Funny Maid of Honor Speech for a College Roommate: 3 Full Examples

Hi everyone. I'm Rachel. Twelve years ago the University of Minnesota housing office handed eighteen-year-old me a compatibility survey and promised that science would find me the perfect roommate. Science found Megan.

I've since seen her answers. Megan filled out that survey the way some people fill out tax returns. Creatively.

Question one, are you tidy. Megan wrote, very. I believed her for nine days, which is how long it took her side of the room to develop what our RA described as a texture. My umbrella went missing in there for a month. It was open the whole time.

Question two, are you a morning person. Megan wrote, yes. Megan's relationship with morning was long distance. That September she registered for an 8 a.m. seminar. The professor finally met her in December and assumed she was a transfer student.

Question three, are you quiet. She wrote, very quiet. Megan argues in her sleep. Full arguments, with pauses while the other side talks. One night she apologized to somebody named Brenda. We have never met a Brenda. Eleven years I have waited for answers.

Question four, do you have pets. She wrote, no. Three weeks into the semester I found a hamster living in her sock drawer. His name was Greg. By Thanksgiving I was the one smuggling carrots out of the dining hall for him. I'm a veterinarian now. Greg was my first patient and my first ethics violation.

So the survey was fiction, almost top to bottom. Years later I found her copy in a shoebox, and the last question asked, what do you want in a roommate. Everyone else in that dorm wrote chill, or clean. Megan wrote, somebody to take care of.

It's the only true sentence on the page. Sophomore year a boy I won't name dumped me four days before finals. Megan never said one word about him. She walked me to the library every night that week, made flashcards for classes she had never taken, and on the morning of my last exam she was waiting in the hallway with two spoons and a grocery store cake. I passed everything. The cake is a tradition now.

Which brings me to Eric. When things got serious, I did for Megan what science once did for me. I gave him the questionnaire. The original, smoothed out flat. He sat at their kitchen table and answered every question out loud while Megan begged him to stop. He admitted he is messy in exactly one drawer, and he said mornings depend entirely on the coffee situation. Then he reached the last question, what do you want in a roommate. He looked across the table at her and said, somebody to take care of.

He had no idea what she wrote twelve years ago. I checked twice.

Megan, on paper you are the worst roommate in the history of the housing system. In real life you're the best one I could have been given, and I would fail every compatibility test in the world to land in your room again.

Eric, two things you've earned the right to know. She will tell you she is a morning person. Nod. And check the sock drawers now and then.

Everyone, please stand and raise your glasses. To Megan and Eric. Compatible by every measure that counts, and none that fit on a form.

Hello everyone. I'm Becca. Chloe and I have been best friends for eleven years, and for the first four months of those eleven years we did not speak. We corresponded.

We were thrown together in second year at Sheffield, six girls in a student house with one kitchen, a bin rota nobody respected, and a kettle older than the monarchy. Chloe and I took one look at each other and decided, with the certainty only twenty-year-olds have, that the other one was the problem. Neither of us could face confrontation. So we went to war the polite way. Notes.

It started with the washing up. I left one on the counter that said, hope you're well, just a gentle reminder about the pans. She replied underneath, in noticeably better handwriting, thanks so much, they're soaking. The pans were not soaking. The pans were in the garden. Eleven years on, neither of us can explain the garden.

By November we had a full correspondence going. She signed everything warmest regards, which in Yorkshire is a declaration of war. I escalated to best wishes. Our housemates moved through that kitchen like peacekeepers. One note about the bins went through three drafts. I know that because she numbered them.

I work in human resources now. Conflict resolution, mostly. Chloe finds this very funny.

Then in January the boiler died and the landlord stopped answering his phone. The house got so cold we could see our breath in the lounge. One night there was a knock on my door, and it was Chloe, holding a hot water bottle and the notepad, and she said, truce. I need your handwriting, yours looks like a solicitor's.

We stayed up past two drafting the angriest polite letter in the history of South Yorkshire. The boiler was fixed inside three days. We have been on the same side ever since, mostly against landlords.

Once we were actually speaking, I learned what everyone in this room knows about Chloe. The fierceness on paper exists because she is soft everywhere else. In third year my dad lost his job, and I had quietly decided to drop out rather than ask anyone for help. I never told her. She worked it out anyway, and that same week a rota went up at the cafe where she worked with my name already on it. She had talked her manager round before checking I would even say yes. I finished my degree because of that job. She has never once brought it up. She will be furious that I have.

Four years ago she rang me and opened with, a man has left a note on my windscreen and it might be the most beautiful thing I have ever read. That was Will. He had clipped her wing mirror in a Tesco car park, and the note had his number, his insurance details, a small diagram of the angle, and an apology so thorough it continued on the back. She rang him about the mirror. They talked for two hours. The mirror got fixed that weekend. The note now lives in a frame in their hallway, which I find disgusting and perfect.

He still writes to her. I have read the ones on their fridge, little things like, gone for milk, you're brilliant. Eleven years ago she would have graded it and signed something menacing. From him, she keeps every single one.

Chloe, you were the worst pen pal of my life and you turned out to be the best friend I will ever have. Will, one warning from the previous administration. If she ever signs anything warmest regards, run.

Everyone, please raise your glasses. To Chloe and Will. May everything they put in writing be kind.

Evening, everyone. I'm Tash. Steph and I met fourteen years ago when we moved into a sharehouse in Brunswick that should have been condemned. I can say that freely, because three years after we moved out, it was.

The rent was suspiciously low, and the reasons introduced themselves one at a time. The hot tap in the bathroom was decorative. The front door only opened if you lifted the handle and gave it a hip check, and every guest we ever had needed that lesson twice.

And there was a possum in the roof.

Most people who discover a possum in the roof ring somebody. Steph named him. Reginald. She announced that evicting anyone in winter would be heartless, and she said it in a voice that closed the topic for good. By August she was leaving apple halves on the windowsill. By September Reginald had developed opinions about apples. By exam time he was eating better than I was.

The whole house ran on that same logic. Our couch came off a hard rubbish pile with three legs and a phone book where the fourth should have been, and Steph defended it like an heirloom. Her mum offered to pay for pest control once. Once.

I am allowed to laugh at all of this, because I was one of her strays. I came down from a dairy town smaller than this marquee, and I spent my first month in Melbourne eating instant noodles alone in my room with the door shut. Steph never asked if I was okay. She just set the world's wobbliest table for two, every single night, and waited me out. By Christmas I had a city. Most of it was her.

So I paid close attention six years ago, the night she first brought Nick home for dinner, because that house tested people. He sat on the three-legged couch without being warned and found the safe angle straight away. Then at nine o'clock, when Reginald started up overhead with his nightly impression of a man rearranging furniture, Nick looked at the ceiling and asked, dead serious, what's his name.

That was the whole audition. Passed in under an hour.

They have been doing the same dance ever since. When Steph's nonna got crook last year and Steph went quiet, properly quiet, Nick did not ask her if she was okay either. He drove her to Shepparton every weekend for two months and learned to make minestrone the way nonna likes it, which nonna says nobody else has managed in fifty years. Perfect has never interested Steph. Loved is the whole game, and she finally found somebody who plays it back.

Steph, you found me eating noodles in the dark and decided I was worth feeding. Fourteen years later you are still the first person I ring. You are the best thing that ever happened to me, and I have watched you be the best thing that ever happened to nearly everything you touch.

Nick, she will never tell you when she is the one who needs looking after. You have never once needed telling. Take care of our girl.

Everyone, raise your glasses. To Steph and Nick. May every door in their life open on the second shove.