Melissa Petro

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.

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

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

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

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.

Without a doubt, going to AA meetings saved my life. But after six years of devoted participation, my attendance dwindled until, about a year ago, I stopped going entirely. Contrary to what I was taught when I was in the program, my sobriety’s just fine. You can stay sober without AA — at least, I can. Here’s how I do it.

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.

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

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