Melissa Petro

So, I got an email from my brother yesterday telling me that he’s not coming to the wedding. “I want to be there,” he writes, “I really do, but the idea of being consigned to [our mother and her boyfriend’s] care for the duration of the trip is driving me mad. You know, the whole lack of autonomy and being on someone else's time and all that.”

Drunk or not, it’s a fact that white people are more prone to acting like assholes to authority figures—because we’re more likely to get away with it.

[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.

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

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.

It's pretty well understood in 12 step programs that "who you see here and what you say here, stays here."

Sure, "friends forever" sounds nice. In theory. But sometimes it's better that two people just not be friends.

On FYI’s newest, Kiss Bang Love, the show sets one man or one woman up with ten strangers who the contestant will kiss, one after another, while blindfolded. From these ten hopeful suitors, the contestant chooses five and then two, with whom they go on “intimate 24-hour dates.” The producers ask: Can blind sexual chemistry lead to love? I say, probably not!

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?

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.