There’s this long held tradition at weddings that the best man does a speech, the groom does a speech, the bride’s father does a speech, and all the gals just stay silent and/or giggle modestly or whatever. I think this tradition is, in the words of the Lord himself, big ole balls.
‘Maids of honour should do speeches,’ says my friend Natalie. ‘Because they’re hilarious and know you, and you’re a legitimate human being that needs embarrassing and potentially break-up material stories told about you.’
Exactly. Why should the best man and the groom have all the fun banter, while the bride gets the soppy stuff? If you’ve got a maid of honour who’s up for public speaking, then it shouldn’t be so mind-blowingly unusual to have her get up and do it.
This year, my best mate is getting married, I’m the maid of honour, and I’m doing a speech. Not because I forced the issue, but because she wanted me to – yes it’s loads of pressure, and yes I’m shitting myself in case I screw it up by accidentally telling everyone I’m shitting myself, but it’s also great. Because I’ve sat through way too many weddings where the bride sits there and listens to guys talking, when it’s just as much her day as the groom.
You know what another tradition is? The bride transfering all her property from her father to her now-husbnd because she had no assets of her own. We don’t do that anymore, because it’s ridiculous, so why are we still adhering to weird male-dominated speeches?
A quick poll of my friends showed an interesting cross-section. Firstly, it brought up the issue of time, as in, nobody needs to add another speech onto what is already a fairly boring section of the day when everyone just wants to go party their arses off. ‘You can’t have a maid of honour do a speech, otherwise you’d need a father/mother of the groom speech to even it out and they would go on forever!’ says Charlotte, who got married herself.
Charlie (not the same person) is getting married this year, and isn’t having any extra speeches because ‘I don’t want to bore people any further with any more talking, there’s only so much that needs to be said by any of us, and I don’t feel the need to say something for the sake of it just because I wouldn’t have been able to 50 years ago.’
Both fair points, not least because everyone should be able to do what they want on their own wedding day – but the fact that the maid of honour speech, or a bridal speech, is seen as an added extra rather than as part of the tradition is what needs to change. Why do we need the groom to give a speech? What about having a maid of honour and a best man speech followed by some very quick words from both parents?
It’s all about timing, and about not boring the congregation to death. ‘I think weddings should be like the Oscars,’ says my mate Graham (a man who has been to weddings). ‘Everyone gets a speech, but the band should start to play them off if they go over their allocated time.’
And it shouldn’t be about who does what – we should get rid of the traditional ‘Well, we have to have these speeches’ base line and go apeshit with the running order. The bride! The vicar! A door! Who cares provided they stick to the allotted time, and everyone gets to say something cool and nice about each other?
‘Just have whoever you want to say something – best woman, uncle of the groom, youngest child there,’ says another friend, Dani. ‘It’s your day, why would you want some completely random tradition to dictate what happens and what/who you want to listen to on the happiest day of your life? Ffs.’
Thing is, because it’s still relatively unheard of (when I say I’m my friend’s maid of honour, obviously nobody has asked me ‘how my speech is coming along’), the pressure of speech-making is tripled when nobody expected you to make one in the first place (Badly. The speech is coming along badly), and it also puts you in direct competition with the best man. Can you imagine if I get up there and fuck it up so royally that the party thinks, ‘Well, THIS is why nobody asks the maid of honour to do a speech’? I’m basically doing a speech for the whole of feminism. But hey, nobody said this shit was easy – at least I’m good at public speaking and parents love me.
And I guess I’ve got the element of surprise, something that people will talk about for ages – ooh, do you remember when the maid of honour gave a speech and it trounced the best man’s (OK I’m totally jinxing it now)? But mainly it means that my mate Alice won't be sitting on her own while loads of men talk about her.
If you’re not a public speaker/comfortable with it, then why force people into it? There’s nothing worse than seeing a shaking best man stand up and stumble over some words, clearly horrified by the whole ordeal, knowing that he’s spent six months not sleeping only to confirm his worst fears. Might as well just have someone else do it, instead. But can you imagine if the best man didn’t do a speech, and the maid of honour did? There’d be anarchy. People would shoot registry offices. Churches would cry.
‘My sister was my maid of honour, and she didn’t do a speech because she was too shy,’ says Rebecca. ‘But I gave a speech because there were four men speaking and it made me cross! I just made sure everyone was limited to five minutes.’
So the take-home message here is: if you feel a bit weird about loads of guys stealing the marriage-thunder, then get your maid of honour to do a speech. Or whoever you like, because it’s 2015 and nobody should be using the word ‘maid’ – unless they’re in a school play or referring to the noughties film *Maid In Manhattan *starring Jennifer Lopez.
And then limit everyone to five minutes, because nobody cares – they just want to do Jagerbombs and start a faux-ironic conga.
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Picture: Frances Sousa
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.