The MANual: Wedding Speeches

The Groom Speech: 10 Rules

The success of your wedding toast is based on two criteria. As the groom, it’s critical that your toast convey two qualities: humor and heart. First, see our guidelines for the Best Man’s toast for plenty of overarching advice. As the groom, however, you face some additional expectations and pitfalls.

Humor and heart. To sufficiently employ them, you must stick to the following rules:

SEE ALSO: The 5 Biggest Wedding Planning Mistakes Grooms Make

ONE: REITERATE YOUR LOVE FOR YOUR BRIDE.

Look, this is us. The Plunge. We’re as unsentimental as it gets. But even we acknowledge the importance of dialing up the whole “earnest love” shtick. Toward the end of your speech, you must say how lucky you are to have met this woman, how much you love her, how she still makes you wobbly in the knees—and you’ll feel that way for the rest of your life. We know, we know: in normal circumstances this would make us barf. But it has to be done. And happily, this moment of ahhhhwwww will be nicely counter-balanced if you…

TWO: INJECT HUMOR.

There’s a difference between “humor” and “jokes.” This is not the time to tell a joke like, “How are women and tornadoes alike? They both moan like hell when they come, and take the house when they leave.” (Save this for the bachelor party. If you save it at all.)

Don’t tell that joke. Or any generic joke. Instead, stick to some humorous anecdotes about how you met, how she’s the only one who finds your cooking edible (self-deprecation—always a plus), how you knew it was over when she whopped your ass at pool, whatever. What’s important is to use true anecdotes.

THREE: IGNORE DUMB QUOTES.

Plenty of wedding websites will provide helpful quotes you can use. Ignore most of them. The Knot, for example, suggests the Congolese proverb “Love is like a baby; it needs to be treated gently.” Or the Russian proverb, “Love and eggs are best when they are fresh.” Your own sincerity is better than a random, impersonal quote. While it’s okay if your earnestness sounds a little clichéd (hey, it is what it is), never stuff the speech with corny “filler” quotes that everyone else uses at their weddings.

FOUR: THANK THE HOSTS.

The bride’s parents, especially if they just scribbled out a check for $30,000 bucks, deserve the most prolonged expression of gratitude. It’s okay, kiss a little ass. And thank them even if they haven’t paid a nickel—it’ll score you in-law goodwill. (In fact, it’s expected. Not thanking the in-laws will look about as appropriate as grabbing your bride’s sister and jamming your tongue down her throat.) And give a shout-out to the schleppers. Whoever traveled 3,000+ miles just to eat some cake deserves a quick tip of the hat.

SEE ALSO: Groomsmen Gifts

FIVE: BUT DON’T THANK THE ACADEMY.

Don’t be like one of those obnoxious Academy Award winners who drones on and on by thanking Patty Sue for this beautiful cake, thanking your buddy Gus for the photography, and thanking our lord Jesus Christ for making this all come together. You’ve just lost your audience.

SIX: PRACTICE. WHEN YOU’RE DONE, PRACTICE MORE. REPEAT.

Yes, we harped on this when you proposed and we stressed it again for the Best Man’s toast, but it’s the single most effective way to improve your performance. Keep practicing in the mirror until you can deliver it with confidence. Don’t just give this a few minutes. Give it a few hours. If you spent 67 hours playing Madden just so you can have the league’s leading rusher, leading receiver, and leading passer all on the same team—we’ve all done this—then you can spend a few hours prepping for the most important speech of your life.

SEVEN: LOOK YOUR BRIDE IN THE EYE.

Before you actually get to the lovey-dovey stuff (see Rule 1), turn from the crowd to your bride, pause, let the moment gather a hint of drama, and then look her dead in the eye. Address her by her name. This will make every woman in the reception reach for a tissue and dab their newly-forming tears.

EIGHT: KEEP IT SHORT.

See? Isn’t this one easier to read?

SEE ALSO: Groom Speech Videos

NINE: KEEP THE STRUCTURE SIMPLE.

All you really need is an intro (welcoming the guests), a boatload of thank yous (see above), some humor-and-heart anecdotes about how you met your wife, and then a closing about how much you love her. Bang. That’s it. No need to reinvent the wheel.

TEN: STEAL

Again, we don’t recommend using canned quotations like this one, courtesy of The Knot again: “St. Augustine once said, ‘Insomuch as love grows in you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.’”

Or another, from About.com: “Here’s to the prettiest, here’s to the wittiest, Here’s to the truest of all who are true, Here’s to the neatest one, here’s to the sweetest one, Here’s to them, all in one – here’s to you.”

Ugh.

The trick is customizing and personalizing. The site Speeches.com, for instance, sells six different versions of “Conventional Groom Toasts.” For about $16 bucks, you fill in the blanks (like Mad Libs) and they’ll spit out some stock speeches with the names already in there. The results can be choppy and disjointed. One such excerpt (the underlined parts are our fill-in-the-blank choices):

“Rachel – in case any of you hadn’t noticed, is the perfect wife, and I’m lucky she said yes.

I’m lucky to have someone who can live with my toe fungus.

I’m lucky to have someone who can live with my nose hair.

And I’m lucky to have someone who is just so good hearted and so good to be with.

Someone once wrote [sic] that a good marriage is at least 80 percent good luck in finding the right person at the right time. The rest is trust. On that basis, I would say we are 100% ready for this.”

Not the smoothest. But if you have utterly no idea where to start, these templates can give you a rough—very rough—first draft that you can then personalize and polish.

A few other useful links:

20 Speech Topics (but mostly just a detailed list of who to thank—yawn)

http://www.speech-topics-help.com/groom-speech.html

Some quotes. Most are awful. Some are potentially useful.

http://quotations.about.com/od/weddingtoasts/a/wedding5.htm

More toast templates:

http://www.essortment.com/lifestyle/weddingtoastte_sfvl.htm
Really want to geek-out and over-prepare? There are some books like the “Complete Guide to Groom Speeches.”

http://groom-speech.blogspot.com/
(Frankly, you’re better off just going to a bookstore and flicking through a few of the sample templates to see if they’re worth a damn.)

Your next groom duty: Buying Gifts for Your Groomsmen.

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