The honeymoon always ends
By FARHA GUERRERO
This is a philosophical meditation that does not seek to provide answers. What interests me are the questions themselves.
I’m drawn to the original meaning of the honeymoon as a sweetness of time. That phrase matters. Sweetness is something humans understand sensually: honey on the tongue, the sweetness of a smell, the sweetness of morning light, a tender kiss. It can be sensory, emotional, even atmospheric. The idea that the honeymoon is fundamentally a kind of sweetness in time is conceptually powerful.
What fascinates me is that the honeymoon is a constructed idea that we accept fully, including the fact that it ends. We don’t dispute this. We don’t resist this. We enter it knowing it is temporary.
At the centre of this is a simple idea: one enters a honeymoon knowing it will end. One understands its temporality. One accepts it. One does not question what comes after.
The honeymoon can be seen as its own entity. Humans may not consciously dwell on its ending, but subconsciously they know it is finite. Its sweetness is inseparable from its brevity. Whether it lasts a month or six months doesn’t matter. What matters is that it ends.
The honeymoon is not cyclical. It does not repeat like Christmas or birthdays or vacations. Those events return. The honeymoon does not.
Even if one marries multiple times, each honeymoon remains singular. The first honeymoon is irretrievable. Repetition only underscores its irreversibility.
It is a one-time event with a fixed duration, knowingly entered, knowingly exited. And yet it is entered without bitterness. People do not embark on a honeymoon thinking, “I must enjoy this because it will end.” Its ending is implicit, not foregrounded.
This distinguishes it from a final concert or a final farewell. Those are explicitly marked as endings. The honeymoon is not framed as a final thing — and yet it is.
That paradox is essential.
And love — which humans desire more than almost anything — is placed within this temporary frame. People enter the honeymoon in love knowing that love itself will change. The marriage follows. Life follows. Difficulty follows. And still, people enter the honeymoon willingly.
Interestingly, the honeymoon also ends in sweetness. Even its ending retains the quality of honey. This matters. Its conclusion is not violent or tragic by definition. It fades. It closes.
This entered my life concretely last December, when my epileptologist told me that my honeymoon phase had ended. The word itself — borrowed from another domain — struck me deeply. A honeymoon used as a metaphor in medicine opens something larger.
My reading epilepsy returned fully. The existential question is not how to extend a honeymoon — because a honeymoon cannot be extended — but how one lives knowing it has ended.
I’m not interested in dreaming of another honeymoon, or hoping for its return. I’m interested in understanding what it means to accept a finite period of joy without demanding continuation.
We often ask “what happens next?” Humans are restless that way. We ask it after joy and after suffering. But the honeymoon is strange because we don’t seem to ask that question at all. We accept it as complete in itself.
This is where nostalgia becomes seductive. Humans cling to the honeymoon in memory and attempt to live inside it long after it has passed, to the detriment of the present. The mind tries to recreate what cannot be recreated.
Do I now look back nostalgically and mourn that period? Do I hope for another honeymoon through another medication? Or do I accept that the honeymoon existed — and that its existence does not require repetition to be meaningful?
This is where thinkers like Heidegger and Nietzsche matter. Not because they provide comfort, but because they insist on finitude. On endings without transcendence. On temporality without consolation.
I’m not interested in what comes after the honeymoon. I’m interested in the period that exists under full knowledge of its ending — and is lived anyway.