A honeymoon that isn’t a performance

By the time the honeymoon arrives, you have already performed. The wedding was months of being looked at, of pleasing everyone, of a thousand decisions — most of them, if we are honest, made by the bride. The last thing the trip that follows should be is another production to manage.

And yet the perfect honeymoon has become its own kind of pressure: the right hotel, the photograph, the itinerary that proves it was worth it. We think this is exactly backwards.

The case for doing very little

Kyoto, given six slow days, is the antidote. Not the Kyoto of tour buses and ticking off temples, but Higashiyama’s stone lanes in the early morning, before anyone else is awake. A private tea ceremony in a two-hundred-year-old machiya. A ryokan with an in-room onsen, where the evening asks nothing of you. A kaiseki dinner at a counter that seats eight, booked months ahead.

This is the trip I send my closest friends on. The ryokan in Higashiyama books out fast — we hold a block reservation.

— Nidhi Jain

What makes it a honeymoon is not the spectacle. It is the privacy, the slowness, the fact that for six days the only people you are trying to please are each other.

You will not come home with the most photographs. You will come home married, and rested, and quietly sure you did it right.