Medicine: Honeymooners, Beware

The wrong way to begin a marriage is with a honeymoon. So says British Psychiatrist (and Member of Parliament) Reginald Bennett in The Practitioner: “The honeymoon is an ordeal. More often than not it is a ghastly disappointment, and one whose personal humiliations no excuses … can mitigate. All too often the girl, if she had been a good girl has lacked any semblance of learning in what to expect … The naughty girl has gradually learned through experiment. So the wages of sin is serenity and the wages of virtue—shock, plus a married life endangered from the start . ._ ” [After] the sheer fatigue of the weddin day [there is] inevitably a long evening or night’s traveling to complete the exhaustion. Strange circumstances in a distant hotel; a good deal of alcohol perhaps, or worse, the hangover from it six hours ago—these all make the [male] as . . . ineffectual as[he] is ever likely to be In addition, the lore of the honeymoon—the vast repertory of awful jokes, none dignified—may be added to the anxiety … At best there may be a hopeless anxious fumbling effort, certain to complete the rout of a tense, frightened ashamed and embarrassed girl. . . Indeed it almost seems wonderful that any marriages have ever survived!”