How to start a father of the bride speech

Open with your own name, your daughter's name, a thank you to the room, and one small joke that has nothing to do with her. "I'm Peter, I'm Emma's dad, and thank you all for coming." Then a line at your own expense, and you are away. That is twenty-five seconds and it is the whole shape of it.

It is that plain for a reason, and the reason is the first thirty seconds. You stand up, the cutlery stops, ninety people who mostly know you turn round, and your voice does something you have never heard it do before. Higher than usual. Slightly unsteady, with a throat that will not clear however many times you try. The opening line of a father of the bride speech has to be sayable in that state. Anything needing breath control, a run-up or a feeling is being asked to work at the exact moment you are least able to deliver it.

So pick the opener on how easy it is to say out loud. How good it looks written down matters much less than you would think. By the time you reach the material that might set you off, ninety seconds in, you will have already heard your own voice hold in front of the room. That is what the first line is really buying you.

What the first thirty seconds do to you

The brief I get from fathers of the bride barely changes. They know what they want to say about their daughter. They just do not want to fall apart saying it.

Adrenaline arrives before the first word does. It tightens your throat, speeds you up, and wipes out lines you have known cold for a week. An opening line carrying any emotional weight walks into all of that at once. Take the weight out and the first ten seconds are ordinary speaking, and ordinary speaking is what steadies a voice.

The rule that follows is unromantic. Your first twenty words should be something you could say if somebody woke you at three in the morning. Names, facts, the room, the food. Save the feeling for ninety seconds in, once your voice has proved itself.

Six openers that work

1. The straight host welcome

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Peter, I'm Emma's dad, and on behalf of Sue and me, thank you all for coming. Thanks as well to whoever sorted out the parking, because I had been dreading that far more than this.

This one gives you a job. Hosting is a role most fathers of the bride can do on autopilot, and it asks nothing of you emotionally at the point where you have nothing spare. The last line gets a low, easy laugh, and the laugh is the useful part: three seconds of breathing, and proof the room is already with you. Notice what the joke is about. Parking. It goes nowhere near your daughter, so it cannot catch you out.

2. The fact with a year in it

In September 1998 I drove a Vauxhall Astra to Chester with a car seat in the back and a boot full of nappies. Twenty-eight years later I have driven the same road to bring her here, and the car is not much tidier.

Numbers are easy to say. Dates, places, cars and street names are stored somewhere different in your head from the feelings, and you can deliver them steadily while your hands are still going. A year also puts a timeline on the table, so the speech has somewhere to go next. Get it right, because somebody will check. And keep the detail small. A boot full of nappies is something the room can picture. A grand line about the day your world changed gives them nothing to see, and it is the sort of sentence most likely to go on you.

3. Naming the fear out loud

Emma had one request for me this morning. She said: Dad, whatever else happens today, please do not cry. So I had a run-through in the bathroom at nine o'clock. It went badly. But I'm told the first attempt is always the worst, so here we are.

Every guest in that room has already decided you are going to cry. Saying it first takes the tension out of it, and it means that if your voice does go at minute four, the room reads it as the thing you promised rather than a collapse. Only use this if it is true of you. A father who is stone cold and pretends to be fragile sounds like he is doing a bit.

4. The line at your own expense

Emma asked me to keep this under five minutes. Her mother asked me to keep it under four. So I have written six and I am going to let the two of them fight it out.

Self-deprecation is the safest humour available to you, because you are the one person at this wedding you cannot offend. It also keeps you out of somebody else's lane. The best man is there to do the teasing and has spent weeks on it, and you gain nothing by competing with him from your first line.

5. Speaking to her new husband or wife first

Before I say a word about my daughter, I want to say something to Ryan. Eight years ago you turned up at my front door with a bottle of wine you clearly could not afford, and you have not let her down once since. Welcome to the family. You have made this very easy for me.

Everybody expects you to open with the bride, so opening with her partner turns the room a few degrees. It also gets the warmest duty in the speech done while you are still steady. Welcoming somebody into the family is hard to say at minute five with all the emotional material stacked up behind it. If you have a specific memory of meeting them, put it here.

6. The object in your pocket

I have got something in my pocket I am going to read to you in a minute. It is a school report from 2007. The teacher wrote that Emma is bright, and that she will argue with a brick wall. Nineteen years on, I have not been able to improve on that description.

An object gives your hands something to do and your eyes somewhere to go other than a hundred faces. Reading aloud off a piece of paper is also mechanically easier than speaking from memory, because the words are sitting there and all you have to do is say them. A birthday card, an old note, a photograph, a text her mum sent you the day she got engaged, they all do the same job.

Three openers to leave out

The joke about the bar bill

Every father of the bride thinks about this one. "The bar is free until nine, and after that it becomes Ryan's problem." Predictability is the issue. It is the joke people expect from this slot, so a good part of the room can see the shape of it coming before you land it. Money also points the room at what the day cost, which is not where you want anybody's attention in your first ten seconds. Aim the first laugh at yourself instead.

"Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking"

This is a line from another century, and now it turns up mainly as a parody of a wedding speech. It also announces something the room will work out on its own inside ten words, and it talks down a speech that has not started yet. Standing up and beginning does the same job. Anything modest about your speaking is worth more later, once you have shown that you can in fact do it.

The welcome that lists every relative

The one that runs: welcome to friends and family of both sides, to Auntie Margaret who has come all the way from Aberdeen, to Ryan's mum and dad Dave and Christine, to Sue's sister and her husband and their three, to everyone who travelled, and to those who sadly could not be here today.

It is generous and it kills the opening. Ninety seconds of names before your first sentence of content is where a room's attention quietly leaves, and it does not fully come back. It also hands you the worst possible task for that moment: reading a list, with no rhythm to it and nothing to land on, right when you needed some momentum.

Two exceptions. Thank the people who have travelled as a group rather than one by one. And if somebody has died, that gets its own moment, placed where you choose, never buried halfway down a list of names.

If the mother of the bride is speaking too, split the thank-yous between you in advance, so that neither of you ends up calling a register. And if you are standing in this slot without being her father, the opener has a different job to do.

How long the opener runs, and what follows it

Give the opener somewhere between twenty and forty seconds. Then move to the second beat, which is usually the first proper story about your daughter. Your voice will have done enough work by then to hold.

The whole speech wants to be around five minutes, which is roughly 650 to 750 words at a nervous pace. Almost everybody reads faster on the day than they did in the kitchen, so time it standing up and out loud, then add a little on.

Because you go first, everything after you gets planned around your slot. The groom and the best man both build their timings on where you finish. There is more on that in what order wedding speeches go in, and if the nerves are the part keeping you awake, the ten minutes before covers what to do with them.

A test for the line you write yourself

Four checks, in this order.

1. Can you say it with a tight throat? Read it out loud after running up the stairs. If it needs breath control, or a clean run at a long clause, cut it shorter.
2. Is there a name in it? A name in the first sentence tells the room who you are and who this is about, and it steadies you, because you have been saying that name daily for twenty-odd years.
3. Does it need setting up? If the line only works after you have explained something first, it is not an opener. Move it to minute two.
4. Does it survive going wrong? If the laugh does not come, does the line still make sense on its own? An opener that depends on a laugh leaves you stranded while the room is still settling.

Learn the opener, read the rest

Learn the first twenty seconds by heart and read everything after them. Memorise the whole speech and you have handed yourself a second thing to lose on the day. Read every word of it, including the top, and you give up the only stretch where looking up counts for anything. The opening is when the room is deciding how worried to be about you. After that, read it. Nobody minds a father of the bride holding notes.

Then print those first three lines a size or two bigger than everything else and put them at the top of page one on their own. If your hands are going, and they might be, you want the one line you have to say from memory sitting right there in front of you anyway.