Melissa Petro

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?

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

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

“If you believe in the decriminalisation of sex work,” Ian Dunt rightfully points out, “you will instantly come under a sustained and highly emotive attack on your morality and your identity.” In this vein, when a man comes out in favor of sex worker’s rights, he becomes “a betrayer of women, a gender Judas encouraging violence against them.”

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 my friend on Facebook had made a remark about how there are people who have multiple income streams and travel abroad constantly and drive cars and eat at restaurants every week and then talk about class privilege like they don't have it and in my mind I was like, Oh. Yeah. She’s right. In the past six months or so, my life has dramatically changed.

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

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.

"Certainly, my life as an alcoholic was not what most would imagine. I was a writer, living in the West Village of New York City, enrolled in a prestigious graduate program and working on a book. At least, this was my cover story."

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.