Maid of honor speech examples

Hello everyone. I’m Priya, and I’ve been Hannah’s best friend since we were nineteen and shared a kitchen with four other people and one functioning ring on the hob.

Hannah, you look unbelievable. I want that on record, because in about ten years you’ll be looking at these photos telling everyone your hair didn’t do what you wanted, and I need a witness statement.

Here is the thing everyone should know about Hannah. She is the person who turns up. When my dad was ill she drove four hours on a Tuesday, sat in a hospital car park with me for an hour and a half, and drove home. She had work the next morning. She never mentioned it again, and she would be annoyed that I’m mentioning it now.

That’s who she is. She is not the loudest person in the room. She is the one still there at the end of it.

When she told me about Daniel, I did my due diligence, which is to say I was unbearable about it for six months. And then I watched him listen to her. Properly listen — the way you do when what someone is saying matters more than what you were about to say. That was it. That was the whole test, and he passed it without knowing he was taking it.

Daniel, she is the best person I know. You clearly already understand that, which is the only reason I’m allowing this.

Everyone, please raise a glass — to Hannah and Daniel.

Hi. I’m Ellie, I’m Sophie’s maid of honour, and I’m going to be brief, because Sophie knows exactly how I feel about her and the rest of you came for the food.

Sophie is the kindest person I have ever met, and she is kind in the way that actually counts — quietly, without needing anyone to notice, usually at some cost to herself.

Tom, you have married someone who will always, always be on your side. Be worth it.

To Sophie and Tom.

Good evening. I’m Nadia, I’m the maid of honour, and I have been Rachel’s friend for eleven years, which under most legal systems entitles me to say whatever I like for the next four minutes.

Rachel is a woman of strong opinions. She has strong opinions about coriander, about the correct way to load a dishwasher, and about a man she once saw on a train in 2016 whose crimes I’m still not clear on. She has never once been talked out of any of them.

She is also spectacularly, catastrophically bad at directions. We have missed two flights. I have watched this woman confidently lead a group of six people the wrong way down a road she has lived on.

So when she rang me to say she’d met someone and she thought this was it, my honest first reaction was: are you sure? Have you checked? Do you want me to check?

And then I met Alex. And Alex, within about twenty minutes, said something gently sarcastic to her that she absolutely deserved, and she laughed. Properly laughed. And I thought — oh. There it is. She’s met someone who isn’t frightened of her. Thank God.

Rachel, you are the funniest, fiercest, most loyal person I know, and I have never been more sure about anything you’ve done.

Please, everyone, be upstanding — to Rachel and Alex.

I’m Grace, and Amelia has been my closest friend for sixteen years.

I’m not going to tell you an embarrassing story, because I don’t think that’s what today needs, and because the thing I want to say about Amelia isn’t funny.

Amelia has had a harder few years than most of you know. She has handled them with a grace that I genuinely do not think I would have managed, and she did most of it without asking anyone for anything. There were months I only knew how bad it was because I’d known her long enough to hear it in her voice.

What I want to say is this: she never got bitter. Not once. She came out the other side softer, not harder, and I think that is the rarest thing a person can do.

Josh, you did not meet her at her easiest. You met her in the middle of it, and you stayed, and you made her laugh on days I couldn’t. I will never forget that.

Amelia, you deserve every good thing that happens from here. Watching you happy is the best thing that’s happened to me this year.

To Amelia and Josh.

Evening. I’m Bea. I met Charlotte four years ago, at work, in a meeting so boring that we bonded entirely through eye contact.

I mention that because I know some of you have known Charlotte since she was five, and I can’t compete on material. I have no stories about her at school. What I have instead is this: I know exactly who she chose to be as an adult, because I met her after she’d decided.

And who she decided to be is someone who is fiercely competent and absolutely refuses to be unkind about it. In four years I have never heard her take a cheap shot at anyone. Not once, and believe me, our workplace has provided opportunities.

When she started talking about Michael, she talked about him the way she talks about a project she believes in — carefully, and with her whole face involved. That was how I knew.

Michael, you have married the most quietly impressive person I know. I suspect you already know that.

To Charlotte and Michael.

Hello. I’m Farrah, I’m Yasmin’s cousin, and I’ve been her maid of honour in spirit since roughly 1998, when we decided at a family wedding that we would do this for each other and then shook on it with sticky hands.

Growing up we saw each other at everything — every Eid, every birthday, every funeral. That’s a particular kind of closeness. You don’t choose your cousin, and then one day you realise you’d have chosen her anyway.

Yasmin is the one who holds this family together. She remembers everyone’s news. She rings our grandmother every Sunday and has done for nine years. When anything goes wrong, she is the first phone call and she has never once made anyone feel like a burden.

Omar, you have married into a large, loud, extremely opinionated family, and you have done it with remarkable calm. We like you. That is not nothing round here.

Yasmin, I’m so proud of you it’s embarrassing. Everyone, please raise your glasses — to Yasmin and Omar.

Maid of honour: Good evening. I’m Zoe, and this is Lucy and Anna. Between the three of us we have known Isla for forty-one years, so we’ve divided this up. I get the childhood, Lucy gets university, and Anna gets to explain Ben.

Maid of honour: I met Isla when we were seven. She was already in charge. She organised the games, she assigned the roles, and she once made me be the horse for an entire summer. Some things do not change, as Ben will discover.

Lucy: Thanks, Zoe. I met Isla at eighteen, when she knocked on my door to tell me my music was too loud, and then stayed for three hours. That is the most Isla thing that has ever happened. She came to complain and left having made a friend for life.

Lucy: She looked after all of us in those years. She is the reason four of us graduated. Anna — Ben.

Anna: Ben. We were suspicious. We were, I think, unreasonably suspicious, and Ben, you took it extremely well.

Anna: But here is what won us over. Isla has spent her whole life looking after other people, and Ben is the first person we’ve seen look after her. That’s all we ever wanted for her.

All three: To Isla and Ben.

Hi, I’m Kate, Laura’s maid of honour. I’m going to be honest with you: I don’t know James very well. They met eighteen months ago, and I live three hundred miles away, and I’ve had four dinners and one very strange game of croquet to form an opinion.

So I can’t stand here and tell you about James. What I can tell you about is Laura, and what has happened to Laura in the last eighteen months.

She has got braver. That’s the change. This is a woman who spent years talking herself out of things, and this year she left a job she’d outgrown, booked a trip she’d been putting off since 2019, and told her mother something true that she’d been avoiding for a decade.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think that’s what happens when someone makes you feel safe enough to be brave.

James, on that evidence alone, you’ll do. Welcome to it.

To Laura and James.