could I marry someone they haven't had a chance to vet fully, assess his fashion and the potential for me to be a stay at home mom based on his income and the decoration potential of our future home (all remarks they've both made to me before about other guys)? The reality? I don't want their opinions on whether the flowers I want for my bouquet pass gay-boy muster. If Ben wants to wear tevas on his feet, I don't care to hear their commentary on his Jesus-sandals (but seriously, if anyone can pull off anything Jesus related, shouldn't it be this man?). I know it'll pass, but it is bugging me right now....