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!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.