Honeymoon

The honeymoon is presented as a short-lived suspension between a young woman’s former life and the social reality of marriage. It offers temporary distance from everyday surroundings, but cannot resolve the anxieties of separation, sexual initiation, and a future that may seem already decided for her.

A Pause Between Two Conditions

The account places the honeymoon after marriage, when the young woman has been thrust into adult life by a transition that combines delight, surrender, duty, pity, and fear. This upheaval is not simply a private romantic episode: it gathers the uncertainties of sexual initiation and the passage from one social condition to another. The honeymoon’s celebratory atmosphere is said to serve, in part, to hide that confusion.

For a few weeks, the bride is removed from her everyday world and temporarily cut off from ordinary social connections. The interval makes her seem suspended from her usual place in space, time, and reality. Yet the pause is provisional. Sooner or later, she must return to the social world and take her place in a new home.

Separation and Return

The move into marriage also separates the young woman from her family. Her ties to her father’s home, especially to her mother, are often stronger than her ties to her husband. Leaving can therefore feel like a definitive weaning: an experience of abandonment mingled with the vertigo of freedom. How painful the break is depends partly on whether she has already loosened her attachment to her family or remains under its protection.

Even when she has wanted to leave, the bride may feel disoriented by the loss of the small society in which she grew up. She is cut off from her past and from the familiar principles and unquestioned values of childhood. The honeymoon’s temporary escape does not prevent this return to ordinary life; it delays, rather than removes, the encounter with her changed condition.

The Limits of the Honeymoon

The book does not treat the honeymoon as proof that marriage fulfils the bride. Only an ardent and complete erotic life could restore for her the peace of immanence, but the account says that a young woman is usually more disturbed than fulfilled at first. The success or failure of sexual initiation adds to her confusion rather than automatically resolving it.

After the wedding, many women experience reactions compared to those surrounding their first menstruation: disgust at a bodily revelation of femininity and horror at the prospect of its recurrence. The day-after disappointment is also connected to marriage itself. Even when a woman has already had sexual experience, marriage may represent her full entry into adult life; reaching that threshold can therefore leave her asking what comes next. The decisive problem is not simply whether the honeymoon is pleasant, but whether the life that follows allows her to retain a hold on her own future.

A Larger Account of Women's Time

The honeymoon’s brief suspension contrasts with the repetitive time assigned to women elsewhere in the book. Housework begins again each day, maintaining the present without producing a lasting conquest; reproductive cycles, pregnancy, and the burdens of childcare likewise shape women’s lived circumstances. The contrast is not that bodily processes alone determine a woman’s future: the book insists that the body acquires meaning within social conditions and cannot by itself define her.

That distinction grounds the broader argument. A human subject fulfils freedom through projects and movement toward an open future; oppression occurs when that transcendence is confined to immanence. In this framework, the honeymoon is a revealing interval, not a resolution: its temporary removal from routine cannot by itself undo the social arrangements that may leave a married woman dependent or limit her possibilities.