Maid of Honor Speech Examples for Your Best Friend: 3 Balanced Speeches

Eleven years ago I answered an advert for a spare room. The advert said, quiet professional wanted, must like dogs. I had no dog and I am not remotely quiet, so I lied on both counts, and that is how I met Sophie.

I'm Imogen. I fix old furniture for a living now, I sand things back and bring them up nice, and the entire trade started in that flat because of one wardrobe. Sophie had bought a flat-pack wardrobe to celebrate having a spare room again. She laid all the panels out on the lounge floor, lost the instructions inside the first ten minutes, and then made a decision I have watched her make a hundred times since. She decided she didn't need them.

We built that wardrobe by feel over an entire Sunday. There was a bag of little wooden dowels left over at the end that neither of us could account for. The doors did not meet in the middle. There was a gap you could post a letter through. And Sophie stood back, looked at this leaning catastrophe of a wardrobe, and said it had character. Then she hung her coats in it and used it, gap and all, for four years, until it finally bowed in the middle and I had to take a screwdriver to it before it fell on the dog.

That is the thing about Sophie that the wardrobe gave away early. She backs herself completely, on no evidence whatsoever, and then she is too loyal to admit a mistake even to a piece of furniture. I find it the most aggravating and the most wonderful thing about her, usually in the same afternoon.

Here's the part I came up here to say. Four years ago I lost my job and my nerve in the same week, and I went very quiet, which for me is the warning sign. Sophie didn't ask me what was wrong, because she already knew I'd lie. She just started leaving the good biscuits on my side of the kitchen and booking us cheap day trips I couldn't get out of. She drove me to a furniture auction one Saturday purely to cheer me up, and I came home with a broken chair and a reason to get up the next morning. She built me back the way we built that wardrobe. By feel, with no instructions, refusing to admit it might not work.

Then Daniel turned up, and I want you to know I vetted him hard, because somebody had to. The thing that won me over was small. He never tries to fix Sophie's chaos. He just quietly stands where the falling shelf is going to land. I watched him at their flat reach out and catch a stack of her books sliding off the counter, mid-sentence, without even looking, and carry right on with what he was saying. He has clearly been doing it a while. He's good at it.

Sophie, you took a chance on a stranger who lied about owning a dog, and you turned her into family. I have watched you back yourself into corners and back yourself right out of them again for eleven years, and I would not change a single dowel.

Daniel, you're marrying a woman who will never once read the instructions and will be right far more often than that should allow. Stand where the shelves fall. You already know how.

Everyone, on your feet, glasses up. To Sophie and Daniel. May you build the whole thing by feel, may it lean in all the right places, and may there always be a spare wooden dowel that neither of you can explain.

I study the ocean for a living, so I spend a lot of my time watching things that cannot be controlled and learning to be calm about it. Excellent training, as it turns out, for being Hannah's best friend.

I'm Renata. Hannah and I got assigned as lab partners freshman year, by a computer, against both our wishes. Our very first assignment was to keep a tank of six small fish alive for one semester. A simple task. A pass-fail, do-not-overthink-this task. Hannah named all six fish within the hour. Not number one through six like a normal person. She gave them full names, backstories, and what she insisted were distinct personalities, and she decided that the smallest one, who she called Gerald, had low self-esteem and needed extra attention.

We were, I want to be clear, the only pair in that class who got emotionally attached to the control group. When one of the fish died around week nine, which is statistically just what happens, Hannah held a funeral. An actual funeral, at the campus fountain, at night, and she made me say a few words. I gave a eulogy for a fish named Bartholomew because my lab partner was crying and I could not, even then, leave her standing there alone. We passed the assignment. Gerald, against the odds and entirely because of her, outlived every other fish in the room.

That is Hannah in one tank. She refuses to treat any living thing as a number. It made her a nightmare lab partner and it has made her the best friend a person could be handed by a malfunctioning piece of software.

Here is what I actually want to tell you. Two years ago I was hospitalised, suddenly, three hundred miles from home, and I woke up after surgery with no idea who would even know I was there. Hannah was asleep in the chair next to the bed. She had driven through the night the moment my mother called her. She stayed six days. She named the IV pole. By the time I was discharged the entire nursing staff knew her by name and the woman in the next bed had been adopted into Hannah's life permanently and they still text. She would not let me be a number on a chart any more than she would let Gerald be one. She does not have an off switch for it, and thank God.

Which brings me to Marcus. Hannah feels everything at full volume, the funerals and the fierce love and all of it, and Marcus is the first person I've watched who doesn't try to turn that volume down. He just turns himself up to match her. At a dinner last spring she got tearful about a documentary, a documentary, and instead of teasing her, he quietly got tearful too, and then they both laughed at themselves, and I thought, there it is. He found the one frequency she lives on and he moved in.

Hannah, you have never once let me feel like a statistic, not in twelve years, not on my worst day in that hospital bed. You name everything you love, and being named by you is the safest a person can feel.

Marcus, you're getting a woman who will hold a funeral for a goldfish and mean every word of it. Never make her smaller. You clearly have no intention of trying.

Everyone, please stand and raise your glasses. To Hannah and Marcus. May you love everything at full volume, may you always feel things at exactly the same time, and may every Gerald you meet outlive the odds.

G'day, I'm Tabitha. I keep bees for a living, thousands of them, and I want to start by saying that nothing those bees have ever done to me compares to the trouble I have got into following Georgia around since we were nineteen.

We met working a summer fruit harvest down south. Long days, terrible pay, and Georgia in the next row over, who within about an hour had decided the two of us were going to be friends whether I'd agreed to it or not. By the end of the first week she'd organised the whole crew into a roster for shared cooking, started a swear jar, and learned the name of every single person's dog back home. I'd never met anyone who arrived somewhere and immediately ran it. I have spent fifteen years being gently run by Georgia and I have loved nearly every minute.

The story I have to tell is about the day she decided we should have honey. We were camping near a property that kept a few hives, and Georgia, who fears nothing and researches less, declared we'd just go and ask the farmer for a jar. We could not find the farmer. We could find the hives. Georgia got it into her head that she could simply lift a frame, borrow a bit of honey, and we'd leave money under a rock like honourable people. I told her this was a terrible plan. I, the person who would later keep bees professionally, was overruled by Georgia, who had read half a blog post.

We got chased across two paddocks by a very motivated swarm. We left the money under the rock at a full sprint. Georgia got stung four times and laughed the entire way, and somewhere in the middle of that, watching her flat-out run through a field cackling with a stolen jar she'd dropped anyway, I thought, I am never going to have a boring life as long as I know this woman. I was right. I also became a beekeeper, partly out of spite, so I'd always be the expert next time.

Underneath all the nerve, here's the truth of her. Georgia walks straight at things the rest of us walk around, and most of the time the thing she's walking at is somebody who needs help. When my marriage ended she was on my doorstep with her car still running, no plan, no clever words, just her, ready to walk straight into the mess with me. She stayed three weeks. She organised my whole kitchen and half my life and she never once told me it would be fine, she just refused to let me be alone in it.

Then Liam came along, and Liam is calm in a way I have personally never managed around Georgia. He doesn't try to slow her down. He just packs the first aid kit and goes along, grinning, ready for the swarm. At their place he keeps a drawer of plasters by the door, and when I clocked it he just shrugged and said, with Georgia you learn. Reader, you do.

Georgia, you grabbed me out of a fruit row at nineteen and my life has been louder and braver and better ever since. Liam, you're getting the bravest woman in any paddock. Keep the plasters stocked.

Everyone, charge your glasses and get on your feet. To Georgia and Liam. May you always run at the thing, and may there always be someone beside you who packed the kit.