Q: How much leave should a honeymoon really take? Is a week enough?
A: The conclusion first — the length of leave you can secure is usually not the crux; the crux is what you want the honeymoon to accomplish.
If the task is reward: the wedding is over, body and spirit spent, and you want somewhere beautiful in which to lie flat and recover — then seven days is enough, and better still nine, with two of them given over purely to sleep. This kind of honeymoon suits one place explored deeply: an island, or an inn in the mountains, the luggage unpacked only once, the wear of moving on reduced to nothing.
If the task is an opening: to treat the honeymoon as the marriage’s first proper journey, with a little sense of narrative — then it is worth fighting for twelve to sixteen days, in two movements. The first holds substance: a journey, a city, a stretch of savannah. The second is pure blank space: by the sea or in the hills, going nowhere at all. First you experience together, then you digest together, and the rhythm runs like a complete piece of music.
There is only one plan we will talk you out of: the grand honeymoon tour that crams four countries into ten days. What a honeymoon has most to fear is not being short but being hurried. The fatigue of rushing falls precisely on the patience of two people — and the patience of those days is worth keeping for each other, not for the check-in desk.
One last observation, from many years of watching: the density of a honeymoon’s memories has little to do with the number of days and everything to do with whether there were a few stretches of time with nothing arranged at all. What you will return to again in years to come is, most likely, not some sight but a certain morning on a balcony — two cups of coffee, no plan, talking until you nearly missed lunch.
So make it any length you like — but do, please, leave room for a few of those mornings. They are the honeymoon’s main feature.