Melissa Petro

"We built a luxury dream home but can only afford to have two children."

For someone like me — someone with difficulty forming and maintaining relationships, who has struggled with commitment, and who’s got intimacy issues galore — surely, you can see the appeal. You don’t need to be Freud to figure out why, at a disturbingly young age, I looked forward to the day a man would commit.

Is there anything problematic about trading foot rubs for blow jobs? Or is it a healthy way to add a little spice to a long term relationship?

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?

The other day on Facebook, one of my friends remarked that I was a “later-in-life” bride.

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

Would Sheryl Sandberg be able to get away with leaning in while donning Zuckerberg's signature v-neck T-shirt and jeans? History says no.

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.

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

[I]t looks like our wedding will cost us more like $10,000. That is a hell of a lot of money. Still, it’s our one and only wedding. And for a wedding in Manhattan that includes most of the typical expenditures [...] that’s not too bad. Here’s what I’ve learned about how to make your big day (relatively) less expensive.