Maid of honor speech examples

When we were twenty-three, Hannah and I shared an apartment with a radiator that only worked if you hit it. Not adjusted — hit it. Hannah made a laminated sign explaining the technique for guests. She laminated it. We had no money for groceries and she found money for lamination.

I'm Leah, and I have been her best friend for fourteen years.

That sign is the most Hannah thing that has ever happened. She is a person who cannot leave a problem in a state where the next person has to work it out for themselves. At university she rewrote the departmental exam timetable because it was confusing, and sent it to everyone, and nobody asked her to and about ninety people used it.

For a long time that meant she was the one who fixed everything and nobody fixed anything for her. I watched her spend most of her twenties being the competent one in every room she was in. It is a very lonely job and she is very good at it.

About four years ago I called her on a Sunday and she said she couldn't talk because she was lying on the floor listening to a record, and Daniel had told her she was not allowed to be useful until three o'clock.

I actually stopped walking. In the street.

Daniel, you did not make her less capable. She is exactly as capable as she ever was, and she will still laminate something for you. But you gave her somewhere to put it down. I had been trying to do that for a decade and I could not manage it, and you did it in about six months, apparently by being extremely stubborn about Sundays.

I want you to know that you are not just marrying her today. You are stuck with me too, permanently, and I have already accepted this on your behalf.

Hannah, you have looked after all of us for fourteen years. I hope this marriage gives you back every single bit of it.

Everyone — to Hannah and Daniel.

Sophie has a system for choosing restaurants that involves a spreadsheet, three separate review sites, and a phone call to check the acoustics. I have watched her do this for a Tuesday lunch. For two people. In a town we were leaving that afternoon.

I'm Nadia, and I have been eating in objectively excellent restaurants against my will since 2014.

I want to be clear that she is right. That is the infuriating part. In eleven years of this I have never once had a bad meal with Sophie, and I have had many, many bad meals without her, and she has never said anything about it, which is somehow worse.

She is like this about everything. She researched my mortgage. I did not ask her to research my mortgage. She sent me a document. It had a contents page.

And I used to think this was just a funny thing about my friend, until about three years ago when I was going through something genuinely awful, and Sophie turned up with a folder. An actual folder. She had researched the thing I was dealing with, called two people, and worked out what I needed to do next, because she knew I could not do it myself that week.

That is when I understood that the spreadsheets are not a personality. They are how she loves people. She finds out what would help and then she quietly goes and does the work.

Ben — you were the first person I ever saw make her a spreadsheet back. It was about a holiday and it was, and I say this with love, a terrible spreadsheet. She kept it. It is still in the kitchen.

Sophie, you have researched, planned and organised your way through my entire adult life and I would not have got here without you.

Please raise your glasses. To Sophie and Ben.

The first thing Mia ever said to me was "you're in my seat", and then she sat down next to me anyway and we have been friends for nineteen years.

I'm Grace, and that is genuinely the whole of her character in one sentence. Mia will tell you exactly what she thinks, immediately, and then stay.

I have been told the truth by this woman more times than I can count, and every single time it has been the right thing to hear and the wrong thing to want. She told me not to take the job. She told me the flat was too expensive. She told me, at two in the morning in a kitchen, that I was not actually happy, and I did not speak to her for four days, and she was right.

Nobody else does that. Everybody else is kind. Mia is honest, which is much harder and much rarer, and she has never once used it to be cruel.

Alex — the reason I knew about you before I met you is that Mia described you as "annoying and correct". That is the highest praise available in her vocabulary. She has been telling me the truth for nineteen years and you are the first person I have ever heard her say has told her one back.

Mia, thank you for every uncomfortable thing you have ever said to me.

To Mia and Alex.