Melissa Petro

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?

How do you break up with a best friend?

Teaching sex ed the right way doesn’t have to be weird or hard.

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.

Sometimes the fights I pick with my fiancé are really fights with myself.

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

“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.”

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.

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.”

For any couples thinking about moving in together, I thought I’d share my Dos and Don’ts, and how my husband and I are making my small and unattractive (but inexpensive!) apartment work for our family.