When it comes to getting married, there’s no right way to do it. Now, there are wrong ways to do it—just ask several of the Redditors in question who spent their first marital days looking for divorce courts—but that doesn’t mean newlyweds don’t each have their own version of non-bedroom fun. If the couple in question are comics fans, why shouldn’t they spend their first morning in a comic shop? If they both are adrenaline junkies, why not party outside of a biker camp? And sometimes, after the chaos of a wedding, a simple trip to a fast-food restaurant, sleeping in, and doing nothing is the best wedding gift they can give themselves. Whatever way they write it, it’s love. Here are 42 honeymooning stories about every which way married people spent the first day after their wedding.
1. Just Roll With It
Well, I got married while camping at a motorcycle rally. It wasn't exactly planned. We took the paperwork to the courthouse, went for about a 100-mile loop through West Virginia, then hung out at the campfire with about 50 of our new "friends" we met the day before. There was no official ceremony or anything.
Then we were up all night, freezing cold and scared, laying in a tiny pop-up tent while an insane thunderstorm was going on. The next day we were miserable.
On a side note, there were about 25 or 30 people at our "wedding", all of whom we had met about two hours before.
It wasn't exactly how I thought I would get married, but it definitely wasn't how I planned on spending my honeymoon either.
2. DIY Honeymoon
We were renting two apartments at the time because we were in the process of moving. So we dumped off all our gifts at the new place, which was pretty much empty. We also brought all the leftover booze from the reception. So we just drank and opened gifts.
3. Not Ready for My Close-Up
My in-laws organized a family photo session for friggin’ 10 AM, because his family is so spread apart that we never get to all be together. The pics were great, but I wanted to just sleep in my (ridiculously expensive) hotel room until like two minutes before check out.
4. A Walk in Our Shoes
Slept in late and got the subway down to Chinatown. We walked from Chinatown to Midtown, stopping for pizza at Lombardi's. We gave up around Times Square and got the subway back to our apartment around midnight. Probably boring for most people, but kinda cool for us because we came out to New York for the first time. We're from Australia.
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5. Do It Again
We woke up, cried a little because we were so overwhelmed from the amazing wedding we had, banged, napped, banged again, opened presents, went to dinner, played pool, drank some brews, banged again, watched Chopped, then went to sleep. 12/10 would do again.
6. The Bald Truth
My brand new husband shaved his head for the first time without telling me. I had no idea I'd married Mr. Clean.
7. Munch Squad
We slept 'till noon, had brunch at Stroud's (superb fried chicken and cinnamon rolls), unwrapped some wedding gifts, carefully preserved her dress and our handfasting string, and spent the evening watching the season finale of The Great British Bake Off with our dogs. Obviously some private time in there too.
8. A Storm of Love
We had an early morning evacuation from our hotel, spent the early afternoon finding a new hotel to stay at, until finally taking a nap. Woke for dinner and went back to bed. Thank you, Hurricane Nate!
9. Dance Dance
Woke up crazily hungover. Lost wife's mobile phone in the taxi home, got home and slept the afternoon away, then made wife's young niece and nephew have a dance-off, which we filmed.
10. Snip, Clip, and Let It Rip
I went to get my hair cut. I had been growing it long for over a year to have an updo at the wedding. Lopped that off short while my husband went to our nephew's birthday party (now in town because, well, wedding). I picked him up and we drove straight from there to the airport to catch our flight to Paris for our honeymoon.
11. From Wedding Bells to School Bells
He had an exam the next day that the professor wouldn’t move. So we had brunch with the family and he studied and I unpacked. After his exam though, we went to a very nice restaurant for dinner and the next day got a very relaxing couples’ massage.
12. A Mother’s Job Is Never Done
Trying to hook up without my mother getting in the way. Our wedding night was the first time we'd “gone all the way,” and it was an intense emotional experience. The next day we just wanted to play and explore, learn how to please each other with a bit less pressure. But it was a bit awkward. We had not left for our honeymoon yet, and my parents insisted on joining us for breakfast and then staying for lunch.
At two in the afternoon, I had to basically kick them out with a polite, “Go away. I want to shag my wife now.” They came back for dinner in the evening, too. It was only on the next day that we were finally able to get down to some uninterrupted enjoyment of marital bliss without the pressure of my parents wanting to eat with us.
I should point out that I have a well-meaning but over-interfering mother, and if she could have stayed there in the bedroom with us to give advice on technique, she would probably have done so. Only when I appeared to still be alive and well after about five years of marriage did she finally accept that my wife could cook and feed me.
Until then she'd keep coming around to our house with pies, casseroles, lasagna, etc. “just in case you were missing home cooking.”
13. Love is a Highway
We were poor, and it was 1989. We couldn't afford a honeymoon, so our plan was to crash on the couch in her parent's house and pack the remaining stuff from her room and put it in a truck with a moving guy. But my best man had heard about our plans and paid for a hotel room for us so at least we could have a bed. So on our wedding night, we got busy like crazy.
The next day, the moving guy showed up. It was an extremely unpleasant surprise. He must have been 102 years old if he was a day. He also showed up in a 1950s-style Ford pickup truck that gave off blue smoke and was WAAAAY smaller than we needed. My mother-in-law had hired him and was super mad when he showed up. Obviously, he couldn't do much lifting, and since his pickup truck was way too small, it was moot.
So we had to find a truck and had to find it fast because I had to go to work the next day, which was 400 miles away. We scrambled, called every Hertz, Ryder, Axis, and fly-by-night rental companies within 200 miles to find a 20' truck or higher with an automatic transmission. Zero. Finally, we found one company that had one, but it was a manual.
My wife's best friend had a fiancé who could drive a stick. So he got the truck, packed everything (the truck had last hauled a lot of seafood to West Virginia, so it stank something fierce) and made the 400-mile drive from Keyser, WV to Alexandria, VA (next to DC). And the truck could ONLY go 25 mph up hills because the transmission was garbage. On flat or downhill terrain, it was fine.
OMG, we had a train of cars behind us that hated us in the West Virginia mountains. We frequently had to pull off to the side of the road to let miles of cars pass us before we got back on the road. Normally, the trip would have taken about three hours, but it took us seven. We got to our brand-new apartment only to find out the keys they gave us didn't work, and their maintenance doesn't work weekends.
Now there are four of us (my wife and I, her friend and her fiancé), plus two caged birds, without a place to stay. Hotels won't let us stay with the birds, despite them being caged zebra finches. Eventually, I said I'd sleep in the truck in the parking lot with the birds, and the other three could sleep in a hotel, which one hotel was okay with. Later that night, we just snuck the birds in.
The next day, I had to go to work, while my wife had to deal with the apartment folks. Because the cars and truck were left in the heat of the summer, our wedding topper melted all over the place, and that was a mess. Then finally, after the apartment complex figured out what was going on, the gang got our stuff moved in.
Believe it or not, we stayed married 25 years. We only separated because she passed in 2014. I miss her.
14. The One-Too-Many of Honor
Went outside to find that all of our insanely hungover friends had broken into the potato salad/pulled pork leftovers and were eating straight from the chafing dishes with forks. We then recruited them to help stack chairs.
15. Distances Makes the Heart Grow Fonder
I drank alone in the hotel bar. My wife got incredibly sick. Violently throwing up from an incredible migraine. By 4 pm we had to make the room completely black and free of any sound. She told me to go to the bar, I got dinner, ordered her some to take back, and drank while chatting up the bartender and telling her how awful I felt about my wife.
I drank enough to fall asleep by 8 pm and we were both wide awake (and her feeling better) by 2 am. We called the front desk, ordered a late checkout, and watched The Magicians season 1 on Netflix in bed.
16. Diagnosed with Honeymoon Blues
I ended up in the hospital with a large ovarian cyst that had been hurting me for two weeks at that point. I left my own wedding early because I was close to passing out.
17. Go With the Second Take
I'm older now and on second marriage that has been great. First marriage sucked in a lot of ways. I don't even remember the first marriage. We likely just went back to work after that first marriage. No honeymoon trip or anything. But the second was intimacy all the time, like rabbits. But I realize now in reading the comments that it does change.
Not necessarily in a bad way because we still do stuff almost every day in one form or another, but the urgency isn't there like it was. A while ago it was almost desperate. Now that we are together all the time, the intimacy is great and expected. But not like you are deprived of something you can't get enough of. It's a little more comfortable, but still... great!
I think I prefer it to desperation. I'm around 50 years old now and I have no designs on chasing that desperation with a different woman just to get that desperation back. I really like what have with my wife. I have always been crazy about her, even when I'm angry about her. The guys that chase and cheat I don't get. But maybe I got lucky. Lucky to have a woman I love and trust.
18. Binge Wedding
We rented a hotel room for our wedding night and the following night within walking distance of our venue, and it just so happens that Stranger Things season 2 came out the day after our wedding! We spent the entire day alternating between Netflix, Chinese takeout, and doing the dirty. Finished the whole season of Stranger Things and got pretty tipsy.
Honestly, it miiiight have been the best day of my life... like way better than the actual wedding day (which was also great!)
19. Should’ve Said I Don’t
The day after, we somberly cleaned up, drove home (we rented a big house turned wedding venue on a lake a couple of hours away), and I debated contacting the officiant to not send in the marriage license. My thinking was, if the officiant sent me the license and didn't file it, at least the marriage wouldn't be real, and we wouldn't have to get a divorce.
I knew I was making a mistake as we were actually getting married and still went through with it, so I decided to let the license be filed and sleep in the bed I made for myself. The wedding was awful for us. At least I don't think our guests could tell what was going on. My husband called his parents the next day to confront them about what they did at our wedding, but they started yelling at him and he hung up.
He offered to let me go on our honeymoon alone if I didn't want to go with him. The first few days I didn't sleep. We didn't really speak to each other. It felt like we were zombies. We left for a week-long honeymoon in Puerta Vallarta a few days after the wedding and started actually interacting again. The wedding was seven months ago, and it's been rough.
We're finally both in therapy individually and together. We haven't looked at the photos or video and don't talk about the wedding.
20. Not Getting Down to Business
Friends of mine spent their first night in a cabin a few hours from the venue. Their first day was spent flying then driving to a place in Colorado, where they had to hike the rest of the way to their final stop. Then they slept. I'm told there was no action until day two, and then it was fumbling around trying to figure things out. That plus nervousness meant no actual consummation until day four.
They both come from very religious families.
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21. Cleanliness is Next to Romance
We had to go clean the reception venue, hungover, with our two-year-old.
22. Love in 40 Panels
We stopped at the comic shop to buy some new comics the way to the reception (a small dinner for eight at the pub, wife of my father bailed...) and so after going to the casino post-supper, we went to the hotel and read comics. She was pregnant so it's not like hooking up was a priority... the next day we went for a drive and read more comics...
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23. That Was Fast
We got into an argument about why we didn't sleep together on our wedding night, then had really bad intimacy before breakfast. About to finalize our divorce!
24. Romance of Errors
The power outlet in our car had stopped working on the trip to the wedding. We had a backup that was not intended to be a backup in the form of a solar charger, but it was grossly insufficient for the task of keeping a phone charged while using GPS. This will turn out to be a mildly important plot development. The day after we got married, we woke up and packed our things in the hotel and dropped them off with my parents.
Then we made a quick stop at an outdoor store and set off for Denver, Colorado from Amarillo, Texas. With little more than a glance at the Cadillac Ranch, we set out on I-40, heading west. Now anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of American geography probably knows that Colorado is north of Texas. I was certainly aware of that fact, and yet I still chose to go west.
This was because I'd briefly glanced at a physical map and noticed that the I-25 connected Albuquerque with Denver, where the most obvious direct route required a few interchanges. A road trip consisting of a single major turn and following only interstates means it's pretty easy to stay on course. And so we drove west. And drove. And drove some more.
Four hours later, my decrepit little orange Cobalt screamed out of the hills east of Albuquerque, and the first major sign of civilization unfolded on the plain before us, promising, among other things, a decent place to stop and eat. Nothing struck our fancy until we'd made our first turn of the trip, merging onto I-25 for the long northern slog. As the city warned us to give way, our hunger had grown to the point that it could not be ignored for long.
Rather than risk pushing until we'd give in to the siren song of a Dairy Queen, we pulled off for Cracker Barrel. After ordering, my brand-new wife disappeared to the restroom and I pulled out my phone. In boredom, I opened the map and looked out our route so far, this time giving it more than a glance. I realized that my vague recollection from the map had been incorrect.
See, Denver is slightly west of Amarillo, so heading west for a time made at least a bit of sense. It does not, however, lay four hours at highway speed to the west. A few trip estimates from Google confirmed what I'd just seen. We were almost exactly as far from Denver as we'd been the minute we set out. When my wife returned, I shared the news. She thought it was funny.
We made one more stop before leaving Albuquerque behind, this time at a Wal-Mart where we secured an archaic paper map. It took ten hours to get to Denver from there. We outran a brutal rainstorm on a stretch of highway bisecting a stretch of grass so empty that the whole world seemed to be just us, the car, and the rain. Night fell before we hit the mountains, but even in the dark, there was a sense of weight to the world.
Thirteen hours in, we stopped for gas and a few things to keep us going for the last stretch, and nearly sixteen hours after we set out on an eight hour trip, we arrived at our motel on the west side of Denver, gnawing on the remains of some of the worst jerky I've ever tasted. The motel politely informed us that they didn't have room. We pointed out that we'd reserved a room, even paid for it.
The motel agreed that this had been the case but offered no explanation beyond a shrug and an offer to refund the price of the room we couldn't stay in (at least not without a bit of a fuss.) After a bit of negotiation, they agreed to return the money at some point and suggested a different motel down the road, and so we set out again, this time annoyed enough to seriously consider creating a Yelp account in order to complain into the void of the internet.
It took several stops before we found a motel with a room. That one had a Denny's in the parking lot, and so we were able to take some solace in improvement from the promised "free continental breakfast" at the first place. Exhausted, we dragged our things into the room, and after engaging in the usual newlywed activity with the sort of ferocity that you'll only find when newly married, slightly angry, and tired beyond reason, we blacked out.
25. Love is the Best Severance Package
Right after the ceremony, we went to our favorite local diner for some tasty breakfast. All we did the next day was hook up and eat cake cause my wife got fired for taking her wedding day off.
26. You May Not Kiss the Bondsman
Posted bail for the wedding party; paid for damages to the hall.
27. Jet-Set for Heartbreak
I left for the Netherlands for a six months long internship, literally the day after the wedding. We cried at the airport and said goodbye. She visited me three times during that time, which was nice. Now we are together, but my next internship is coming soon. For one whole year. This time I’m taking her with me.
28. No Stopping the Fun (for Them)
Went to work. We were working on a cruise ship and made arrangements to get our shifts covered just to have the ceremony.
29. The Best Score is the High Score
Drove 13 hours for our honeymoon and got plastered, played some GameCube and had some good pizza when we finally got there.
30. We Don’t Need Any More
We got married in a courthouse. We went home. We changed out of our clothes into lazy clothes. We took a nap. We remembered our Applebee’s gift card from his work to congratulate us on our marriage. We put on nicer lazy clothes. We went to Applebee’s.
31. Get Something Off Her Chest
So my wife has metal rods in her back for scoliosis and the day before and the day of our wedding she was having some pretty serious back pain, bad enough that she was pretty desperate for some relief. My brother had some seriously strong painkillers that she only ended up taking at the very end of the night because she was basically crying from the pain and couldn't sleep.
Let's just say they sure as heck did the trick because she was out pretty damn fast after that. They also made her feel loopy. I'm sharing this because it's relevant to what happens later. So she wakes up at the crack of dawn still feeling pretty good, we get intimate, and then she flops off to the side. The pain starts coming back so she figures she'll just take some Tylenol quick to be able to sleep a bit longer.
We wake up a couple of hours later, and she realizes she feels really loopy still, then notices she grabbed the wrong pill earlier, so she basically doubled up on the heavy painkiller. Well, at least she isn't hurting, right? We shower and get dressed and head down to get a quick little breakfast at the little hotel breakfast bar. This hotel was really nice, but the breakfast bar was still pretty basic junk, basically waffles and like cold scrambled eggs, though maybe they were just cold because we were getting up kinda late.
We try to eat something before we get the day underway, and she realizes she feels awful, totally nauseous and the lazy breakfast just makes it worse. We get on the road, heading back to my parents' house and she is just about totally silent and clearly doing pretty rough. We get to the neighborhood, and she says she thinks she's gonna barf but can probably keep it down until we get there.
I should have just stopped immediately but we were only like 100 feet from the house. I make the turn onto their street, and she just explodes all over her chest, stomach, arms, and purse. Yet somehow for all she let out, she only managed to get herself, nothing on the seat or the floor. I pull into the driveway and she manages to keep it all contained and not make a mess as she promptly heads upstairs to take a shower.
Somehow, she never ran into anyone on the way there, so I'm literally the only one that saw what a mess she was. She felt pretty good after spilling her guts and getting another shower in. Then we had an actual breakfast that didn't suck with my family and her parents in the backyard and spent the rest of the day at the aquarium with them.
32. Settling into a Routine
He unloaded a moving van all by himself then went to work. I spent the day sick in bed, alternating between sleeping and throwing up. It was magical.
33. Easy Come, Easy Go
Had a three-person wedding at the courthouse. Went to dinner afterward where her parents and only one of mine presented themselves. Went home, got in a huge fight. She slept in bed, I slept on the couch and it pretty well downhill from there. Let this be a lesson. It cost $150 to get married but about $5,000 to get divorced. Don't waste the money on getting married. You don't need some piece of paper to show how much you love someone.
34. Dearly Beloved and Departed
We woke up at 5:10 AM for a 6:30 AM flight to our honeymoon at an airport 75 miles away—downtown Austin to San Antonio. Packed and out the door in about two minutes. Broke open the valet stand to get our keys because no one was around (paid for damages later). Hustled and made it with a little time to spare, not really sure how.
Found some food and wedding cake that they had packed for us in the car that we didn't notice the night before, so we had a nice little breakfast on the way. Free upgrade to first class. We were on a daybed on a beach in Mexico by lunchtime. We never would have booked a flight that early, but the airline we were booked on originally pulled out of Austin and options were extremely limited.
It was a great first challenge as a married couple, and a story we've told many times.
35. High Expectations
We had breakfast with all the family, drove home, opened presents & cards and basically just kept saying, "Yep, we're married." We both agreed also that we felt kinda sad, we'd been organizing the day for so long & it went perfectly. We enjoyed it SO much that we were gutted it ended. First official anniversary next July, although we will have been together ten years in September.
36. Let It Go
My husband and I both woke up with the flu. So we spent the entire day vomiting and defecating our brains out.
37. Bonus Achievement
Went back inside the house and proceeded to get on the computer again. It wasn't that special of a day. Got married in the front yard by an officiant.
38. Share the Love
Ordered $48 dollars’ worth of Domino's Pizza for delivery and paid the delivery man with a 3-inch bunch of singles from the dollar dance, including a 50% tip.
39. Start a Marriage With Good Cinema
Started a The Land Before Time movie marathon that lasted the first couple days of our honeymoon.
40. Extra Wedding Gift
Flew home from Vegas, stopped at a pharmacy on the way back from the airport for a pregnancy test, found out we were pregnant. Kid still hasn't done the math, as far as we know.
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41. Head over Head in Love
We went for brunch with the wedding party then went home and had a quiet afternoon. My wife was feeling very hungover, although we later made a chilling discovery: she had a headache because she had gained a concussion the day before the wedding after she hit her head on a fireplace.
42. Three’s a Crowd
I enjoyed sleeping alone on my wedding night while my new bride cheated on me, great stuff.
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