The honeymoon phase

Resisting our cultural scripts of decline

Listen, I don’t know anything about marriage. In many ways, being married feels a whole lot like not being married, except that you no longer have to think about whether or not you’re going to get married, and you don’t have to plan a wedding at some point. This outcome is probably also possible if you decide you’re just not going to get married, but I like being married, for some intangible reason it’s hard to put my finger on. I like the open-ended foreverness of it.

It’s very possible I might feel differently about ‘forever’ once I’ve been married longer. One year is a drop in the bucket compared to a lifetime, to the sixty-odd years I’ll get with my husband, if I’m lucky. But talking about marriage that way makes it feel like a prison sentence instead of a privilege. I think this is a product of our cultural scripts around marriage – people are always talking about how hard marriage is, a sentiment I can’t relate to at all.¹ I can conceptually understand how marriage might be hard, but to me it seems that life is hard and marriage is just there, always in the background, with the usual caveats that relationships take generosity and patience. But I like my husband, so I kind of instinctively want him to feel loved and safe – that generosity and patience feel good to practice, and feel good to receive.

If this is a naïve and shortsighted view of marriage, so be it. But I think my problem is that I really don’t like the idea that the only way you can believe that your marriage will be good forever is to be an inexperienced idiot – to be in the ‘honeymoon phase’. 

My husband got covid at our 2023 wedding, which I think happened because my friend jinxed us by joking that having a ‘superspreader wedding’ would be ‘retro’. We found this out on our honeymoon, meaning I spent a good chunk of the trip wobbling to French pharmacies saying the word ‘covid’ in a vaguely French accent and hoping that would magically summon tests, masks, and medicine, while Phil spent a good chunk of the trip in bed. A month or so later, I told an older relative about it and she replied, ‘Oh god, weren’t you so frustrated with him?’ It took me a second to register what she was asking; when I said that I hadn’t been, she laughed: ‘Just wait – in the future you’ll find it annoying’.

I have no doubt that this conversation was meant with only good intentions: to make light of the situation and to welcome me into a new society of married women, who can always bond by complaining about their husbands. But the implication seemed to be that the only reason I didn’t want to complain about my husband was because I was newly married, so I didn’t know how annoying he was yet.

The ‘honeymoon phase’ isn’t just for marriage: it seems to apply to everything. New relationships are the obvious parallel, but it also comes up in conversations about children, work, moving to a new city – basically anything new that could be something long-term. A search of Reddit’s main pregnancy board turns up a number of posts complaining about being told ‘enjoy it while it lasts’ any time they stay out late or get special treatment for being pregnant: ‘as soon as the baby comes it’s gone’. A recent episode of My Brother, My Brother, and Me bemoaned the compulsion to tell parents about how fast the time with their children will go, and how much worse it will get when they’re older, implying, as one of the hosts explains, ‘that I don’t love my kids enough now, and that I won’t love them later’. The first day I complained to my new coworkers about something at work, they said, ‘Moved past the honeymoon phase, then?’

I think people talk about the honeymoon phase, or enjoying things while they last, for a few reasons. The first is just to have something to say, honestly. Small talk isn’t always easy and sometimes you just recite ubiquitous phrases. Today I had a conversation with a stranger about man flu, a thing I don’t think exists, because it seemed The Thing to Say. The second is that people who are dissatisfied with their own lives like to burst other people’s bubbles. And sometimes your life does get worse, and you want that to be universal – it helps, somehow, to feel like it was inevitable. The last is that we’re all suckers for nostalgia. The past is suffused with a rosy glow, and is precious in its irretrievability. Once I’ve been married a lot longer, I’ll look back fondly on this time; I might have smoothed it over in my memory to seem favourable in comparison to my current life.

But being told to enjoy something while it lasts gives the happiness and contentment of an early thing an expiration date. It injects self-doubt and anxiety into what should be a good time, prompting you to distrust your own happiness and, in doing so, creates the pattern it describes. The honeymoon phase seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The closer I get to my thirties, the more I’ve been noticing the ubiquity of cultural scripts of decline – the general expectation that things get worse over time, inevitably, and to believe otherwise can only be a product of a lack of experience. It’s the trope of being older and wiser – you’ve seen enough ‘real life’ to ‘know better’. (My question is: know better than to what?)

With regards to marriage, these cultural scripts are everywhere. They’re in the phrase ‘ball and chain’. They’re in those wedding cake toppers where one of the partners (usually the groom) is running away, or being ‘dragged to the altar’. We see marriage represented in media in sitcoms, trotting out the usual points of conflict: wife never lets husband do hobbies, wife never wants to have sex, husband never wants to do housework, husband kind of a buffoon, husband a bad parent. I know these are all jokes – they’re exaggerated for comic effect – but they’re exaggerated from real attitudes around marriage and when they’re the dominant cultural representation we have of marriage, they colour our view of the institution.

A couple months ago I watched Death Comes to Pemberley, and was really moved by its depiction of Lizzie and Darcy’s relationship after their wedding – it was romantic in a way you don’t often see. I figured there must be a market for people who want media about love stories within marriage, so went hunting for more of it – and I couldn’t find anything. As with the sitcoms, I think this is probably because stories – funny or not – need conflict, and the easiest way to have conflict in a story about marriage is to make the marriage a bad one. But the fact remains that many of our cultural scripts of love and romance end at marriage; and the cultural scripts of marriage are that it’s frustrating and boring, or a game to win. These scripts makes marriage seem like the death knell of a fun, good relationship, when actually marriage can be really nice. (It’s not the be all end all of your earthly existence, but I don’t think it’s something to actively avoid, either.)

Broader cultural scripts of decline eat away at your other future possibilities too – kids will ruin your marriage, age will ruin your looks, your adult responsibilities will ruin your freedom, your boring desk job will destroy your soul. So we fight against tying ourselves to anything that might pull us into decline, trying always to look and feel like our 20-year-old selves even when it makes us miserable. (Imagine my surprise when my life became so much better after I realised I actually did want to “sell out” instead of suffering for the sake of a career I’d arbitrarily assigned as more meaningful and legitimate.) Then we watch TikToks where people say ‘actually being thirty is so good’ and read studies about how old people have better sex, which somehow feels worth reporting because it defies our expectations that everything is always getting worse. I’m not saying things never get worse, just that they don’t have to, and that when life gets hard, the good things in your life can stay good. Your happiness isn’t zero sum; I think it’s important to trust that the happiness you have when you’ve found something good can stay – it’s not a trick, and you aren’t stupid for believing in it.

Then again, I don’t know anything.² I’m only 27. I’ve only been married a year. It’s possible that everything I’ve written is just a product of youthful ignorance. Experience tells me I’ll always look back on my younger self and think I knew nothing – even if what I didn’t know is that everything will be okay. But I’d rather live in this ignorant optimism, believing that my life will be the exception to our cultural scripts of decline, than believe the decline is inevitable and watch for it everywhere: giving every disagreement with my husband, every new wrinkle or ache, every stressful day at work, every sleepless night with kids, the significance of confirmation. Confirmation is dangerous. It takes the normal difficult moments of life and transforms them into a pattern, a pattern by which we interpret reality until our reality is only hard times and we miss all the joy, except when we’re looking back and see that it was there at the time – so enjoy it while you can.

1. This would be less true if my husband were less wonderful – happy anniversary, babe.

2. If you want to read about marriage from someone who knows what they’re talking about, Ada Calhoun’s Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give is the most simultaneously beautiful and realistic picture of marriage I’ve ever read. It should come included with engagement rings, like a Happy Meal toy.