Best man speech examples

Two years ago Nick sent me a photograph of a bookshelf he had assembled and asked, and I am quoting exactly here, "does this look load-bearing to you?" It was a bookshelf. It was leaning at about eleven degrees. There were no books on it, because he had already tried that.

I'm Owen. I've been Nick's best friend since we were fifteen, and in that time I've watched him take on roughly four hundred projects with total confidence and approximately no research.

He once decided to learn Portuguese in six weeks for a holiday. He got extremely good at ordering breakfast and could not do anything else. He spent the entire trip having breakfast. Three times a day. I ate breakfast at nine in the evening in Lisbon because Nick was fluent in it.

He restored a motorbike he could not ride. He grew a beard for a bet nobody had made. He once cooked a twelve-hour brisket for a party that started in four hours and served all of us extremely confident raw beef and a very good speech about patience.

And here is the thing I actually want to say, which is that every single one of those stories is the same story. Nick does not wait until he is good at something to start. He just starts, badly, in public, and he keeps going, and about a third of the time it works and the rest of the time we get a bookshelf.

I have never been able to do that. I wait until I am sure. I have missed a lot of things waiting until I was sure.

Amira, the first night I met you, Nick told you about a business idea he'd had for two days, and you asked him four real questions about it. Not polite ones. Real ones. And I watched him sit up straighter, and I thought, oh — she takes him seriously.

That's the whole thing, isn't it. He has spent his life throwing himself at things, and you're the first person I've seen who looked at that and thought: good, let's go.

Nick, you have never once waited until you were sure, and it has been the great privilege of my life to watch what that looks like up close.

Everyone — please raise your glasses. To Nick and Amira.

In March of the year my father died, James drove ninety minutes to my house on a Tuesday, let himself in, made two cups of tea, and sat on my sofa without saying anything for about forty minutes. Then he washed both cups and left. He did that eleven Tuesdays in a row. He has never mentioned it, and he is going to be extremely annoyed that I have.

I'm Sam, and I've known James for twenty-two years.

Most of what I could tell you about him is small. He is the person who remembers that you do not like coriander. He is the one who texts the day after the interview, not the day before. When his sister moved apartments he took the day off and told nobody, and we only found out because she posted a photograph and he was in the background holding a lamp.

He is not a dramatic man. He has never once made a grand gesture in his life. What he does instead is turn up, over and over, for years, in ways that are so unremarkable you almost do not notice you are being looked after.

I want to be honest — for a long time I worried about him. Because people like James give a great deal away, and I was not always sure anyone was giving it back.

And then he met Freya.

Freya, the thing I noticed first about you was that you asked him what he wanted. Just directly, in a restaurant, about something small. And he had to stop and think about it, because I do not believe anybody had asked him that in about a decade.

You have kept asking. I have watched you do it for four years now. And he is different — not louder, not changed, just less alone in it.

James, you have been the most consistent good thing in my life since I was seventeen. You have never asked for anything. Today I am extremely glad to watch somebody give you something back.

Please raise your glasses. To James and Freya.

Theo once queued for forty minutes to return a pair of headphones that worked perfectly, because he had promised a colleague he would test them and he had decided that meant testing them properly and giving them back. Nobody had asked him to do any part of that.

I'm Rob, and I've had the job of pointing out that nobody asked for about twelve years.

That's genuinely him, though. Theo does the whole of a thing. He does not do the useful eighty percent and leave the rest, which is what the rest of us do. He does all of it, including the bit nobody will ever see, and then he does not tell you about it.

I've watched him do it with his work, with his family, and — for the last five years — with Priya.

Priya, I'm going to say the obvious thing quickly because I know there are three more speeches. You are the first person I have ever seen make him stop. Actually stop, sit down, and not be halfway through something. I did not know he could do that. I'd assumed it was structural.

Theo, you're the most thorough friend a person could have, and I have never once had to check whether you meant it.

That's all I've got. Everyone — to Theo and Priya.