You Should Invite All Your Friends on Your Honeymoon

The idea struck my then-fiancé Marshall and I about ten months before our wedding: Why not keep the party going and invite our friends on the honeymoon? We texted people that we had a free place to stay for two weeks — a villa in Antibes, France, with three extra rooms — for anyone who could get there. One by one, the bedrooms filled: Peter and Emily were already going to be in France, Tamir and Racien could get there easily from Berlin, and Christian and Lauren needed a vacation anyway. For a series of perfect days, all eight of us would overlap. “Two hot new bombshells enter the villa!” my husband and I yelled in horrible accents upon each couple’s entry, because we’re diseased by reality television and because it was true.

By the sixth night, everyone had arrived. I fell asleep wine drunk and giddy, knowing the people I love most were right upstairs. I woke up the next morning and the night’s card games were already cleared from the table. Drips of candle wax had been scraped off the plastic tablecloth, evidence of all the wine we drank was put away, and a vase of freshly picked lavender sat at the table’s center. Eight bathing suits lay scattered around drying on the backs of various chairs. Someone, I can’t remember who, handed me coffee.

In the traditional sense, a honeymoon is a trip for romance. We had plenty of it. We lit tall candles, we stayed up late dancing, we took pulls from bottles of bad tequila and shared the hungover burden of washing the dishes the next morning. We cooked scrambled eggs for one another. We laughed until we felt sick. We’d all been on group trips before and knew the risks associated — someone feels left out, someone emerges as a party pooper, etc. — but none of that happened on the honeymoon. Part of the trip’s magic, I think, has to do with our age. As we rapidly hurtle through our 30s, we’re having the realization that perhaps all young adults have: It only gets logistically harder to make the people you love hang out with you. Time spent with close friends is increasingly rare and valuable. I’m old enough to understand how precious it was to get everyone together in one room for our wedding. But I’m still young enough to want more — the wedding wasn’t enough; I wanted to see my friends together on the honeymoon, too.

Apparently, we weren’t the only couple to want this. A 2023 “Style” section article in the New York Times had already christened it a “buddymoon” and said that more and more newlyweds were doing the same. My husband and I fit the Times trend story’s description exactly: Marshall and I were in our early 30s and had already been living together for several years. We hang out and travel together all the time. We didn’t need a special, private trip to hang out even more.

Tara Kutcher, 34, and her husband were also in their early 30s by the time they got married in September 2024, and they’d already been living together as well. Since the early days of their relationship, they had dreamed of taking a sailboat trip around her husband’s home country of Montenegro. To make that dream possible, and to extend their wedding celebration, they brought seven friends along on their four-day honeymoon a few days after their wedding. Everyone had their own cabin and paid their own way, which Kutcher said made it financially feasible — if they had booked for two, the price tag would have been more than $10,000. The trip, Kutcher said, was “once in a lifetime.”

Splitting the pricey honeymoon bill (a 2024 survey by the Knot estimates the average cost hovers around $5,300) is a reason many couples bring along their group chat. Inviting friends helped Marshall and I manage some of a very expensive trip’s cost. While we fronted the rental fee for the villa, taking turns on grocery runs and dividing the bill eight ways at dinner lowered the total spending once we were in France. Excursions that would have been out of the question for just the two of us — like a sunset boat ride on the Mediterranean that we’ll never forget and a day spent at a touristy beach club called, literally, YOLO — were made possible by sharing the cost.

As on any group trip, there were some predictable misadventures. On that hungover seventh day, what we thought would be a quick walk to a hidden beach turned out to be a mileslong hike around the coast. Most of us had worn flip-flops. Morale dipped until we found a man selling Diet Coke from a cooler along the path. An image of our friend Christian resolutely carrying eight beach towels in grocery bags along the wet rocks will never leave my brain. But there were also miracles: an honest-to-god delivery boat that pulled up next to our Mediterranean cruise with hot pizza and chilled wine; a night spent laughing like kids while we learned the “Apple” dance in matching outfits; and the repeated revelation of seeing our friends — people from disparate parts of our lives — falling in love with each other, too. “There was something in the air at that house,” we all said. A year later, I think it was just us.

Janny Kim, 28, hosted a buddymoon in the Hamptons last fall and found no shortage of romance in the crowded, 16-person house. “It still felt romantic to celebrate with the people we love,” Kim said. It was also “fun and touching,” she added, to see so many people get together from around the world in the name of celebrating their love. If the wedding itself is one of your only opportunities to get most of the people you care about in a single room, a group honeymoon is just an extension of that chance — and we get so few of those chances, especially as we get older.

It’s a myth that romance exists only between lovers. We found it among our friends too, and the details will stick with me for decades. Like how one morning, my friend Lauren asked me how I like to cook my scrambled eggs — high heat or low? Christian slept so late another morning that Emily woke him with a glass of rosé instead of coffee, and he accepted it without question. Racien and Tamir had smuggled Tajin from a recent visit to Texas and sprinkled it on everything. At one point, I was presented with a plate of Tajin-covered grapefruit — a snack that, no matter how I try to re-create it, will never taste quite the same. That, to me, is more romantic than anything I could imagine: to know how your friend likes her scrambled eggs; to learn about someone’s proclivity for adding spice to everything, even fruit.

There are those who will inevitably say that a honeymoon with friends isn’t a honeymoon at all; it’s a group vacation. Why can’t it be both? It was a group trip in that there were eight of us but a honeymoon in that Marshall and I did most of the planning, and everyone was more than happy to follow along and continue celebrating the central love that brought us all together. As each couple left, like kids getting picked up at the end of summer camp, we said good-bye and mourned their loss. After everyone had gone, the house felt big and empty. I cried tears of joy as Marshall and I pulled away from the villa for the last time. I couldn’t believe those days had been real. I was awash with deeper love for my friends, yes, but also for my husband and for our new life. To us, a group trip was the perfect honeymoon. I can’t imagine starting our marriage any other way.