I Don’t Know About This “Buddymoon” Business

Keep the party going by having your friends come along on your honeymoon.

Weddings are great: dancing, food, an open bar, the possibility of making out with a stranger, celebrating your friends’ love, etc. They’re also great because they end. The happy couple goes back to their lives or on a ten-day trip to St. Thomas and you tuck your uncomfortable shoes in under your pajamas and head home, knowing that you’ve celebrated in full and can return to normalcy.

What if the party kept going? What if your friends invited you on a “buddy moon?” This is what some newlyweds are doing, according to Conde Nast Traveler, because I guess if everyone’s hightailed it to Puerto Rico for your wedding, you might as well take the week and make a vacation out of it.

More Newlyweds Are Taking Friends on Their Honeymoons

Perhaps because this came from Conde Nast Traveler, I was prepared to hate this, but honestly, it makes sense. Only 12 percent of Americans surveyed had been on a buddymoon, but the trend is rising; CNT attributes it to the more casual direction weddings are headed towards and also the fact that if you flew somewhere far, and it’s the one time all of your friends are together, make a thing of it.

To successfully participate in a buddymoon, the guests must plan their vacation around the wedding. Is it incosiderate to ask your friends to plan what could be their only vacation of the year around your nuptials? Eh, maybe. Depends on the friendship, I guess. Next July one of my best friends is getting married in Vieques. As my friends and I rarely get together in locales more exotic than New Orleans, where one of us lives, the trip to Puerto Rico next summer will be a vacation. No one’s really planned anything per se, but I’ve already mentally added a day on either end. Nothing is set in stone, but I’m probably not going to go on vacation to Vieques again with all of my closest friends at maximum happiness, in the same place at the same time. If I save money, book early, and do all the other things my travel-anxious brain requires, it’ll be fine.

The only wrinkle is money — it’s always money. Attending weddings are expensive. When you’re done with the wedding weekend, you’re done spending money on rounds for the table, a celebratory pizza, a cab to the hotel, whatever. Maybe all the buddymoon requires is a mental rebranding. You took the vacation anyway to go to the wedding — consider the buddymoon just extra hangout time to talk to your friends for a while.

How do you decide who’s worthy of taking extra days off and spending more money than you’ve already spent on the wedding itself in order to keep drinking beers on the beach? Also, would you want to?

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