Funny Maid of Honor Speech for a Best Friend: 3 Full Examples

Evening, everyone. I'm Nadia, the maid of honour. Yasmin and I have been best friends for eleven years, and in that time she has sent me four thousand voice notes. I have kept all of them. I am a librarian. This is both my job and, apparently, my entire personality.

I want to be clear about what these voice notes are. They are not messages. A message has a point. Yasmin's voice notes are weather. They arrive in a long warm front, usually around midnight, usually nine minutes each, and they begin in the middle of a thought I have not been told the start of. A typical one opens with so anyway I was wrong about the cheese. No greeting. No cheese had been previously discussed. I have learned to just open the window and let them in.

Some of you are wondering why a sane adult keeps eleven years of this. Honestly, so was I, until I started noticing the pattern in them. Because I do file them. I have folders. There is a folder called Crisis, which is mostly not crises. There is one called She's Met Someone, which has had a lot of false starts over the years and one entry that finally stuck. And there is one I labelled, years ago, in a moment of weakness, called The Good Ones.

The Good Ones is the folder I want to tell you about. It is where I keep the voice notes that came in when something had actually happened. The night I did not get the job I wanted, Yasmin sent me a forty second one that I have never deleted and never will. She did not tell me it would be fine. She said, right, that job was a coward and it did not deserve you, and I have already decided we are getting chips about it. Then she turned up at my flat with the chips. She had recorded the voice note from outside my front door. She just likes the format better.

That is the thing about Yasmin that the chaos hides. She is the most reliable person I have ever met, she is just unreliable about admitting it. She will send you nine minutes about cheese and then quietly notice that your voice was off in the one sentence you let slip, and she will be at your door before you have worked out what is wrong yourself.

Which brings me to Sam. I knew about Sam before I met Sam, obviously, because I am the archive. And I noticed something in the voice notes that I had not heard in eleven years. They got shorter. A woman who has never once finished a thought in under nine minutes started sending me thirty second notes that said things like, he listens to all of it, Nadia. He listens to the whole voice note. I had to sit down. I have been her emergency overflow since I was twenty-three. Sam, you have absorbed the cheese updates. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Sam, here is what you have actually signed up for. You are now the primary recipient. The folders are yours. She will narrate her entire inner life to you in instalments, out of order, beginning in the middle, and most of it will be about nothing. Save the ones that aren't. Trust me. You will want them later.

Yasmin. Eleven years of you talking and me filing, and I would not give back a single minute of it, including the cheese. You are the warmest voice in my whole archive. I love you. Go be somebody else's weather now.

Everyone, please raise your glasses. To Yasmin and Sam. May he never run out of storage.

Hi everyone. I'm Cassie, and I've been Brooke's best friend since we were twenty-two, which means I'm one of the few people in this room who has eaten her cooking and lived to stand up here.

I need to take you back to the dinner party. There is only one. Brooke knows the one.

We were broke and twenty-two and Brooke decided, for reasons that have never been fully explained, that what our friend group needed was a formal dinner party. Eight people. Three courses. Place cards. She had a printed menu. What she did not have, at any point in the evening, was the recipe open in front of her. Brooke does not read recipes. Brooke reads the title of a recipe, decides she gets the gist, and proceeds on confidence alone.

The starter was supposed to be a soup. It arrived as two different soups, because she made it twice and refused to choose between them, so we each got a small bowl of each and were told to compare. The main course was a chicken that went into the oven at a temperature Brooke described as roughly hot. At nine o'clock she opened the oven, looked at it, closed the oven, and said the words I will remember on my deathbed. She said, it's fine, it's resting. It was not resting. Nothing in that bird was resting. We ordered pizza at eleven and ate it off her nice plates so the evening would still feel fancy.

For years I thought that night was just a funny disaster. Then I got older and figured out what I'd actually watched. Because here is what else happened that night. One of the eight was a guy none of us knew well, a friend of a friend, who had just moved to the city and didn't know a soul. Brooke had found out he'd be alone that weekend and invented an entire dinner party so he'd have somewhere to be. The chicken was a catastrophe. The reason for the chicken was the kindest thing I'd ever seen.

That's the whole of Brooke, right there. She will commit fully to something she has not remotely prepared for, and she will do it because she noticed somebody needed it. She does not read the instructions because she is too busy reading the room.

So when Brooke met Daniel, I paid attention to one thing. I wanted to see how he handled the chicken energy. And on their third or fourth date she decided to cook for him, God help him, and apparently she set a small but real fire doing it, and Daniel did not laugh and did not take over. He just calmly dealt with it, and then he asked what was for dessert. She called me that night and said, Cassie, he wasn't scared of the fire. Reader, I knew right then.

Daniel, I'm not going to lie to you in front of all these people. You're marrying a woman who thinks oven temperatures are a vibe. There will be more fires, literal and otherwise. But you already know the secret, which is that every disaster she causes has somebody she's quietly taking care of at the centre of it. Stand near her when it's burning. That's the whole job.

Brooke, you fed me badly and loved me well for thirteen years, and I would eat that raw chicken again tonight to do it all over. You are the best thing that has ever come out of a kitchen, technically by leaving it.

Everyone, please raise your glasses. To Brooke and Daniel. May the smoke alarm be the only thing that ever screams in that house.

Kia ora, everyone. I'm Leah. Tessa and I have been best friends for twelve years, and in that time we have been profoundly, confidently lost on three separate continents. I'm the maid of honour mostly on the strength of having survived all of it.

The first time was a bus. We were nineteen and backpacking, and Tessa was holding the map, which was our first mistake, and she announced with total certainty that our hostel was a short ride away on the number 12. We got on the number 12. The number 12 was going to the airport. We watched the entire city slide backwards out the window, and when I started to panic, Tessa looked at me, completely calm, and said, well, now we get to see the airport. We did not need to see the airport. We saw it for two hours.

This has happened our whole friendship. There was the train in a country where neither of us spoke the language, which we boarded going the wrong direction and only realised when the sea appeared on the wrong side. There was a ferry I am still not entirely sure we were ticketed for. Every single time, the same thing. I spiral, and Tessa decides that wherever we have ended up is actually where we meant to go. She does not get lost. She gets re-routed by the universe, and she trusts the universe completely, and the universe, infuriatingly, keeps coming through for her.

It took me years to understand that this is not really about directions. Tessa genuinely believes that a wrong turn is just a part of the trip you didn't know was coming. And once I clocked that, I started seeing it everywhere, not just on public transport.

When my mum got sick, six years ago now, I fell apart in a way I had never planned for. I had no map for it. And Tessa flew across the Tasman with a day's notice, sat with me in a hospital corridor at three in the morning, and did not once tell me it would be okay, because she didn't know that, and she has never lied to me. She just held my hand and said, we don't know where this goes, but I'm on it with you. She treated the worst week of my life the way she treats a wrong bus. She got on it next to me and stayed in her seat.

Then Tessa met Will, on a delayed flight, which I want you to sit with for a moment. The most directionally cursed woman alive met the love of her life because a plane went to the wrong place at the wrong time. He was in the next seat. They were stuck on a runway for three hours. She rang me afterwards and said, Leah, I think I just got re-routed on purpose. For once, she was right about the directions.

Will, here is the deal. She will get you lost. Cancel any plan you are attached to. But you will end up places you never would have found on your own, and she will never once let go of your hand while you're getting there. That is the best travel insurance there is.

Tessa. Twelve years, three continents, zero correct buses. There is nobody I would rather be lost with, anywhere on this earth. I love you. Lead on.

Everyone, raise your glasses. To Tessa and Will. May every wrong turn take them somewhere worth it.