Every woman has met the empty drawer on a weekday morning. We asked 554 readers to name the one thing they actually do about it. Two answers finished within two women of each other at the top — and the one that quietly takes over the older end of the table is the only answer on the list that requires knowing how. The poll is still open, so the table is still moving.

The brochure never showed the folding cot, the receipt, or the 5 a.m. departure. Somewhere in the last century the holiday stopped being a rest and became a repair — a scheduled window in which a marriage is meant to remember itself. Couples book flights on that assumption, and some spend the first three days quietly frightened it isn't working. Here is what the research on sleep, holidays and desire actually describes, what it conspicuously doesn't, and why the honeymoon — invented as a chaperoned round of family visits — was never built to carry the job we now hand it.