Maid of honour plays bride’s old voice memo for wedding toast; stunned bride says she ‘couldn’t believe’ it
When Caroline Coady Powell, 26, picked her lifelong best friend Anna Cooper, 25, as the maid of honour, she never thought it would unfold into something the world would obsess over! On her friend’s big day, Anna was supposed to deliver an emotional toast, telling the newlyweds how perfect they are as a couple. Instead, she played an old voice memo that left the bride speechless!
The wedding toast that broke the internet
The moment Anna pressed play on her phone during her maid of honour speech, she knew she was about to destroy her lifelong friend in the best possible way! The 45-second audio clip was a condensed version of something the bride had recorded years ago. She had forgotten it even existed, so she never saw it coming. The whole thing was captured and later posted on TikTok, where it has raked in over 20 million views.So, what was in the voice memo? It was the recording Caroline sent to Anna hours after she met the man she would eventually marry! Caroline was talking to her best friend about someone she had just met and thought was nice. This was long before she knew she would eventually marry him.‘Hearing it again felt incredibly sweet and surreal. I’m so grateful to have that moment preserved, and even more grateful that Anna trusted her intuition to include it in her speech,’ the bride told People.
Best friends for life
Caroline and Anna have been in each other’s lives since 2004, when the latter’s family moved into a Nashville neighbourhood. Soon, the neighbours’ kids became close friends. Two kids only a year apart in age tend to do that. Over the next two decades, their connection became the kind of friendship that survives college, careers, and distance, the kind you actually work to keep alive!Their voice memos are epic, some even the length of ‘podcast episodes’, where they’d vent, laugh, and decompress about whatever was happening in their lives at that moment. And one of them was sent by Caroline on September 17, 2023, when she attended a wedding where she met her future husband, Colton Powell. She had heard about him earlier through mutual friends but had never actually met him, mostly because he’d been away at law school in California.He almost didn’t make it to the wedding that day. If his schedule had been different, if he’d decided differently about that last-minute trip, Caroline wouldn’t have walked up to him at the rehearsal dinner.“I was a bridesmaid, and we ended up meeting at the rehearsal dinner. It’s crazy to think that if he hadn’t made that last-minute decision, we may never have met,” Caroline said. After returning from the wedding, Caroline told Anna all about Powell.“I was slap-happy and so giddy, so naturally I sent a seven-minute voice memo to Anna. I definitely do not remember it being seven minutes long, but I’m not shocked by that at all,” Caroline recalled.But she never thought Anna would save that recording.“In the full seven-minute recording, it was so obvious [Caroline] was completely smitten with Colton. I already knew who he was, I knew he was a great guy, and I knew they’d met in such an organic way through mutual friends, so I felt like there was real potential there,” Anna said.So, when the couple were getting married, Anna knew what should be in her wedding toast. She wanted to make a meaningful gesture for the couple, and this voice memo was too perfect to discard. She edited out some parts and kept the perfect ones for the toast.“I was really intentional about what I included, and I know Caroline well enough to know she’d love it. I know her family well enough to know they’d love it too, and I knew Colton would love hearing what she had to say about him just 24 hours after they met. If I’d had any doubt that it wasn’t the right thing to do, I never would’ve played it,” Anna said.The bride had ‘absolutely no idea’, but once she heard it, she was in tears, and so were the attendees.
