Honeymoon Planning
While there’s a tendency for couples to think of Wedding and Honeymoon planning as two separate events, in fact, much of the planning you do for your wedding will also assist you in having a perfect honeymoon and a lifetime of good habits.
You want your skin satiny smooth, your body strong, healthy and flexible, your hair shiny and smooth for those perfect wedding photographs? You can think of your beauty treatments as a one-day wonder, beginning and ending with your wedding day, or you can make it a lifetime commitment to good grooming and healthy living.
As you plan your wedding, you may hear the saying, ‘guests come first’. No doubt you think that once your wedding day is done, and you start thinking about your honeymoon, there will be only two people you will need to consider - yourself and your partner.
This may have been the case in the days past. Today there’s a chance that either you or your partner have children, or you have other responsibilities which can’t be put on hold for any length of time.
Some of the contemporary options are Familymoons as enjoyed by Reese Witherspoon, her new husband and her two children. Even some royalties have recognised that a honeymoon can be a great time for bonding with the children that are to be part of the new family.
And then there’s the phenomena of destination honeymoon where the two of you are joined on your wedding day and your honeymoon by your guests. The big thing here is to make sure you please your guests as well as yourself, and that the togetherness with the guests doesn’t intrude on your togetherness as a couple.
There are even Babymoons where the couple are already expecting, hoping to expect by the time their honeymoon is finished, or looking forward to a fabulous time just the two of them, before returning home and discussing the idea of starting a family.
What is the ideal length of honeymoon? Whatever time or money you have to spend on it. There have been those rich and famous who spoke of honeymoons in terms of months - perhaps even a year. And then there’s Minimoons which might be a matter of days. As a new bride, Queen Victoria might have had the means, but apparently she didn’t have the time, so she opted out for a Minimoon which lasted only three days.
Planning a wedding, whether you’re doing it for the first time, or following the example of some of our many married celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Artie Shaw and Mickey Rooney who between the four of them celebrated 33 weddings in all, can stretch both your patience and your budget. Yet most couples do it automatically. Why? Because they want a day to remember.
As you begin planning your wedding consider how these plans can help you create a honeymoon as well. 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 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, Lord Byron, described by Lady Caroline Lamb as mad, bad, and dangerous, described his honeymoon as a ‘treaclemoon’ with little sunshine but plenty of clouds. And while treacle is often associated with sweetness, in the case of Lord Byron’s honeymoon, it’s more likely treacle stickiness that he was thinking of.
More often than most people realize, the honeymoon has little resemblance to what either one or the other spouse imagines it will be. And while there are many reasons that honeymoons are not as memorable as they should be, the most likely reason is that couples tend to think of a honeymoon as a vacation planning it accordingly.
If you think of your honeymoon as little more than getting away from your everyday existence, then you 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 organized, 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 it an extension of your wedding planning where you bring to the occasion the very best of yourself.