Best Man Speech Examples for Your Best Friend: 3 Balanced Speeches

The first time I met Daniel we were both seven and both in detention, for the same crime, which was laughing at something neither of us could later explain to the teacher. We got an hour of silence as punishment. We have been failing at silence together ever since.

I'm Theo. I cook for a living now, I run a kitchen, and Daniel is the reason for that, though not in the way he likes to claim. When we were eleven he decided the two of us would open a restaurant. Not a lemonade stand. A restaurant. He cleared out his dad's shed, found a folding table, and printed menus on his mum's good printer until it ran out of the colour blue, so for one weekend only every dish came with a side of jacket potato in a strange grey.

He put me on food and put himself on what he called front of house. I was eleven and standing over a camping stove making cheese toasties that I'd priced, ambitiously, at two pounds. Daniel stood at the shed door welcoming guests who were entirely his own family. He gave his nan the best table. The best table was the only table.

We served four customers across two days and lost money on every single one, because Daniel kept comping the bill the moment anyone said the toastie was nice. His nan ate for free on the grounds that she was his nan. By Sunday the business had collapsed and I had third degree opinions about cheddar, and that, genuinely, is where the cooking started.

Here is the part the toastie story hides. Daniel was never really running a restaurant. He was running a room. He wanted everyone he loved sat down, fed, and looked after, and he wanted it badly enough to rope an eleven year old into hard labour to get it. That is still exactly who he is. He just has a bigger shed now.

When my first kitchen failed, the proper one, the one with my name half on the lease, Daniel drove two hours and turned up at closing on the worst night of it. He didn't tell me it would be fine. He knew it wouldn't. He took the keys off me, sat me down in my own empty restaurant, and cooked me dinner in my own kitchen, badly, and made me eat it. We didn't talk about much. He just wasn't going to let me sit in that place alone. I've never told him what that night meant. So now four hundred people know before he does.

Then Priya came along, and Priya is the first person I've ever watched out organise him. He found someone who runs a tighter ship than my actual kitchen. The first time she came to mine for dinner she'd already heard the shed story, and at the end of the night she looked at me and said, so you've been cleaning up after his ideas for twenty years too. She had the whole shape of him in one sentence, on a first meeting, and she signed up anyway.

Daniel, you have spent your entire life trying to get the people you love around one table. Tonight you finally managed it, and you didn't even have to print the menus.

Priya, you're getting a man who will feed everyone he meets and undercharge all of them. There is no business plan in him. There is just a very large heart and a folding table, and somehow it has always been enough.

Everyone, on your feet. Raise your glasses to Daniel and Priya. To a full table, a warm kitchen, and a best table that, from tonight, finally has the two of you sitting at it.

I fly passenger jets for a living, so I want to open by reassuring everyone that I am, these days, a careful man. I check things twice. I respect a safety briefing. None of that was true when I was nine, and Marcus is the witness who can prove it.

I'm Reuben. Marcus moved in next door when we were five, and within a week we'd knocked a gap in the fence between our yards so we didn't have to use the gate like ordinary children. That gap stayed open for fifteen years. Both sets of parents gave up on it around the same time.

The summer we were nine, Marcus drew up plans for a go-kart. He was always the one with the plans. I was the one who said yes before reading them, which is a dynamic that has cost me a lot over the years. He built it out of a milk crate, a plank, and the wheels off his little sister's pram, which he had not cleared with his little sister. It had a steering rope. It had a paint job. It did not have brakes. When I pointed this out, Marcus looked at me with total calm and said, that's what your feet are for.

We pushed it to the top of Crestline Drive, which anyone from Denver will tell you is not a street you test a brakeless vehicle on. I went first, because I always went first, because Marcus had a gift even at nine for making you feel honoured to be the crash test. I made it about two hundred yards before the feet plan revealed its flaws. I came home with no skin on either palm and the happiest face my mother had ever been furious at.

Marcus rebuilt it that same week. With brakes. He'd watched me eat that hill and his only takeaway was a design note. That's the man. He doesn't quit on a thing because the first version drew blood. He just fixes the part that hurt and runs it again.

I found out how far that goes when I washed out of my first flight program. I'd wanted it my whole life and I failed the check ride twice and I called Marcus ready to walk away from the only thing I'd ever planned for. He didn't give me a speech. He flew out, sat in my apartment, and made me explain to him, out loud, every single thing that went wrong, until the failure stopped being a wall and started being a list. Then he booked his flight home on the airline he was certain I'd end up flying for. He was that sure when I wasn't sure at all. I passed on the third attempt. He keeps the boarding pass in his wallet.

Which brings me to Hannah. They met when her dog got loose in a park and Marcus, naturally, was the man who caught it, because catching things that are accelerating is the through line of his entire life. He called me that night and said, I think I just met the one, and she yelled at me for grabbing her dog. I said that tracked. Hannah, the first time we met, you watched Marcus confidently assemble a barbecue with three screws left over and you didn't correct him, you just quietly moved the gas line yourself before he lit it. I knew right then you'd be fine. You manage his optimism the way air traffic control manages me.

Marcus, you put me at the top of every hill in our childhood and swore the feet would hold. They mostly did. You've been the best friend a careful man could ask for, which is to say you made me less careful and a much better person for it.

Everybody, please stand and raise your glasses. To Marcus and Hannah. May the road run downhill, and may you finally have someone riding with you who remembered to pack the brakes.

G'day, I'm Jonah. I met Liam on the school bus when we were six. He sat next to me, looked me up and down, and asked if I wanted half his sandwich. I said yes. That was the entire negotiation, and we have run the friendship on roughly those terms for thirty years. He offers, I accept, neither of us reads the fine print.

I'm a vet now, out in the country, and I blame Liam for that as well, because of Biscuit. In Year 4 our class got a guinea pig named Biscuit, and at the end of term the teacher sent her home with whichever kid's parents were daft enough to say yes. Liam's parents said yes. Liam swore on his life he'd look after her. He did, for about a week, until he decided what Biscuit really wanted was freedom, and he built her a run in the backyard with what he described as a fence and what Biscuit correctly identified as a suggestion.

Biscuit was gone by morning. Liam was inconsolable, so naturally it became my problem. We spent three days combing every backyard on the street, putting up posters, knocking on doors. We found her on day three under the Hendersons' shed, perfectly happy, having clearly been the best fed guinea pig in the southern hemisphere because half the street had been quietly feeding the celebrity fugitive. Liam cried with relief and then immediately started planning a better fence. I started, somewhere in that week, wanting to be the person who fixes the animal.

Now, people meet Liam and think soft touch. They're half right. He is soft, but he's not a pushover, he just decides early who he's responsible for and then never stops being responsible for them. Biscuit got it. I got it. You're all about to watch Lucy get it for the rest of her life.

The thing I want to tell you isn't funny. When my dad got crook a few years back, Liam was living three states away by then. He rang every single Sunday. Not the dramatic calls, the boring ones, the ones that actually count, just checking in, talking about the footy, letting Dad feel like a normal bloke for twenty minutes instead of a patient. He never made a thing of it. I only found out how many Sundays it was when Dad mentioned it at Christmas, like I already knew. I didn't. That's how Liam does the big stuff. Quietly, and on a schedule.

Lucy, you should know what you're marrying. The first time you came to ours, our old dog took an instant shine to you and parked herself on your feet for the whole night, and you didn't move once, for three hours, because you didn't want to disturb her. Liam watched you do that and I watched Liam, and mate, that was the day it was settled. Animals know. We just take longer.

Liam, you offered me half a sandwich when we were six and you've been splitting everything with me ever since. You're the most loyal man I know, and I've got a guinea pig's worth of evidence and thirty years besides.

Lucy, welcome to it. He'll look after you the way he looks after every creature that crosses his path, completely, and with a fence that may or may not hold.

Everyone, charge your glasses and be upstanding. To Liam and Lucy. May the gate stay open, the table stay full, and the two of you never once need finding.