Love them or hate them, the after-dinner speeches are an important part of your wedding.

Back in the day, they were really important because your ceremony wasn’t about you.

Yes, your names would be mentioned, but your story wasn’t, and it was only after dinner that people got to talk about you.

But here’s the thing… in a humanist wedding, we’re going to talk about your story and how you came to be together.

We’re going to talk about the reasons you love one another.

And – of course – you’re going to make the promises that will create your future.

A humanist wedding brings everything that used to get said after the ceremony into the ceremony.

That’s great – except nobody ever explains that to the people who are expecting to speak after the ceremony, namely the Best Man and the Father of the Bride.

And that’s why – not often, but often enough to make me want to write this post – one or other of them will come up to me after the ceremony to say something along the lines of, “that was great, but you’ve totally xxxxed my speech!”

We don’t want that do we?

So there are two things you can do.

You can either let them know at least something about what’s going to be said during the ceremony

Or, you can give them a role in it. Which is a great honour and it can be really moving.

Either way, you won’t be sitting there after dinner silently thinking, “can someone please get my dad to shut up!”

PS If you do have to write a wedding speech, you should check out this great article by Jenny Yi – which is where the illustration came from too…