Why I Don’t Believe In The Honeymoon Period

To clarify, I don’t mean the period after which a couple has gotten married, but more so the first few months that a couple embark on a relationship. It is a common notion that when you first meet your partner, the beginning is supposed to be ‘bliss’, aka free of arguments and upset and should simply involve you floating on cloud nine on a daily basis.

‘These are the best times in a relationship, before anything gets serious and you’re just obsessed with each other and wanting to be together as often as possible.’

 I couldn’t agree less with this statement and general view. When you first meet someone, you have absolutely no idea what they are like except for the fact you have a mutual attraction to each other. You don’t know anything about their family, and upbringing, what their friends are like, how many past relationships they have and how they treated their partners, what their work ethic is, their religious views, what their biggest fears are,  how ambitious they are. When you first meet someone, you get to know them slowly, and usually they only reveal their best characteristics first (and could be why people think the first few months should be the best ones, as you’re not really with a ‘real’ version of yourself, more just a projection of the best possible version of yourself that you wish to be and for others to see.

At the start of any relationship, whatever age you meet, you are flung together with someone (albeit normally by choice) and expected to click and get along straight off the bat. If you think of all the other types of relationships you have in life: colleagues, friends, housemates – have any of those relationships started that way? Or has it taken a bit of time to warm to the person, get to know them and what makes them tick, and then finally, when you’ve sussed each other out, you can feel like you’ve ‘clicked.’

The same goes for relationships and it’s something I am experiencing in my relationship at the moment, especially as we are both from two very different worlds. We are using this ‘honeymoon period’ to suss each other out. And whilst that does involve some good times, it also involves some less good times were we realise we don’t agree on some things, or have different outlooks to life, or discover things about our past that we don’t like. But personally, I would rather be upfront and honest and lay my cards on the table at the very start of a relationship than to be a fake version of myself until a year into the relationship and then realise we just aren’t compatible. I would rather have a period of figuring each other out and aligning with one another, and then have a potential lifetime of a honeymoon period, than the other way around.

I’m not saying that everybody behaves in this way, but I think so many of us are fixated with having a perfect relationship at the beginning, that if anything arises that we don’t like, such as how we behave with people of the opposite sex whilst in a relationship, we keep schtum and try to act ‘cool’ and ‘carefree’ thinking that this is how an ideal boyfriend/girlfriend should be and to avoid any conflict. What this actually does is give the other person in the relationship the false idea that you are happy with how they behave around people of the opposite sex and so they will continue to do so, until, a year into the relationship you can’t hold in how much it pisses you off and you flip. Perhaps that leads to a breakdown in a relationship, perhaps it leads to a break, perhaps it leads to a realisation that you are too misaligned to work. Whatever it does, I firmly believe that the sooner this happens the better. Surely it’s better to suss out you’re not right for each other as early on as possible so as not to waste both of your time? Or even better, surely it’s better to raise the fact you don’t like how they behave early on so you can work through the issue together when you are both calm(ish) and find a way to move forward with it positively. Cue a calm and stress free time, instead of pent up and anxious 12 months that are portrayed as your ‘picture perfect honeymoon period’ months.

To my ever faithful readers – what are your thoughts on this? Do you believe the honeymoon period should exist at the start?