Last Minute Wedding Guide for the Men of the Wedding
At most weddings there are three significant men of the wedding, groom, best man, and father of the bride. Their roles and duties go into overload during the week before the wedding. Each has a different set of responsibilities.
As the groom, most of your final week will be dealing with a crazy fiance. Don't worry, all fiances are crazy by this point of the wedding. Suck it up and deal with it. Be supportive and bite your tongue when she says something stupid.
You also have the jobs of ensuring everything is ready for the honeymoon, surviving the bachelor party without contracting a sexually transmitted disease, helping your parents to host the rehearsal dinner, ensuring the minister gets and signs the marriage license, and giving a great toast at the reception to tell everyone how grateful you are for everything that they have done.
The best man has a different set of responsibilities. The biggest of those is the bachelors' party. Although your primary goal is to help the groom have the time of his life, you also need to be watching out for him. It's your job to make sure that he makes it to his wedding in one piece with no new diseases tagging along. Make sure that you have enough cash on you to bail the groom out of any situation he gets himself into. Many a best man has had to pay off on the spot an enraged hotel manager.
The best man's toast is the first to congratulate the new bride and groom. This is a good time to avoid bringing up secrets you know about the bride or groom. Too much booze before the toast is a recipe for disaster.
The father of the bride gets it twice as bad as the groom when it comes to dealing with hysterical women. His wife is firmly convinced that the wedding is about to be ruined by the caterer or someone else. His daughter is convinced that her mother is trying to keep her from having any say in the wedding. There are a large number of last minute things that have to be paid for, so keep a thousand in cash available during the last week.
Your toast at the reception is your chance to tell everyone how special your daughter is, and how welcome into the family your new son-in-law is. Write it out, make it genuine, and practice it.
Each key man of the wedding is critical in their own way. Since men are about as unaware of wedding decorum as possible, you should help each other out. Work together, encourage each other, and you'll make it through with flair. Who knows, you might even start to like each other.