Melissa Petro

Engagements being the universally stressful occasions that they are, what this has meant is that I’m constantly pushing my fiancé to make wedding-related decisions, and he is constantly having to ask me (nicely and less-nicely) to give it a rest. It all came to a head this past weekend.

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

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

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.

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

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.

A week or so ago I started shopping for a wedding dress, and guess what? Shopping for a wedding dress sucks!

My relationship with my father was never father-daughter picnics. Maybe when I was very little — or maybe this is less a memory and more of a wish — I have an image of myself as a very little girl sitting on my father’s lap, and we are both laughing. Perhaps my father enjoyed fatherhood when his children were very little, but that joy seemed to curdle into constant frustration as my brother and I grew up.

If you watch TV and movies hoping to be emotionally moved or intellectually challenged, you know that means you’ll some

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.