Funny Groom Speech About the Bride: 3 Full Examples

Thank you all for coming. I run a kitchen for a living, which means I have shouted at grown men over the doneness of a scallop. I have served four hundred covers on a Saturday without my hands shaking once. And tonight, holding one piece of card, I have already sweated through this shirt.

I'm Marco, and somehow I'm the groom.

Here is a thing nobody believes about me. I cannot cook for Priya. I cook for strangers all day and it is the easiest thing in the world. The first time I cooked for her, properly, our third date, I made a risotto I have made a thousand times, and I plated it, and I watched her take the first bite, and I asked her how it was before the fork had even left her mouth. She said, are you alright. I was not alright. I had been calmer during a fire inspection.

Nine years later it has not improved. Last month I made her a birthday dinner and stood behind her chair the entire time like a waiter who fancied her. She finally turned round and said, Marco, sit down, you're putting me off. The woman has eaten my food for nearly a decade and I still hover like it might be the night she finally sends it back.

I think I know why. In the kitchen I am in charge. I decide. I am, and the lads will back me up, slightly insufferable about it. Priya is the only person alive who I cannot control the outcome with, because her opinion is the one that actually counts, and she has never once told me what I wanted to hear. When my souffle was bad she said the souffle was bad. When I was being a nightmare during the opening of the second site, she didn't manage me. She put my keys in her bag, drove me to the sea, and made me eat a terrible petrol station sandwich until I remembered I was a person.

That is the real reason I married her. Not because she is kind, although she is. Because she is honest at me in a way nobody had ever dared, and underneath being slightly insufferable, I had been starving for it.

There is a bit I have to do properly. To my mum and dad, who are over there pretending not to cry, thank you for the kitchen we grew up around. Half of who I am came off that stove. And to Priya's parents, thank you for raising the most truthful woman I have ever met, and for trusting her with a man who cannot plate her a starter without a small breakdown.

Priya. I have cooked for prime ministers and football managers and one minor royal who sent back a perfect steak out of spite. None of it ever mattered. The only review I have ever actually wanted is yours, across a small table, on an ordinary Tuesday. I get to cook you breakfast tomorrow as your husband, and I am going to be a wreck about it, and you are going to tell me to sit down, and that is the whole rest of my life and I cannot wait.

Everyone, on your feet for me. Raise whatever you've got. Here is to my wife, the only critic who ever scared me, and the only table I ever want to be standing behind.

To Priya.

Evening, everybody. I'm Theo, the groom, and I want to start with a confession that my new wife has given me permission to make, which is that I proposed to Hannah four times.

Not four times because she kept saying no. She said yes the first time. I just kept getting the proposal so badly wrong that I had to keep doing it again to fix the last one.

I'm a geography teacher. I plan things for a living. I have laminated a seating plan for thirty fourteen-year-olds. So you would think I could organise one question. The first attempt, I hid the ring in a dessert, because I had seen it in a film. I had not thought about the fact that Hannah inhales food like she is being timed. She nearly swallowed the ring. The romantic moment was me shouting do not swallow that across a quiet Italian restaurant while a waiter hovered, deeply concerned for both of us.

Second attempt, a few weeks later, I tried again on a hill, because I am a geography teacher and I genuinely believed the answer to romance was elevation. It rained sideways. We could not see the view, which was the entire plan. Hannah, soaked through, said, did you just bring me up a hill in a storm to ask me something you already asked me over pasta. Reader, I had.

I will spare you the third one. It involved a drone. The drone is in a hedge in the Yorkshire Dales to this day.

The fourth time, I gave up on the plan. We were on the sofa, it was a wet Sunday, she had just beaten me at a board game and was being unbearable about it, and I just looked at her being smug with crumbs on her jumper and asked her properly. No dessert. No hill. No aircraft. She said, finally, you idiot, and that one stuck.

Here is what I worked out somewhere between the hill and the hedge. I kept trying to build Hannah a moment that matched how big she feels to me, and I kept failing, because the way I feel about her does not fit in a gesture. It lives in the ordinary afternoons. Her cheating at cards. Her laughing at my plans before they have even gone wrong. The crumbs on the jumper. That is where the whole of it actually is, and it took me four tries and one drone in a hedge to see it.

To both sets of parents, thank you for sitting through the engagement that simply would not end, and for never once asking why it took four attempts. To Hannah's mum especially, who I am fairly sure knew about every failed proposal in real time and kept a straight face. You are a stronger person than me.

Hannah. You said yes when I did it badly, and you said yes when I did it terribly, and you said yes when I finally did it like an actual human being on a sofa. You have backed me through every overplanned disaster I have ever cooked up. I promise to spend the rest of my life getting things slightly wrong and having you laugh at me about it, which is, it turns out, all I have ever wanted.

Everyone, lift your glasses. To Hannah, who said yes four times to a man who could only get it right once.

To my wife.

Good evening. For those still finding their seats, take your time, I have plenty of card.

I'm Daniel, the groom. I argue for a living. I am a lawyer. I get paid actual money to win disagreements, and I am, professionally, quite good at it. I want that on the record before I tell you the rest, which is that I have not won a single argument against Aisha since roughly 2017.

Not one. I have tried everything. I have used my courtroom voice at the kitchen island and watched it bounce off her like she was made of something the voice does not work on. I once spent an entire weekend building, and I am not exaggerating, a small written case for why we did not need a second fridge. Tabs. A document. Aisha listened to all of it, very patiently, then said one sentence back, and we have two fridges, and honestly the second fridge has been the best decision of our marriage and it was hers.

That is the pattern. I bring the argument. She brings the answer. I have learned to spot the exact moment I have lost, because she goes very calm and slightly kind, the way you are kind to someone who is about to find out they are wrong. The closing speech that ends me is always four or five words. The big one, last year, the one about whether we move cities for her job, I had pages. She just said, Daniel, I would do it for you. That was the whole rebuttal. I folded the pages up and we moved.

Here is the thing I have slowly understood across nine years of losing. I do not actually want to win against Aisha. When I argue at work, I am trying to beat someone. When I lose to her, I am being shown a better answer than the one I walked in with, every single time. She is not winning. She is right. There is a difference, and it took me nine years and one unnecessary fridge document to learn it.

To my parents, thank you for raising a son stubborn enough to keep arguing and just self-aware enough to marry the one woman who could end it. To Aisha's family, thank you for her, and for the fact that not one of you warned me. You let me find out on my own. Respect.

Aisha. I have lost every argument we have ever had, and our life is unrecognisably better for it. Every place I did not want to go, you were right about. Every plan I resisted, you were right about. The biggest one, the one where I said I was not the marrying type, you did not even argue. You just waited, completely calm, completely certain, until I worked out you were right about that too.

So here is the only verdict that has ever mattered to me. Everyone, on your feet, glasses up. To Aisha, the finest advocate I have ever come up against, who beat me fair and square and let me keep the house.

To my wife.