It’s pretty common to want to blame other people for our flaws, and it’s especially tempting — easy, even — to put the burden on our parents. Got angry-drunk and called your boss a bad name? Thanks for showing me how to self-medicate with alcohol instead of controlling my anger, Dad....
You have plans with a friend who you don’t entirely trust to stick to said plans. You’ve agreed to a time and a place. You show up at the appointed time and place. Maybe 20 minutes later, you get a familiar text: They can’t make it after...
Until recently, pop culture portrayed the “revenge bod” as a strictly female phenomenon. As Vanity Fair notes, the term first entered the lexicon in the early 2010s, as a way for glossy celebrity magazines to describe famous women (Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian, Britney Spears, Katie Holmes) who...
I struggle with asking for things that I want. I’ve never, for example, sent a meal back to a restaurant kitchen for any reason. Instead, I’ll happily power down the veggie special after ordering lobster to avoid an uncomfortable confrontation with a waiter. I’ve been meaning to...
There was a time when dinner was the go-to first date. Two people would politely nibble at their meals as they gazed at each other over their plates and played footsie underneath the table. They’d talk about their lives over a shared bottle of wine. There might...
When Rick Webb got engaged several years ago, he turned to the best wedding planner he knew: Himself. The long-running stereotype is that men are not just indifferent about the details of their wedding ceremonies; they’re bored by them. Couple that with the idea that women are...
The mission of the online registry Traveler’s Joy is to “help couples take their dream honeymoon.” But more and more, that dream includes far more people than just the bride and groom. Or what is now being referred to as a “buddymoon”: a quick jaunt with members...
I used to be as dismissive of nonalcoholic beer as I was of decaf coffee: What’s the point? I’d wonder, while having numerous real beers instead. The point, of course, became much more clear a couple of years ago when, for a variety of reasons, I got...
I got married at 30 years old. Until that night, I was a virgin. Like lots of people who have been raised in the church, this is something I’ve always believed in doing. My parents instilled in me that sex is essentially like a gift for the...
Thirty-two-year-old Allie Knight is the rarest of specimens: a female, millennial long-haul truck driver. “I always wanted to drive the biggest and best anything,” she tells me from a boat in Hawaii, where she is on vacation with her other half. “Snowmobiles, four-wheelers, motorcycles, anything with an...
My name is Nick, and I am not an alcoholic. But I do like alcohol quite a bit. And I’ve always been aware, on some level, that I’ve probably spent a fair bit of my disposable income on it over the years. Pretty much all of it,...
So you’ve made it through the bachelor party and the ceremony; now it’s time to party down and not worry, right? Maybe for some wedding guests, but by and large, the reception is the most complex part of the whole shebang. How many people should make speeches,...