Maid of Honor Wedding Speeches - Free for You to Use

Maid of Honor Sample Wedding Speech:  Sample One:

When _____ asked me to be her maid of honor, my response was immediate and shrill with excited nervousness: “I would love to be your maid of honor but you know I hate speaking in public!”  But here I am, here you all are, and there are the newlyweds smiling at each other like this day is theirs alone.  Ladies and gentlemen, take out your Blackberries, whip out your Palm Pilots, and pull out those laptops from under the tables where I know you have stashed them.  Into your organizers, on this date, enter these two names: _____ and ____.  This is their day, and it is our responsibility to remember it, to keep this day their special day, just like the old-fashioned vow says, “as long as they both shall live.”

“Let me not,” wrote Shakespeare over 300 years ago, “to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.”  Me neither.  I may not say it as eloquently as Old Will, but my feelings are every bit as certain.  What _____ and _____ have is so totally cool, so precious, that I would throw a convincing body block at anyone who dared try to interfere with its natural course, even though I have never thrown a body block in my life; am not really sure what one is.   But it’s obvious.  These two belong together.   There was a significant period in my life when I was totally cynical about love and downright fatalistic about marriage.  But being around these two has healed me and restored my faith.  If you’ve spent much time around them, you can’t help but know what I mean.  They treat each other well.  They even listen to each other!  And as theologian Paul Tillich knew, “The first duty of love is to listen.” 

You may think it is a no-brainer being the maid of honor in a wedding, that all you have to do is tolerate the gown reasonably well and not drop the bride’s bouquet on the floor when rings are being exchanged.  Ha!  That’s the least of it.   I have been working with this bride intensively to get her ready for her wedding day.  First of all, we have been shopping together for MONTHS, on-line and in-person.  Secondly, we have been having panic attacks, which involve exhausting and repetitive bouts of hysterical sobbing and laughing.  As a matter of fact, it was not so long ago the two of us, with several able assistants, successfully concluded our last panic, and it was veritably quintessential.   And here we are: wedding day.   The gowns, contrary to popular tradition, are beautiful, and I did not drop her bridal bouquet.  But now the really significant work of being a bridesmaid begins, which is ironically exactly the same as the real work of being a sister or friend or any family member that is, supporting this marriage, which is a good marriage, a true union of hearts and souls and minds.  We are here today to celebrate; henceforth, we help uphold and support and invigorate.  It will be my great pleasure to do this, as I’m sure it will be all of yours, too.

So, this is our day to celebrate, all of us.  To celebrate ____ and ____ and the strands of friendship and family that connect us to them.  I want to thank, first of all, _____, for letting me serve as maid of honor.  I want to thank everyone who worked so hard and well to organize this great day, a day of meaning as well as frivolity, of laughter as well as tears, of solemnity and huge, happy hunks of joyfulness.  Both sets of parents were essential to this culminating day, and let me tell you, if all in-laws cooperated as well as these, stand-up comics would lose a lot of material!  To the rest of my maids in (color of gowns), what a blast it has been preparing for all this with you guys, the parties and the shopping.  Not since the days of slumber parties have I had so much fun with “the girls.” 

______ and ______, this day has been the best.  I’m so glad I could share in your promises and your happiness today.  When you come back from your honeymoon, I’ll be waiting.  We’ll all be waiting, actually.  This day is the start of a new volume in your lives, but you’ll be happy, we hope, to hear that none of the supporting characters are leaving; we are, in fact, all still here, cheering for you and sharing the great adventure of life still before us.  The great adventure?  The poet Nikki Giovanni said it so well that I think I will let her have the last word here: “We love because it’s the only true adventure.”  To your great adventure.