Melissa Petro

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

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.

A lot has been written about what not to say to a pregnant person. Being on the opposite side of that, I’ve learned pregnant people make mistakes, too.

The quickest way to reveal yourself as a douchenozzle — not to mention unoriginal — is to remind someone who’s about to get married that most marriages end in divorce. The second-quickest way to offend is tell us what our wedding has to be like or whom we need to invite.

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

The biggest fashion mistake of my lifetime may not be what I wore, but what I didn’t.

Mark prayed to Saint Francis, a patron saint of drunks and (according to Mark) lost causes. Mark wasn’t religious, but he wore a St. Francis amulet around his neck, a gift from his father. Nights when he didn’t come home, I prayed to St. Francis, too.

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

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.