The Perfect Honeymoon
Whether you’ve got your heart set on Niagara Falls or Shangri-la, or are having a hard time deciding where to go or even if you need/want to “go,” honeymoons are the traditional post-nuptial trip couples take together after the wedding. And honeymoons, after a formal wedding and all the stress and planning involved, can be great times for a newly married couple. They allow you the privacy to really relax, to celebrate your union intimately, to make love as often and whenever you feel like it, to possibly explore a new place that is exotic and exciting to both of you and they also give you quiet downtime to plan for the future and to hatch schemes for your new lives together as “man and wife.”
And planning the honeymoon is half of the fun! Unless the two of you happen to be ardent and pre-determined to go to a specific destination, honeymoon planning affords you dream time to entertain a whole world of possibilities and you should fully indulge yourself, for at no other time in your lives will the world so be “your oyster” as when you are newly married. That’s because everyone loves lovers, especially the newly married kind.
So…where do you want to go? What do you want to see? What do you want to do? These are the major questions couples ask themselves at the outset of planning a honeymoon.
Perhaps you’re like many couples and don’t have a clue. Maybe you just have this warm and fuzzy feeling you want to create as a result of going on your honeymoon. Whatever the case, the internet and thousands of websites stand ready to indulge your curiosity and dreams. You could literally spend months wandering through them getting ideas and most of them will be appealing because there’s no shortage of marketing smoke and mirrors on each trying to lure you into one travel package or another. If you really want minutiae about places to consider, use Google Earth to investigate at street level possible places for your post-nuptial rest and recreation.
Of course there’s the little matter of the budget you’ll need to respect, but consider this: maybe it’s a good idea to start your research as if money were no consideration at all and you could go anywhere your hearts desire. That will at least allow you to focus in on what is truly appealing to you. Once you’ve firmly identified a place and an experience that creates the spark in both of you, you can always then look for places that will give you that special something which fall within your budget.
One of the neat unanticipated results of planning a honeymoon is what you learn about yourself that you didn’t know before and, of course, what you learn about this person now called your “spouse.” It’s actually like an inkblot test that is revealing to everyone who participates. When, for instance, you consider Hawaii (perennially the number one choice of newlyweds for honeymoons), what do you see? How does it make you feel? Do you feel drawn there by a semi-magical force? Or perhaps repelled by another force? For a minority Hawaii could mean erupting volcanoes and molten lava!
Whatever you do, don’t railroad an idea over your new spouse and don’t let him or her railroad an idea over you. One of you may say that you really don’t care where you go, or you maybe want to please your spouse by agreeing to go somewhere he or she is personally passionate about and to engage in an activity he or she loves. Big mistake. Whoever was the passive partner on the planning end will soon find themselves full of steely resentment and annoyance two or three days into a honeymoon venue that is disagreeable to them (even if it does launch the other party into a state of unmitigated bliss).
An perfect, real life example of the Honeymoon from Hell comes to mind. A new bride happily agreed to go on a skiing honeymoon with her new husband because he is just nuts about skiing and snow. She grew up in Florida and loves sunny warm climates. Skiing to her is something you do behind a boat in nice smooth warm water! The first night of their honeymoon in frigid February in Park Place, Utah, she was awakened by howitzers booming off in the mountains to prevent avalanches. She was terrified and thought they were under attack. The trip went, pardon the pun, downhill rapidly after that. She was freezing cold the whole time, couldn’t feel her fingers or toes, her new husband put her on slopes way too advanced for her (because she is “so athletic!” he exclaimed), evoking within her primal mortal fear, and there was nothing to do all day but ski …ski, ski! You get the picture. The trip was cut short when she broke her ankle jumping out of a ski lift—at her husband’s direction—and they had to go home. Bad scene, for sure.
The point is so clear it hardly needs stating. Honeymoons, like marriages, require honesty and compromise. But they can be one hell of a lot of fun if you have those ingredients while you’re planning, and it goes without saying, the planning can be a good exercise for all of the joint decisions you’ll have to make as a married couple.
If you’re smart and lucky, your honeymoon will be so spectacular, you will want to stay married long enough to go on a “second” one!
