Over the Moon

“Chris and I met through Charlie Pie—one of my best friends from the University of Virginia and one of Chris’s oldest friends from growing up in Melbourne, Australia,” Merrill Hermann says of the man who would ultimately play matchmaker for her and her now-husband, Christopher Baillieu. When they all landed in New York after graduation, Charlie introduced the pair almost immediately. They hit it off—and remained “just friends” for quite a while.

After nearly a decade of writing wedding speeches at Speech Tank, we’ve discovered something surprising: the writing is the easy part. The hard part? Figuring out what to write about. Great wedding speeches aren’t about the prose; they’re about the stories. They reveal something new about the couple, offering the audience a glimpse into a part of their relationship they’ve never seen before, so everyone feels invited to the inner circle.

Before saying yes to a ring you’ll wear for the rest of your life, it’s worth understanding what makes one natural diamond truly extraordinary. Beyond carat weight, color and clarity, how a diamond is cut, how its facets are aligned, and even the shape of the original rough diamond, can have the greatest impact on the way it catches the light. Symmetry is particularly important to look out for as, ultimately, it is what will deliver the diamond’s mesmerizing sparkle.

Dr. Amia Nash’s went further than simply hearting Dillon Chambers on Hinge. There was something about his profile, and she communicated that with a rose. “Something we like to share about the timing of our meeting is that we met the same month that my dad lost his battle to stage four pancreatic cancer,” she explains.

Only on Over The Moon

Art quietly shaped nearly every chapter of this couple’s relationship long before they began planning their wedding. David Nathan Kimmel’s proposal began inside The Museum of Modern Art, where he surprised Elizabeth “Ellie” Lee Kimmel, who arrived expecting to meet her grandmother for an exhibition opening. “Once the shock subsided, he walked me to one of Monet’s Water Lilies triptychs—the ones that feel like they never end—and proposed,” Ellie says.

Dr. Jamuna Antoinette La Nasa and Dr. Anthony Philip La Nasa met at the start of medical school. “I saw her during our white coat ceremony and knew that I needed to get to know her,” Anthony admits. After three years together, he proposed to Jamuna. “I had been sitting on the engagement ring for some time, and it was becoming almost unbearable to me to not be engaged to Jem, as I knew she was the one for me, and I was ready to be married to her,” Anthony explains. “One day I just proposed.

Amanda Mallen was in Antigua, Guatemala, to be a bridesmaid in her friend’s wedding, while Haakon Arthur Pedersen was traveling by motorcycle with a buddy. They met at a club, and that night, she texted her friends that she “fell in love with a Norwegian.” The bride insisted she bring him to the wedding the next day. He quickly rented a jacket, and they ended up dancing the night away. After a year and a half together, Arthur proposed at a quiet temple in Kyoto, Japan.

Why is Las Vegas the top wedding destination in the world? The answer has little to do with the old-school glamour of the desert city or even the Elvis impersonators. It’s actually more practical. Clark County marriage licenses require no pre-booked appointment and are valid immediately, so couples can marry the same day the license is issued, which is extremely rare. Most states require couples to wait at least 24 hours after a license is issued before allowing a ceremony.

Julia Nabhan and Christopher Aventuro grew up in Westchester, New York, with mutual friends and overlapping school circles, but it wasn’t until college that they found their way back to each other. Julia was a sophomore at George Washington University and Chris a junior at Georgetown when, on New Year’s Eve in New York City, they happened to run into one another. Eight years later, they would return to the city to get married.