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

Hi everyone. I'm Marisol, and I have been Lena's best friend since a Tuesday in the rain when we were sixteen. We were both at the same bus stop, both soaked, both pretending the other one wasn't there. Then her umbrella turned inside out, and she looked at the sky like it had insulted her family. I started laughing. She got under my umbrella without asking. Nineteen years later she still doesn't ask, and I still hold the umbrella.

I want to tell you about a key. Three years after that bus stop, Lena cut me a key to her place and pressed it into my hand like it was nothing. She said, in case. Just that. In case. I have had that key on my ring through four apartments and two cities. It's gone soft at the edges now, worn down from riding around in my pocket for half my life. I've let myself into her kitchen at two in the morning. I've fed her cat during a breakup she couldn't get out of bed for. The key was never really about the door. It was Lena saying, you don't have to knock with me, ever, and she has meant it every single day since.

Here is what you need to understand about her. The autumn my mom got her diagnosis, I drove home a wreck and told nobody, because telling people makes it real. Lena didn't get a phone call. She got a feeling. She showed up at my mom's house that weekend with a casserole and a deck of cards, sat down at the kitchen table, and just stayed. She came back every weekend for the next four months. She learned my mom's medication schedule before I did. My mom, who is here tonight and doing wonderfully, still calls Lena her second daughter, and frankly the favorite one.

So when Lena met Theo, I was protective in a way I'm not proud of. I had spent so long being the person who turned up for her that I'd half forgotten anyone else was allowed to. Lena is hopeless at being looked after. She'll drive across the state for you and then apologize for borrowing your phone charger.

Then last spring she got the flu so badly she lost her voice for a week, and I went over to do my usual shift, and I wasn't needed. Theo had already moved the kettle and the tissues and the remote within arm's reach of the couch. He'd written her a little note because she couldn't talk, just one line, telling her to stop trying to be useful. He had cut himself a key, too. I saw it on the hook by the door, shiny, new, no wear on it yet. Give it nineteen years. I stood in that hallway and felt something unclench that had been tight since I was sixteen.

Lena, you got under my umbrella without asking, and you have been the best thing in every storm since. You taught me that showing up is the whole of love, and you never once made it sound like a lesson. I am so happy you married a man who already knew it.

Theo, here is everything I have learned in nineteen years of best friend duty. She will say she's fine. She will be lying. Go anyway.

Everyone, please raise your glasses. To Lena and Theo. May you never need the spare key, and may you always be glad it's there.

Fourteen years ago I sat down at the only free table in a hospital cafeteria in Leeds and cried into a tray of very bad lasagne. I'm Gemma. The woman already at that table was Aoife, and she did the single kindest thing a stranger has ever done for me. She didn't ask what was wrong. She just slid her chips across to my side and said, here, these are better than crying.

We were both twenty-two, both visiting people we loved on the same ward, both there far too often. That cafeteria became ours. We had a table, table four, by the window with the broken blind. For eight weeks we met there nearly every day, two girls keeping watch over two hospital beds, and somewhere in the bad coffee and the worse lasagne, Aoife became the person I could not do hard things without. Both of our people came home, in the end. We kept the table anyway. We still go back on the anniversary and order the chips, for old times, and because Aoife maintains they really are better than crying.

What I want you to know about Aoife is that she runs toward the difficult thing. Most people, and I say this as someone who sits with the dying for a living, most people back away from pain that isn't theirs. Aoife has never once flinched from mine. When my marriage ended six years ago, I rang her at four in the morning, the hour when everything is worst, and she did not say a single useful thing. She just stayed on the line and breathed with me until the sky went grey. Three hours, mostly silence. I have it in my phone still, the call log, three hours and eleven minutes. I will never delete it. That night taught me what she is made of.

So when she fell for Daniel, I watched him like a hawk, because I know exactly what she's worth and I have buried the receipts. But here is the thing I clocked. Aoife is brilliant at sitting with everyone else's hard days and useless at admitting she has her own. She'll carry the whole room and call it nothing.

Then her dad was taken into hospital last year, and I drove up to be the friend at the cafeteria table, the way we do. I wasn't needed in the way I expected. Daniel was already there. He'd found table four without being told. He had two coffees and a folded blanket over the back of her chair, and he was letting her be frightened without trying to fix it. He had learned the one thing it took me a hospital ward to learn. You don't talk someone out of fear. You sit in it with them. I went and cried in the corridor, happily, for once.

Aoife, you gave a sobbing stranger your chips, and you have been giving me the best of everything ever since. You taught me that love is mostly just refusing to leave. I am so glad you found a man who refuses to leave you.

Daniel, fourteen years of friendship taught me one rule worth handing over. When she insists she's coping, pull up a chair anyway.

Everyone, please be upstanding and charge your glasses. To Aoife and Daniel. May your table always be by the window, and may the chips always be better than crying.

I'm Della, from three doors down. I'm fifty-eight, and I know I'm not the maid of honour anyone pictures. The hen do had a quiz and was finished by ten. It was the best night out I've had in years.

Priscilla moved onto our street nine years ago, and we met because she dropped a casserole dish on the footpath outside my gate, the whole thing, glass and dinner everywhere. Most people would have been mortified. She sat down on the kerb next to the wreckage and laughed until she had to wipe her eyes. I came out to see what the noise was, and instead of a neighbour I found a friend, sitting in a puddle of someone's reheated lasagne, delighted with the disaster. I delivered post for thirty-one years. I have knocked on every door in this town. I had never once been welcomed by a catastrophe before.

That's the thing about Priscilla. She finds the funny side of the worst moment in the room, and then she hands it to you so you can hold it too. After the casserole came the Sunday teas. Every week, my kitchen or hers, no occasion needed. Nine years of them. I have counted four hundred and something. You will gather tonight that a postwoman counts everything she carries.

I should tell you why those teas mattered more than she knows. My Gordon passed two years before Priscilla moved in. By the time she arrived I had got very good at being fine. I had a line ready for everyone. Managing, thanks, keeping busy. Priscilla is the only soul on that street who never asked if I was managing, which made her the only one I never had to lie to. She just turned up. Bad jokes, strong opinions about my hydrangeas, gossip from a book club I have never attended. And one ordinary Sunday, a year or so in, I caught myself laughing properly, the kind that surprises you, and I realised the question had answered itself when I wasn't looking.

Folk assume I took young Priscilla under my wing. It was entirely the reverse. She'll wave that away, which is one more reason I love her.

Wesley turned up in year four. She brought him to a Sunday tea straight off, because she will not keep the people she loves in separate rooms. I said little and watched a great deal, which is the only way I know to take the measure of a man. Here is what I saw. My letterbox had hung off one hinge since the winter Gordon died. It was one of his jobs, and I had not had the heart. Wesley fixed it on his third visit, no fuss, no announcement, and he has never mentioned it once. That was five years back. The flap still shuts clean. I check it more often than I will own up to. It has not let me down, and nor has he.

When Priscilla asked me to stand up here I told her she had a street full of younger friends to pick from. She said, Della, you're my best mate, don't make it strange. So I won't. I'll only say the true thing.

Priscilla, you dropped your dinner outside my gate at the loneliest stretch of my life, and you had the sense never to clear off. Thank you for that.

Wesley, you're marrying the finest woman I have shared a pot of tea with, and I have shared a great many. Keep mending things quietly. She misses nothing.

Everyone, glasses up, please. To Priscilla and Wesley. May the kettle never go cold.