Is the Thrill Gone? : With so many couples living together before taking their vows, the bride and groom don’t always make a beeline for the Honeymoon Suite. Still, the wedding night is one to remember.
It’s a ticklish question: What did you do on your wedding night?
“What’s left to do?” laughs a recent bride.
“Don’t use my name and I’ll tell you. . . . I wonder if other couples who’ve been living together do what we did, which is nothing. We were tired from the wedding so we went to sleep. I still feel funny about that. Somehow it doesn’t seem right.”
It’s the ‘90s, folks. Brides and grooms seem to do it all before they tie the knot: Government statistics show that about 50% of women ages 25 to 34 have lived with a man before they marry; and 75% of women have intercourse by age 19. Similar stats on men are not available.
Which leaves many of us--and some of them--wondering what’s left to do on that Night of Nights, when they finally reach the nuptial mattress.
Not much, it would seem.
As the bride above confided: “We didn’t save it up for our honeymoon.” But that doesn’t mean the thrill is gone.
In fact, those who know about such things say there’s a renaissance of wedding night romance, as opposed to sex, for couples who live together before taking their vows.
But the balance has shifted quite a bit. The wedding celebration is no longer the hors d’oeuvre for the feast ahead. It’s the main course.
“What newlyweds do on their wedding night is . . . stay at the party,” says Judith Martin, who writes the syndicated Miss Manners column.
She gets “all sorts of complaints from annoyed wedding guests who know they’re not supposed to leave until the bridal couple has gone. The guests want to do what’s proper--wave goodby, throw some rice, all the traditional things. But they say the bridal couple hangs around too long. This makes it awkward for guests, and also makes it abundantly clear that the newlyweds have nothing they would rather do, if you catch my drift.”
Well, that’s not totally true, according to an informal survey of recent newlyweds.
One couple says they couldn’t wait to reach their marriage bed--to count the money they received. “We opened envelopes, not gifts. We were so thrilled with what we got that we stood up and started jumping on the bed.”
So sex was out of the picture for your wedding night?
“Let me tell you, it’s never out of the picture for us,” says Lauren, 25, who married John, 28, last year in “a big, formal wedding” in Pasadena.
“We lived together for about 18 months. We had a wonderful physical relationship all that time. So the night of the wedding, that wasn’t really the big thing.
“My mom knew I was not a virgin, but she bought me a beautiful long white nightgown and robe--a trousseauy kind of thing with ostrich-feathered mules to match. I put it on as soon as we got to the room. After we bounced on the beds we were still so wired that we watched ‘Saturday Night Live.’
“Then I started to worry. If we didn’t have sex there was something wrong with us; if we did, maybe it would be a bore. But it worked out great. Definitely special, because it had a new meaning--it was part of the wonderfulness of being man and wife.”
“Typical, typical,” crows Barbara Tober, editor-in-chief of Bride’s magazine, when told of this saga. “They’re today in almost every way.”
Tober says she’s watched the nation change its mind about the institution of marriage in the past 25 years.
“In the ‘60s, it ranked a shaky 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. It was found wanting by youngsters” who disdained the rigid relationships of their parents. “But by the ‘70s and early ‘80s,” she says, “couples realized they could control their own destiny”--that the only rules to follow were the ones they jointly made.
Part of the revamped concept is the ritual of the wedding night, she says.
“They’ve lived together. They are best friends. They don’t have to lunge at each other behind the hotel-room door. They are exhausted from the planning, the revelry, from being diplomatic with the guests.”
So what do they do?
“Typically, they strip off their clothes, brush their teeth, dive into bed and cuddle and hug. They are relieved of the old-fashioned performance anxieties that used to afflict the wedding night. The wonder and excitement of being married far outweighs the necessity to have sex,” she says.
Laura, 26, and Chris, 27, didn’t exactly feel that way.
The USC graduates, both now business executives, were live-in lovers for 2 1/2 years before they wed.
“We wanted to put some excitement into it. After living together and having sex for so long, we wanted some way to make our wedding night different than other nights, to give ourselves something to look forward to.”
They came up with a plan.
“We stopped all physical contact a month before the wedding,” Laura says. “We didn’t go near each other. Then I moved back to my parents’ house a week before, so he could come over and court me.”
After the wedding reception at her parents’ home, “we took a limo to the hotel, drank champagne, exchanged presents” (she bought him a watch; he gave her a family heirloom) and “we had an old-fashioned consummation of our vows.”
The plan worked, Laura says. “We’d built up so much anticipation that the night turned out very passionate.”
Robert, 41, a Los Angeles architect, and Ronnie, 37, a Stanford law student, married in June, 1990, after living together for a year.
“It used to be that people were anxious about the wedding night,” Robert says. “Now we worry about the wedding day. We were so busy orchestrating everything, so determined that the people we love were there to surround us, and that they enjoyed themselves.” It’s a bit of a hassle, he says, making sure the flower arrangements, music and food are exactly right.
But it is “the most gratifying thing you can do” for the people you’ve chosen to share the ceremony with. “Certainly these are the most important people in a couple’s life, and it’s as important for them to enjoy as it is for you.”
After the couple’s wedding “at the tip of Palos Verdes, with a panoramic view of the bay, we went back home, gathered ourselves together, and relived the special moments of our wedding day in each other’s arms. And yes, we made love passionately. I don’t mind telling the world about it.”
Diana, 26, a Los Angeles actress, says Tober’s got it right about couples going to sleep.
“I’ve talked to a lot of friends about this, and most say they don’t have sex until after they’ve slept. It’s not like the olden days.”
Diana and Roger, 30, had a church wedding and a reception for 200 in a West Los Angeles hotel a year ago. “When it ended at midnight, we had eaten and drank and danced so much that we were too tired to be amorous. So we stripped, got into the Jacuzzi, and then went to sleep. A few hours later, we both woke up and said, ‘We have to do it. It’s our wedding night. It would be bad karma if we didn’t.’ ”
Wedding night sex “wasn’t technically different” than other sex, Diana says. But “we felt really different about it. It’s an exquisite moment when life hasn’t caught up to you yet. You’re between the old and new life, when time stands still, and sex will never be like that again.”
Or, as the French author Colette wrote in 1945:
“The day after that wedding night, I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.”