Groom Speech - enough is enough

For all the grooms that I speak to who have a morbid fear of public speaking, and view the groom speech as something to get through, rather than enjoy, there are a select number of grooms out there who view the groom speech as an opportunity to test their guests mettle. Most of us will luckily never have to endure the unimaginable hardship of being regularly tortured for information at some secure unit in the Nevada desert. However, I'm pretty confident in saying, that all the CIA have to do to elicit intelligence from reluctant partners, is simply to sit them through some of the groom speeches that people are subjected to each year.

Yes, just a few minutes of self obsessed ramblings from a love sick, slightly delusional thirty something, and they'll be singing like a canary...or as sick as a parrot...whichever birdlife manifests itself, the end result probably isn't what you would have wanted. I cannot stress enough the quality of efficiency in speeches. There is no point in saying the same thing in 3 different ways - it just wastes time, lessens the impact of what you're saying, and bores everyone to tears, however, despite my pleas, there are always grooms who cannot help themselves, who cannot resist the urge to recount stories about every single usher or groomsmen, who find not talking about their new in law for several hundred words, unthinkable.

Try as I might to convince them otherwise, they just keep adding the words until like Augustus Gloop kept on drinking chocolate, and look what happened to him. I recently wrote for a guy who was already at 2500 words and wanted to expand on so many things in the speech, and yes of course you can, but by the time you finish speaking, the cleaners will be mopping around your feet. A groom’s speech of 2500 words, is easily going to take 25 minutes on the day, and that isn’t a speech, it's a lecture. What you really need to remember here, is that this speech is for the guests, not for you, so they won't know if they didn't hear all the superfluous things you were going to say, because you should only be taking them through the important bits. Forget in depth analysis of love, and labouring the point of just how amazing your new wife is. It only needs it be said once, and will be all the more powerful for it. By the time the guests have heard the 5th version of just how great she is, most will have died of emotional exhaustion or boredom. Maybe even a combination of the two.