I don’t recognize my country anymore, and on this Independence Day, I’m having a hard time celebrating what it’s become. When my family was in the military in the 1960s—which is to say my father was a commander in the Navy at that time and we packed up and moved about every two years when […]
Folks invested in the U.S. presidential race are picking sides in an O.K. Corral sort of way—reason and civility be damned—and it’s getting ugly. These are particularly polarizing times. I mean polarizing to the extreme, if that’s not too obvious a redundancy. Folks invested in the U.S. presidential race are picking sides in an O.K. […]
It’s time we ask why it is that men and boys are far and away the most common perpetrators of this kind of violence. “Our thoughts and prayers are not enough.” That’s what the President of the United States said yesterday in Washington, D.C., when he stepped to the podium to make a statement about the […]
All that floats from my breath when I think of you, blowing kisses into the wind, are thank yous. Dear Mom: If you were still here to sit with me and listen to a litany of everything I should have understood about us long, long ago, I would tell you so many things. I would […]
One guy told her she needed to lose 40 pounds. Another said he just wanted to ‘give an older woman a try.’ And another said she had too much baggage. He told her he loved the way they could talk for hours about everything under the sun: Obama’s second-term trials, whether gluten-free diets were a […]
They know it isn’t a piece of paper that binds a family together. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage. When that little rhyme—rigidly prescriptive or whimsical, depending on one’s perspective—made the rounds in the 1960s and ’70s, it felt like a clarion call to a life fulfilled. Its […]
Susan Patton, in a letter to the Daily Princetonian, told college women to hurry up and find a mate while they’re still in school because intellectual equality is key to a long-term relationship. Nancy Townsley argues that it’s not the only thing that matters. My college best friend got married in late December 1981 after […]
Rather than lining retailers’ pockets on Valentine’s Day, why not just tell your partner what they mean to you more often? Ironically, the best Valentine’s week I ever spent was also the worst: I got married and jilted within the space of four days. Granted, I was only 9 years old at the time. On […]
What may have appeared perfect from the outside was just one big mess on the inside. From the moment I got engaged to be married for the first time, I waged a ridiculous—and tyrannical—battle for domestic supremacy. Once my then-husband and I crossed the threshold into our rented one-bedroom apartment after our wedding in March […]
