A frunnymoon is a honeymoon with your spouse – and your friends. It’s also called a friendsmoon or buddymoon.
I’m about to marry the publisher of The Oldie. On a recent Oldie reader trip, he casually mentioned our honeymoon, complete with fireworks over the Amalfi coast. Every ear in the room pricked up.
‘So where do we book?’ asked a reader.
‘I’m afraid you can’t,’ we replied. ‘It’s our honeymoon.’
Still, for a fleeting moment, we did wonder whether we should turn it into an Oldie reader trip.
The word ‘honeymoon’ first appeared in 1546, when John Heywood referred to the sweetness of early marriage fading as quickly as the moon wanes.
Others trace it to the medieval custom of newly-weds drinking mead – honey wine – for a month after the wedding. Even that wasn’t thought to be enough to soften the realities of married life.
In the 19th century came the bridal tour, when newly-weds travelled to visit relatives who’d been unable to attend the wedding. This evolved into the honeymoon we know today.
Today’s newly-weds are increasingly opting for the frunnymoon – extending the celebrations by whisking a group of friends away after the wedding.
It’s not the only new wedding vocabulary. There’s the sten – a combined stag and hen party. And the aisle reveal, when the bride first appears. Then there’s the ‘bride tribe’ and the ‘I do crew’ – bridesmaids now require branding.
The frunnymoon isn’t quite as daft as it sounds. Weddings are often family affairs, full of elderly relatives, distant cousins – and the parents, who usually foot the bill.
The honeymoon with friends becomes the real chance to relax, laugh about the speeches, dissect the dance-floor disasters and conduct a postmortem.
Most frunnymoons stay fairly close to home. Hiring a villa for 20 people after paying for a wedding isn’t usually appealing.
The awkwardness of the traditional honeymoon is nothing new. Dorothy Parker captured it perfectly in her 1931 short story Here We Are. A newly married couple spend their wedding night making painfully stilted conversation because neither knows quite what to say next.
There the frunnymoon has the edge. With 20 friends in tow, there are no awkward silences.
For us, though, on the run-up to a gloriously over-the-top Italian wedding, the thought of a due soli – just the two of us – sounds heavenly. Still, just in case conversation runs dry, I’ll keep a few emergency icebreakers in my back pocket.
How do you solve a Rubik’s Cube in under a minute? Or can you name three famous Belgians? Amelia Milne, Oldie editorial assistant
