Melissa Petro

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

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?

If you missed my weekly column this summer all about getting engaged and planning a wedding, here’s the highlight reel: after doing

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.

How do you break up with a best friend?

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.

We’ve all been in a situation where we've thought NO ONE CAN EVER KNOW THAT THIS HAPPENED TO ME.

In an interview last week for The Cut, Bernadette Peters made some absurd statements about how she eats to stay in shape. “It turns out there's no shortcut,” The Cut notes, “just a lifetime of exercise and extremely healthy eating” — except if you keep reading, you’ll see this relationship with food doesn’t sound healthy at all.

“Lately, I’ve gone back to coffee,” the two-time Tony-winning actress begins the interview, as if she’s admitting to a heroin relapse. She goes on to share that her typical breakfast consists of “three little smiles” of grapefruit and a spoonful of hemp powder.

This — which is all of about 50 calories — is fuel for a morning trip to the gym.

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?

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