As fun as it is for me spill forth ironic commentary about gift registries and seating charts, I was thinking this week about the wedding subjects that are written about less frequently. For example, no one ever writes a column giving you pointers about having sex on your wedding night. The conventional wisdom is that you shouldn’t need any help in that department, although I frankly wish someone had told me that getting my wife out of her wedding dress was a twenty-five minute affair that involved three dozen tiny buttons. That fact would have been good to know before I had several glasses of champagne in hotel room, which made my tiny button concentration skills all the more comical.
But since diving further into the topic of wedding night sex might cause many to blush, let’s tackle a different, but just as important, subject that I feel doesn’t get enough attention during the planning: the toasts.
The reason no one ever talks about the toasts is because the bride and groom always claim they are powerless. Certain people have to speak – father of the bride, maid of honor, best man – and the bride and groom can’t be expected to control what they say, right?
Such a rationale only points out how little people know about toasts. Here’s the golden rule:
The Golden Rule of Toasts:
None of the guests really care what the toasts are about. They only care that they’re short.
This sounds as harsh and it is. But for 99% of the people at your wedding, the toasts themselves are meaningless. The sentiment of the toast is important. They like that the father of the bride always thought his little girl was the smartest person he’d ever met. But a long rambling story about a trip to the zoo in 1983 isn’t necessary to communicate that point.
The truth is that everyone actually knows the golden rule, because they themselves have been guests at other weddings where the toasts have gone on way too long. But somehow when your own wedding rolls around, you suddenly assume there are lots of exceptions to golden the rule, such as:
- Toasts can be long if they’re funny.
- Toasts can be long if they’re sentimental.
- Toasts can be long if they’re from an old person who’s traveled a long way to be at the wedding.
But the reality is that a funny toast won’t be as funny if it goes on too long. And a sentimental toast will eventually have everyone staring at ceiling in boredom. And no one wants to hear the old person rant for twenty minutes about how hard it was to get to the wedding.
Plus, the odds are that your funny friend is going to tell an inappropriate joke about the bride’s breasts that will offend everyone. And your sentimental friend will start over-sharing info about her own life, including how she got dumped recently, so it’s really hard to see you two so happy. And don’t even get the old person started why you two didn’t just get married in Florida where the weather is beautiful, unlike here.
The fact is that brevity is the great savior. It makes great toasts stay that way and prevents bad toasts from doing any more damage than is necessary.
So, no, you can’t control what people say, but you can control how long they say it. VIPs get five minutes, maximum. Regular IPs get three minutes. And if people go over their time limit, just stand up, start clapping, and give them a big hug. The speaker will have no idea what’s happening, and in the confusion you can take the microphone out of their hands and destroy it. Remember: if the toasts go on too long, it will cut into the three hours you’ll need later in the night to get out of the dress.
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