Maid of Honor Speech for a Cousin: 3 Full Examples with a Balanced Tone

Hi everyone. I'm Abby, Erin's cousin. We were born eleven days apart, and she has never let me forget that she walked first.

Erin and I grew up four hours from each other, but every July the whole family landed at our grandparents' cottage on Higgins Lake, and for one month a year we were a tribe. Eight cousins and one bathroom. You learn things about people.

The summer Erin turned nine, she invented the Cousin Olympics. If you want to understand the bride, that is all you need. The rest of us wanted to swim. Erin wanted a sanctioned competition with a governing body. The scores lived in a notebook under her pillow, and every ruling in that notebook was final, because the judging panel was Erin.

I'd love to tell this room the games were fair. In 2003 I threw the greatest cannonball of my childhood. Gran felt the spray on the porch. The notebook shows an asterisk next to my name in green gel pen, and the note beside it says, wind assisted. A cannonball. Wind assisted.

I appealed that ruling for eleven straight summers. The committee was unmoved.

But here is the entry I think about now. The summer I was fourteen, my parents were coming apart, and I didn't want to talk about it, so nobody at the lake made me. Instead, my usual two weeks at the cottage quietly became the whole summer. I assumed the adults had sorted it out. Years later Gran told me what actually happened. Erin had called her in May and argued the case like a small lawyer, so I would never have to ask. A schedule arrived for me in the mail with my best events highlighted in yellow. That was the whole invitation, and it is still the best one I've ever received.

She has not changed. She will disqualify your cannonball with a straight face, and she will rebuild a summer behind your back so you have somewhere to land.

Then one July Erin brought Cole. We entered him in everything, and he was atrocious. Dead last in the seed spitting. Sank during the kayak slalom. Fell off the dock post so fast that two aunts stood up. And the next morning he was out there at seven, practicing, while Erin watched from the window with her coffee and the expression of a woman whose entire belief system had just been confirmed.

He never got good, for the record. He comes back every July and he prepares like it's the Masters. Still atrocious. Erin needed somebody who takes the joke as seriously as she does, and there he was, dripping in flannel pajamas at seven in the morning. He once read the notebook cover to cover, and his only comment was that her record keeping was beautiful.

Cole, you understood her from the dock post, and you've made my cousin lighter every summer since. Just know that somewhere in that notebook, there is already a page with your name on it.

Erin. You ran our childhood like a federation, and I wouldn't trade a single July of it. You kept every score we ever had, and somehow I always came out ahead.

Everyone, please raise your glasses. To Erin and Cole. Gold for both, and this time, no asterisk.

Good evening. I'm Rhian, Catrin's cousin. We were born seven weeks apart and raised three doors apart, on a street in Cardiff where four of the houses belonged to our family. Think about what that means. Some children are raised by a village. We were surveilled by one.

Other families have gossip. Ours has a wire service. When I lost a tooth at school, my mother knew before the bus dropped me home. The aunties on that street could tell you who was courting, who had bought a car they couldn't afford, and whose hydrangeas were struggling, all by nine in the morning.

To survive a street like that, you need an alibi partner. Mine was Catrin. The complication is that my cousin is the worst liar in Wales. When she was ten, she broke Auntie Gwen's garden gnome with a tennis ball, and before a single witness had come forward, she walked into the kitchen and confessed to the full panel of aunties, holding the pieces in a sandwich bag. She'd also written a card.

So we divided the work. I handled cover stories. Catrin handled looking trustworthy, which she remains irritatingly good at. Between the two of us, we made one fully operational teenager.

Here's what I actually came up here to say. Years later, I failed my pharmacy registration exam on the first try, and I was so ashamed that I told exactly one person. I told the worst liar in Wales, on a street with a wire service, and that secret stayed sealed for a year. The woman who once confessed to a gnome carried mine like state business. She drove me to the resit herself and sat in the car park for three hours with a bag of Maltesers. She never asked how it went until I was ready to tell her. It turns out Catrin can keep a secret after all. It just has to be somebody else's.

Then came Owen. You've all seen how my cousin hides nothing, so I knew about him roughly forty minutes after their first date, when she rang me from the bus talking at a frequency only dogs and cousins can hear. But here's how I knew it was serious. She never asked me for a cover story. Twenty years as this woman's head of information security, and for Owen, she wanted the street to know.

The aunties convened, obviously. Owen's first Sunday dinner had a panel format. He arrived with a lemon drizzle cake for Auntie Gwen and asked Uncle Emlyn about his allotment. By pudding, the wire service had flipped. They report to him now. Three separate aunties have told me he is, quote, a keeper. That source has never been wrong.

Owen, you should know what you're marrying into. There's no privacy on that street, but there's no such thing as a bad week faced alone on it either. The same people who know your business will paint your fence and fill your fridge before you've worked out how to ask. I'd take that trade every time.

Catrin. You're the most honest person I've ever known, and the only secret you ever managed to keep was mine. Three doors turned out to be the luckiest distance of my life.

Everyone, please stand and raise your glasses. To Catrin and Owen. The street approves.

Hello, everyone. I'm Holly, Bec's cousin from Melbourne. Bec grew up in Perth, three thousand four hundred kilometres away, and that arithmetic should have made us polite strangers who met at funerals. Instead she's up there in white and I've been crying since the ceremony.

Growing up, I saw Bec twice a year. Christmas at Nan's in Perth, and whatever the family calendar supplied in winter. That should have been the whole relationship. But in 2006, two eleven year olds started an email thread about whether Nan's trifle had been better the year before, and that thread has now run for nineteen years without a break. The subject line has never changed. It says, the rankings.

Every Boxing Day at six in the morning, Perth time, Bec issues the official family Christmas rankings. Categories include the trifle, the quality of the uncle argument, and the backyard cricket. The scoring is merciless. Christmas 2014 lost two full points because my dad bought a fake tree, then lost another on appeal, for his attitude. There is an appeals process. Nobody has ever won one. The greatest Christmas on record is still 2011, and if you want to know why, ask anyone in this family about the seagull, and clear your afternoon first.

In 2017 I missed Christmas for the first time in my life. New job, no leave. I spent it alone in a flat with no furniture. The email still arrived at six on Boxing Day. Worst Christmas on record, it said. Reason, attendance. Three weeks later Bec was at my door. She'd flown four hours with one carry-on bag, and inside it, packed in ice like a transplant organ, was a tub of Nan's trifle. She didn't ask why I hadn't called. She just unpacked it and asked where I kept my spoons, and we were eleven again. We ate it sitting on the floor, because I didn't own chairs. She stayed five days and helped me build the life I'd been pretending was already there.

Then Nick started appearing in the rankings. I knew about this man the way historians know about ancient weather, from the records. It began in 2019. Nan's side gate, fixed without being asked, plus one point. Within two years he had his own column. I hadn't even met him, and I already knew the thing that matters, which is that he shows up in the margins of other people's days and never mentions it afterwards.

When I finally met Nick last Christmas, he asked me two questions. Whether I thought the trifle had declined since 2011, and what really happened with the seagull. He'd done the reading. All nineteen years of it. I emailed Bec that night from the next room, on the thread. No objections to file. She replied in four seconds with a screenshot of his column.

Bec. Nineteen years on one thread, and you never once let it drop. When I had nothing to report, you wrote anyway. When I couldn't come to Christmas, Christmas got on a plane. You're the longest correspondence of my life and easily the best of it.

Nick, you married the chair of the committee. Get your predictions in early and keep fixing gates. The column will take care of itself.

Everyone, please charge your glasses and be upstanding. To Bec and Nick. Ten out of ten.