the best man speech

This was my speech at John’s wed­ding. It’ll prob­a­bly remain the most impor­tant speech of my life unless I ever get mar­ried and have kids of my own, so I’m happy to have nailed it. John’s dad came up to the head table and shook my hand when I was done, and some peo­ple even asked me for a transcript.

I’ve wanted to write about John’s hilar­i­ously frank and robotic love let­ters for so long but I never got around to it, so it was great that I was able to sur­prise him with one of them in the mid­dle of the speech. People were laugh­ing at every sin­gle line.

A rare pic­ture of John and I cause I’m usu­ally the one tak­ing the photos.

“John and I are best friends, although that wasn’t always the case. We both went to the same pri­vate school in grade five, and my first mem­ory of John is of him throw­ing me into a wall because I was the new kid and he was the bully. We were never really close friends until some point in high school, when we were both lon­ers at Upper Canada College, and that’s how we con­nected. Eventually, I moved to Ottawa for uni­ver­sity, but we’ve always main­tained that friendship.

That means I’ve known each of the girls he’s been with, and the con­sis­tent theme through­out his rela­tion­ships is that these girls have always taken care of him in areas that he’s proven to be incompetent.

For exam­ple, John has no idea how to feed him­self. He lost 40 pounds in the first year of uni­ver­sity, due in no part to exer­cise, but thanks to a very strict diet of iced tea and Doritos. I don’t attribute this more to inep­ti­tude than to a love of junk food. A few months ago he went to the mar­ket, bought some salmon fil­lets for din­ner, care­fully pre­pared them with salt, and oil, and squeezed on some lemon juice before putting them in the oven. When he was done, he called me up — all proud of his accom­plish­ment — to let me know that he cooked for him­self for once. I asked him what his side-dish was, and he said “pop­corn”. That makes sense to him.

When he comes to visit me in Ottawa now and I ask him what he wants to eat, he only has one request: “some­thing unhealthy”. I’m glad to say this is because he con­sumes only healthy food now that Alayna’s cook­ing for him. Which is fan­tas­tic, because John is the only per­son I know to have ever screwed up a box of Kraft Dinner. Now, admit­tedly, it was only one small word in the direc­tions that he missed, but unfor­tu­nately it was an impor­tant one: “drain”. John had Kraft soup that night.

John fares no bet­ter when when it comes to dress­ing him­self, because he doesn’t have any sense of style. Luckily, Alayna does, and I’ve been told that in the four months they’ve known each other, she’s already bought twice as many clothes for him as any­one else. One time I asked what brands he was wear­ing because I was curi­ous, and he said he’d get back to me on that because he was curi­ous too. Just this morn­ing I had to iron his shirt for him because he didn’t see a prob­lem with a few wrin­kles, and he had to send out two grooms­men (in the mid­dle of the finan­cial dis­trict at 9am) to buy cuf­flinks because he didn’t have any, a belt because he for­got it, and socks because he brought blue ones to wear with his black suit.

To be hon­est, I don’t know how John bagged her, because on top of this fash­ion dis­abil­ity, because he’s not exactly a suave guy. In many respects, John has always been very pre­co­cious, but when it comes to mat­ters of the heart he’s like an 11-year-old boy who has no idea what to do or say. I used to revise his love-letters because they sounded like legal doc­u­ments. To give you an exam­ple, I have an old draft of one he sent me that he wrote to a girl he fan­cied at the time. Here it is verbatim:

I am attracted to you. I want to take you out on a date and see how things go.

If you feel that there is poten­tial for a “roman­tic” future for us but that the tim­ing right now is poor I can under­stand that but notwith­stand­ing that real­ity or the poten­tial for that real­ity I felt that it was impor­tant for me to clar­ify myself.

If you see no roman­tic poten­tial for our rela­tion­ship I would hate for this con­fes­sion to cre­ate “weird­ness” between us and would like to make clear that I intend to main­tain our friend­ship no mat­ter what your response to my clar­i­fi­ca­tion is.

Sincerely, John.

As you can tell, he’s not exactly a ladies’ man. The thing is, I was in Europe when John met Alayna, and that means he did it on his own this time. She’s got­ten to know John in the unedited, unfil­tered state, and she’s still around. And here we are, cel­e­brat­ing their union.

Which is good because I’ve never known John to be hap­pier than when he’s with Alayna. And I like to think that by suc­ceed­ing with her, he’s really suc­ceeded at every­thing else because there’s some­one now who com­pli­ments him in the areas that he needs it most.

This is impor­tant to me because I feel like I could never tell my own story with­out telling John’s as well, so I have as much invested in his mar­riage and hap­pi­ness as he does.

So I want to say, I love you man. I’m proud of you. I’m happy that you’re happy. I can’t think of a bet­ter per­son for you to be with than Alayna. I’m excited, we’re all excited, that you’re on this jour­ney together.”

He’s lit­er­ally chok­ing the chicken.

Oh man these were fun to do.