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.”

"We built a luxury dream home but can only afford to have two children."

It's time to talk substantively and honestly about how sex work isn't any one thing.

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?

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

No exaggeration, when I close my eyes— even for a second— I see white dresses.

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.

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.

There was nothing easy about recovery, but it helped that living the trainwreck lifestyle had stripped me of everything. Within sixteen months, I was unemployed with no job prospects, barely scraping through my last semester at school. I was drinking every day. Sex with classmates had led to casual encounters which bottomed out at trading sex for cash, something I spent a whole lot of time justifying.

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.