Melissa Petro

Arran and I joke that no one wants to go to a wedding, not really— and maybe that’s true, but (perhaps naively) we had thought of the day as a gift to everyone involved, including ourselves.

Especially if you’re a woman, people assume you’re hungry for a man.

Without a doubt, going to AA meetings saved my life. But after six years of devoted participation, my attendance dwindled until, about a year ago, I stopped going entirely. Contrary to what I was taught when I was in the program, my sobriety’s just fine. You can stay sober without AA — at least, I can. Here’s how I do it.

After gaining as much as forty pounds and pushing a cantaloupe out my vagina, I wondered: will my body ever be the same?

Everyone I talk to agrees: Apparently, wedding planning is the most awful thing ever! Seriously, I did not know that when I first got engaged. This got me thinking... What else don’t I know?

You may have heard the old joke that 98% of people masturbate, and the other two percent are lying.

C-PTSD stands for Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, also known as Developmental Trauma Disorder (DTD) or complex trauma. It’s a diagnostic term for a set of symptoms resulting from prolonged social or interpersonal stress, especially in the context of interpersonal dependence. It’s a tricky diagnosis to land on, given the way trauma is dealt with in the mind and by society. Like Kristof, I wouldn’t have told you there was anything wrong with my childhood. It took years of therapy to catalog early life experiences that were profoundly affecting, if not necessarily severe.

It's time to talk substantively and honestly about how sex work isn't any one thing.

A couple months before our official engagement, Arran and I had an uncomfortable conversation about getting married. Specifically, my dear boyfriend of two years chose a quiet brunch on one unassuming Sunday to bring up the fact that he was reluctant to propose.

“If you believe in the decriminalisation of sex work,” Ian Dunt rightfully points out, “you will instantly come under a sustained and highly emotive attack on your morality and your identity.” In this vein, when a man comes out in favor of sex worker’s rights, he becomes “a betrayer of women, a gender Judas encouraging violence against them.”