After the Fall: Moving Beyond the Honeymoon

Researchers, therapists, and the media generally refer to the first six to eighteen months of any relationship as the “honeymoon period.” In the beginning, you don’t know what will happen between the two of you and you don’t know much about the person with whom you are trying to connect. You look at this other person and imagine that they are everything you desire. In this phase, you and your partner are generally on your best behavior, marketing yourselves with everything you’ve got, downplaying your challenges and basking in the delight of someone seeing you as amazing and perfect.

This can set the stage for two kinds of falls. It can be exciting fodder for falling into a deeper kind of love, as we discuss in upcoming book Making Love Real. But, more often than not, the honeymoon period can set you or your partner up to plummet off of this pedestal. In order to avoid this and give yourselves a chance for lasting love it is important to understand the honeymoon period and how to move out of it.

In the honeymoon period your uncertainty about this person’s desire for you creates a constant longing for connection, which often takes the form of sexual desire. You may feel infatuated and have obsessive thoughts, as well as an inability to concentrate on your day-to-day life. Biological determinists explain this process of sex hormones spiking as an attempt to bond you together long enough for baby-making. In this period sex is generally inevitable, spontaneous, passionate, and full of uninhibited desire and arousal. You are probably filled with feelings of excitement as you imagine all of the possibilities for your future together.

Many people are so addicted to this phase that as soon as a relationship starts moving towards the stability and deeper certainty of long-term love, they would rather move on to their next one. They start a new honeymoon period, never making room for their partner’s flaws or getting comfortable with accepting and revealing their own. If you make it through the honeymoon period, you have a chance at fulfilling long-term love which we will describe in our next post.