For a lot of couples, getting married means hosting a big--and exhausting--celebration. Family members from all over will join together to eat delicious food, cry tears of joy for the couple, dance the night away, and head home just in time to miss the cleanup.
What happens the day after? Well, everyone's experience is different. These married folks shared their own experiences to give us an idea of what the day after getting married is really like!
[Source listed at the end of the article.]
So Much Good Food
“We slept ’till noon, then had brunch at our favorite restaurant, Stroud’s, and ordered their superb fried chicken and cinnamon rolls. We came home, unwrapped some wedding gifts, carefully preserved my wife’s dress and our hand-fasting string, and spent the evening watching the season finale of British Bake Off with our dogs.
Obviously some private time in there too.”
Second Time’s A Charm
“I’m older now and on my second marriage, and it’s been great. My first marriage was bad in a lot of ways. I don’t even remember my first marriage. We likely just went back to work the day after our wedding. No honeymoon trip or anything.
But the second was intimacy all the time, like rabbits. This was a change from when we were just dating and not together all the time, but not necessarily in a bad way. We still do that 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’re together all the time, the intimacy is great and expected. But it’s 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 interest in 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 with 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.”
Good Times
“My wife and I spent the day driving to New York City, and then spent the night we got there eating Thai food and shopping around the Times Square area. Between eating and shopping, we took a nap in our hotel room at The W Times Square.
Our reception had gone late the night before, and once we got back to our hotel from the reception, we spent more time with our best friends having a few drinks and just kicking it. My wife ended up falling asleep halfway through that while I just stayed up.
By the time everyone left our room, it was after 3 am. I was just laying down getting ready to sleep when my wife wakes up around 5 am. We decided to just pack up and head out, and spent the next 8 hours driving to NYC. I was running on no sleep and my wife had gotten maybe 2 hours at most.
The entire drive consisted of me driving for 30 min to an hour, switching with my wife, and her doing the same. I don’t know how we found the energy to do anything once we arrived that night but I think it was the combination of us being newlyweds and that neither of us had ever been to NYC that kept us awake. We have a thing for taking road trips so driving 8 hours to see New York City was pretty cool. We both have the wanderlust bug!”
Netflix And Chill
“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 2 came out the day after our wedding! We spent the entire day alternating between Netflix, Chinese take out, and doing the dirty stuff. We finished the whole season of Stranger Things and got pretty silly over the course of the day.
Honestly, it might have been the best day of my life. It was way better than the actual wedding day–which was also great!”
I’ve Made A Huge Mistake
“The day after our wedding, 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.
I had realized over the course of the wedding, during which my husband stood by as his family intentionally ruined the entire event, that he was not who I thought he was. Suddenly I knew he was not the man I wanted to marry.
My thinking was, if the officiant sent me the license and didn’t file it, at least the marriage wouldn’t be legal 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.”
Leave Us Alone, Mom!
“Mostly, we tried to get some private time 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, because 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 be with 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 an well-meaning but over-interfering Jewish 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 and I could both cook for ourselves. Until then she’d keep coming around to our house with pies, casseroles, lasagna, etc., ‘just in case you were missing home cooking.'”
They Should Have Stayed In Puerto Rico
“We ate breakfast at the Bed and Breakfast where we hosted our reception the night before. We paid the final bill and began the drive home. We were married about 8 hours from our house. So we spent our first day road tripping home.
The next day we got on an airplane and flew to Puerto Rico, and had a honeymoon for about a week. We returned home to a grey rainy cold late fall day that was almost a metaphor for the next couple years of our lives. But, 8 years later we are still together and have been through a lot together.”
A Very Slow Truck, And A Place To Settle Down
“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 just enjoyed our private time.
The next day, the moving guy showed up, and 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 upset 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 company 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 fiancee 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 terrible. On flat or downhill terrain, it was fine.
Before long, we had a train of cars behind us in the West Virginia mountains, clearly all despising us. 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 3 hours, but in that truck it took us 7.
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 4 of us (my wife and I, her friend and her fiancée), plus two caged birds, without a place to stay. Hotels won’t let us stay with our pet 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 incompetent building manager 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 away in 2014. I miss her.”
Oh Right, We Have Kids
“I cleaned the event space, turned in the recycling, took the trash to the dump, packed the hotel room and took all our stuff to her parents house, shuttled friends to the airport, saw my family off, and then spent the evening hanging out with our kids who we really hadn’t seen much in the two days leading up to the wedding.
It was exhausting. The whole thing. A week of constant back and forth to do a million tasks a day for a week, then a really fun ceremony/reception, then more work, then the 14-hour drive home with a 2 year old and 1 year old. I was so happy to get home and flop in my own bed since I hadn’t spent two consecutive nights in the same bed that whole week.”
One Hour Until Take-off
“We accidentally woke up at 5:10 am for a 6:30 am flight to our honeymoon at an airport 75 miles away–from downtown Austin, Texas to San Antonio.
We looked at each other in bed: “Crap.”
We went into maximum speed mode, and were packed and out the door in about 10 minutes. We actually broke into the valet stand to get our keys because no one was around, and paid for the damages later. We sped like there was no tomorrow and made it to the airport with a little time to spare, not really sure how.
We found some food and wedding cake that they had packed for us in the car that we didn’t notice the night before, so had a nice little breakfast on the way. The airline made a mistake, and so we got a 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.”
Nothing Too Memorable
“We woke up and ate breakfast at the Bed and Breakfast we were staying at. Then we went to the place we had our reception the day before to pick up some stuff. We packed our car up and drove back to our apartment. It was a Sunday so we had to get home for work the next day.
You know, I have a pretty good memory, but this was over 20 years ago and I can’t remember exactly what we did. I’m thinking we probably stopped for fast food on the way home or went out to buy some groceries, then watched some TV or used the computer before going to bed. All in all, a pretty standard day.”
All You Need Is Family
“At that time we lived in a large home in the country and married in our beautiful backyard. We were surrounded by flowers, trees, and a pond, and it was just magical. Several friends and relatives spent the night.
My husband and I spent our wedding night with his 2 young stepsons sleeping between us, and we held hands over their pillows. It doesn’t sound romantic to others, but I wouldn’t change it. Those boys’ names are engraved on my ring.
My hubby got up very early to make his deeeeeelicious cinnamon pecan rolls. So everybody woke up to that smell. It was a day of hiking in the gorgeous woods, singing birds, fresh coffee, friends and family. We spent the day hanging out and being thankful for all these people.
We recently celebrated ten years together.”
The Internship
“I left for the Netherlands for a 6 month 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.”