Father of the Bride Speech Examples: 3 Full Speeches with a Balanced Tone

Della asked me for two things this morning. Walk slow, and do not bring the guitar. So I left the guitar in the truck. It is in the truck. I want everyone to know the kind of restraint that took.

I am Marv, Della's dad. I have fixed guitars for a living for thirty-four years. Necks, frets, the lot. People hand me an instrument they have already given up on, and my whole job is telling them it can still sing.

When Della was eight, she snapped the top string on my best acoustic messing about with it after bedtime. Most kids would have hidden the guitar and prayed. Not her. I came down in the morning and found her at the workbench with my tools laid out in a neat row, halfway through restringing it herself, tongue out, doing it wrong but doing it. She had watched me do it maybe a hundred times through the shop door. She got the string on. Tuned it by ear, sharp as anything, and then looked up and informed me the old string was rubbish anyway and I should buy a better brand. I had strung that guitar.

That was Della's whole childhood in one morning. She never asked permission and she never asked how. She watched, then she did it, then she told you where you had been going wrong. At fourteen she rewired the lamp in her room because the flicker annoyed her. At seventeen she talked her way backstage at the Ryman by walking in like she paid the rent. The world kept telling her where the line was, and she kept stepping politely over it.

So when she rang me two years back and said she had met someone, I did not ask the usual dad questions. I asked the only one I cared about. Does he know what he is in for. Because loving Della is a fine way to spend a life, and it is also a bit like agreeing to live downwind of a storm that loves you back.

Wes knew. The first time he came by the house, Della was on the kitchen floor with a busted amp in pieces around her, a job she had started that morning with no warning, the way other people start a jigsaw. Every fellow before him had offered to help and got himself fired inside the hour. Wes sat down on the floor, handed her the screwdriver before she asked, and got the names of the parts wrong on purpose so she could correct him. She lit up. I went and told her mother, that one stays.

Last winter I had a bad spell with my chest. Came right in the end, but for a stretch nobody knew that yet, and Della ran the whole show. The doctors, the forms, her mother's nerves. The night before they sorted me out I could not sleep, and at midnight she came and sat on the edge of my bed with that same acoustic and played me every quiet thing I taught her, badly, on purpose, so I would have to keep correcting her instead of worrying. I slept after that.

Wes, that is who you are getting. The one who turns up at midnight with a guitar and plays it wrong on purpose so you forget to be afraid. Hand her the tools before she asks. You will not regret it.

Della, your whole life I have checked your work, and your whole life it has come back better tuned than mine.

Everyone, lift your glasses. To Della and Wes. May every broken string be back on by morning.

Niamh gave me strict orders. Keep it short, and no boat metaphors. So I have written this entire speech about a boat. Sorry, love. You knew the risk when you gave me a microphone.

I am Eddie, Niamh's father. I have been harbourmaster down our way for twenty-six years, which is a fancy word for the man who tells other men their mooring is in the wrong place and then buys them a pint about it.

Niamh more or less grew up on the harbour wall. Before she could properly read, she could read the water. She knew which boats came in at what state of the tide, knew every skipper by the sound of his engine before he rounded the point. When she was nine, old Pascoe's little crabber came in late one evening in a thickening fog, and it was Niamh, not me, who noticed he had drifted wide of the channel. She stood on the wall in her school shoes shouting corrections at a grown fisherman through her cupped hands, and the daft old boy actually listened, because she was right. I had the logbook. She had the harbour memorised.

That is who she has always been. While the rest of us are still finding our reading glasses, Niamh has already clocked the thing that matters and started fixing it. She kept a tide book under her bed the way other children kept comics. She organised a beach clean at eleven and put me on litter duty. By thirteen she ran the lifeboat fundraiser better than the committee, who were all four times her age and, between us, not half as sharp.

What I did not see at the time, because you cannot with your own child, is that all that watching was her looking after people. The night of the big storm a few years back proved it. The water came up over the front, and while I was out checking moorings in the worst of it, Niamh, by then home from her nursing course, had already gone door to door along the row of cottages on the low side of the quay, the ones that flood first, getting the older residents up the hill before the sea reached their doorsteps. She came back at dawn, soaked to the bone, and asked why the harbour cafe was not open yet, since folk would be cold and wanting tea. We opened it. Gave most of it away on the wall. Worst night the village had in years, and somehow one of the best.

Which brings me to Joe. Joe is from Birmingham. As far inland as a man can be born. The first time Niamh brought him down, he stepped onto the wet slipway in brand new deck shoes and went down like a sack of spuds in front of the entire fleet. Got up, laughed harder than any of us, and asked Pascoe to teach him a proper bowline. Spent the afternoon learning to tie up a boat he had no business being near. Pascoe, who has approved of roughly four people in his life, told me at the bar, that one will do.

Last spring Niamh worked a brutal run of night shifts and came home grey with it. I watched Joe learn her whole tide book by heart so he would know, without asking, exactly when she would walk through the door, and have the kettle already on. He cannot read the water. So he learned to read her instead.

Niamh, my girl. You have spent your whole life keeping watch over this harbour and everyone in it, and tonight, for once, it is all of us watching over you.

Everyone, raise your glasses. To Niamh and Joe. Fair winds, and may every boat you love come home on the tide.

Tara handed me two rules for tonight. Keep it under five minutes, and do not, under any circumstances, get the laser pointer out. The laser pointer is in my jacket. I make no promises.

I am Phil, Tara's father. I have taught high school geography for thirty-one years, which means I have spent three decades explaining to teenagers exactly where they are, and being ignored by most of them. My own daughter included.

When Tara was seven, we went bushwalking out in the hills, and I, the professional, the man who teaches map reading for a job, got us thoroughly lost. Turned the map every which way. Tara watched me do this for a while, then quietly took it off me, turned it the right way up, pointed at a creek I had walked us straight past, and said, Dad, we are here, the car is there, you went the wrong way at the fence. She was seven. She had never read a topographic map in her life. She had simply been paying closer attention than I was, which, it turns out, was the whole story of the next twenty years.

Because that is Tara. The rest of us are squinting at the legend, and she has already worked out where we actually are. She never asked which way to go. She looked, she decided, and she was right often enough that the rest of us learned to just follow her and save the argument. At fifteen she planned the entire family holiday and budgeted it better than I ever had. At nineteen she moved to a city she had never set foot in, with a flat sorted and a job lined up, because she had, in her words, done the recon.

She became a paramedic, which surprised nobody who ever watched her read a room the way she read that map. She rings me after the hard shifts, and we do not talk about the hard shifts. We talk about where to go bushwalking next, and whether her mum's vegetable patch will survive another summer. It always survives. Her mum is simply Tara with thirty more years on her and a better hat.

Then along came Dev. An accountant from the city, a man whose idea of the outdoors was a balcony. The first time Tara brought him up home, we took him walking, and he came spectacularly unstuck. Wrong shoes. No water. Sunburn in the shape of his own singlet. By the end of the day he was a state, and instead of sulking he asked me, completely sincere, to teach him how to read the map properly so he would never slow her down again. I have taught thousands of kids that skill. He is the only one who ever begged me for the lesson.

Last autumn Tara's closest friend was in a bad way, and Tara sat up with her night after night until the worst passed. I watched Dev carry the whole of the rest of their life so she did not have to think about it. Meals, bills, the lot, no fuss, no announcement. He cannot read a contour line to save himself. But he had worked out where Tara needed him to stand, and he stood there the whole time.

Tara, my girl. You have spent your entire life telling me where we really are, and you have been right every single time, including this morning, walking down that aisle looking certain as anything.

Dev, welcome to the family. You found your bearings in the end.

Everyone, up on your feet, glasses high. To Tara and Dev. Wherever you two are headed, you have already found the way.