Author and Celebrant: Honeymoon for the first time, or second or.....

Getting married? For the first time? Second? Third? Known your partner for ever? Or just a short time? Are you planning every single detail of your wedding day, or just hoping that without any effort on your part, everything will turn out just fine?

Unless you’re unique, at this very moment, like most people about to be married, you’re wholly immersed in your wedding plans. Keeping the telephone hot, you’re querying this or that reception venue, comparing the virtues of this or that florist and agonising over the choices being offered to you.

And this is the case whether you’re marrying for the first time or this is an encore wedding either for one or both of you, whether you’ve already shared much of your life with your present partner, or your marriage is to be a complete change of status for you both. Whatever your personal situation, whatever the style of your wedding, you’ll spend much of your time planning every detail of your wedding day.

Why? Because, whatever your situation, you want your wedding day to be a day to remember.

But what about the honeymoon? Is that just going to happen? Or are you planning to make it happen? According to one set of statistics, more than 90% of couples who choose a traditional wedding will celebrate their togetherness by taking a honeymoon. On an average, 14% of the wedding expenditure will constitute the honeymoon. In practical terms, the honeymoon will cost three times as much as the average yearly vacation that the couple will take throughout their lives.

Is the cost and time invested in planning a honeymoon worth the effort?

Obviously the intimate details of the success or otherwise of a honeymoon are not readily accessible. Still, there are just enough hints being dropped to suggest that rarely does it exceed expectations. Quite the contrary, in fact! And it seems no different whether it’s a repeat performance or the very first honeymoon for both partners. As far back as 1815, when Lord Byron married, he commented that his three week honeymoon, which he called ‘treaclemoon’, was not all sunshine, that, in fact, it had its clouds.

More often than most people realise, the honeymoon starts with either one or both partners not talking to each other! Just as many honeymoons begin with either one or both partners sulking, more often than not that bedroom activity which everyone talks about, not only doesn’t generate any fireworks, it doesn’t even happen. Again, lack of forethought leads to a situation that one partner or possibly both, will look back at with regret.

Why is it so? Why is the wedding so memorable while the honeymoon quite often isn’t?

The wedding day is as special as it is because on that day people, who normally run around in shorts and tee shirts, suddenly go formal. People who don’t know their right foot from their left suddenly take dancing lessons. People who have heart palpitations at the thought of public speaking become members of Toast Masters in order to make that all important wedding speech. In short, on that day, people turn themselves inside out to play their part in the most pleasing, elegant and dramatic way they’re capable of.

They don’t merely hope that everything will turn out right. They make sure of it.

How can you make sure that your honeymoon exudes the same type of drama?

If you look back to the beginning of your relationship you’ll probably remember that your life, at that stage, was one, long high. Over the years, though, you may have fallen into the trap waiting for all couples, especially those in a long term relationship, becoming so comfortable with each other you no longer feel the need to show your real feelings towards your partner. After all, by now your partner should be fully aware of your feelings, without any special efforts on your part. You’ve been a couple for a long time. You might be one of those couples who’ve lived with each other for years. It could be that by now you’ve brought up several children together.

Where once it was an endless stream of chocolates and roses and hours of passionate sex, it’s now comfortable, and possibly boring routine of paying the bills and looking after the kids.

All that dressing up for a date, or even going out for a date, treating each other with special courtesy and consideration, sending flowers, selecting a special place to celebrate a birthday or anniversary, you’re way beyond that.

If this is the kind of attitude the couple takes to their honeymoon then they can only expect to be disappointed. Whether this is your first marriage or your fourth, to make your honeymoon truly memorable you need to start planning for it in the same organised, systematic way as you’re planning your wedding day. Only in that way will it be inevitably as memorable as you expect your wedding day to be.

More than 60% of the newlyweds choose a honeymoon in a foreign country hoping to taste something unique and different. Yet, in the majority of cases, it will be little more than a holiday like every other holiday they have ever had, except a great deal more expensive.

But it can be different. It can be more than just a vacation. Instead of concentrating your attention merely on the choice of the location, make your honeymoon a time when you show your partner the person he or she fell in love with in the first place. A you at your very best. Use your honeymoon to re-ignite that old relationship to the way it used to be when you first met each other, and you were each other’s best friend, as well as each other’s dream lover.

Whether you’re 18 or 80, whether you’re spending a leisurely month or just a quick week-end, make your honeymoon a time to remember for the rest of your life by preparing for it as carefully as you’re planning your wedding day.