If Science Says Facial Hair Is Sexy, It’s Sexy
“Results suggest that facial hair is worn to enhance a man’s marriage prospects by increasing physical attractiveness and perception of social status. Men shave their mustaches, possibly to convey an...
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THE BLURB #19: The Complete Thing
A long meditation on poetry, love, time, pain, and finishing the novel:April 2010. I’m in Wassenaar, Holland, at one end of the long desk I share with my wife, Elisa. She scored a writer-in-residence...
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Celebration and Bitterness, Comfort and Dread
In Please Come Back to Me, Jessica Treadway examines the ambiguities of the human heart, sometimes answering life’s dilemma’s too elegantly.Jessica Treadway, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for...
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Tender Speech
“When two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.”-In Search of Lost Time, Marcel ProustI still think that my husband knew at the airport. Maybe he was thinking...
View Article“The Phlebotomist”
Sativa January’s story, “The Phlebotomist” is about love, marriage and swingers, published on Our Stories, an online journal that publishes the best fiction on the web. Here’s an excerpt:“But as Linda...
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Songs of Our Lives: Frida Hyvönen’s “Pony”
His loneliness lay around me like a fence. The promise was that once I solved the loneliness the fence would dissipate. But I couldn’t solve it.He started going out to bars at midnight once I began...
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FUNNY WOMEN #91: Shower Gifts for the Traditional Bride
What to do to when faced with the task of buying a shower gift for the bride of a “traditional marriage”? I don’t know about your relatives, but to mine, a request for specifics can be seen as...
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Placenta Previa
The problem so many people, including myself, have with roses is that there is nothing left to say about them. I understand adherence to social sanctions. Card-, flower-, and candy-giving offer refuge...
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Between Us (and Honeybun)
I’ve been at the newspaper only a matter of days, but I’ve already noticed the guy sitting across from me participating in some peculiar phone conversations. The calls always end the same: he’s cut off...
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Multiplicity
The first time we got married, we eloped. I guess we eloped the second and third times, too, but maybe that depends on your definition of elopement. Is it just getting hitched without telling anyone...
View ArticleDown with Marriage?
Meghan Murphy at xoJane thinks that marriage is a tool of patriarchy. To her, rejecting marriage is the feminist choice.Marriage has been an institution within which women have suffered abuse, rape,...
View ArticleA Non-Inclusive Feminism
Last week, we linked to Meghan Murphy’s essay detailing why she believes that marriage is an anti-feminist choice.But Ona Anosike has a different view.I feel as marginalized in the dominant patriarchal...
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Now that We Can, Maybe We Won’t
When the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, thousands took to the San Francisco streets. That day, I joined in on the mirth, and then came home to Wendy, my beloved partner of five...
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On Living Apart Together
When my friend Cleo’s relationship ended recently—the second ending in as many years—she said, “I just want to fall in love and settle down, so I can ignore my relationship.” I laughed, but her comment...
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Lisa’s Book Round-Up
I wouldn’t be much of a book columnist if I didn’t celebrate Alice Munro and her much deserved Nobel Prize for Literature. It surprises me, the number of people who have never read Munro. If you’re one...
View Article“Firecrackers and Wedding Music”
Granta has a stirring excerpt from Maria Choudhuri’s forthcoming memoir Beloved Strangers, about growing up in the capital of Bangladesh and then moving to New York.The excerpt starts to explore the...
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The Big Idea #8: Rebecca Mead
Even on a rainy December day, London’s Highgate Cemetery tempts the smart-phone photographer. It’s hard to leave without a shot of the weirdly gigantic bust of Karl Marx, who’s buried there, or of the...
View ArticleWhat You Rupture, I Will Mend
I wanted that plate. Lifting it up, I held it in my hands. Then, opening up my fingers, I let it drop. It fell with a sharp crash and smashed into three chunks… My mother recognized my handiwork. She...
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Crack My Heart Wide Open
This is not a feel-good story. I tell you this now because I am offering you an out. Shut your eyes. Close your ears. Walk away. Go ahead. It’s your choice. I would. My first instinct would be to run....
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I Thought I Could Just Be a Passenger
I am standing on the platform of Branch Avenue station, studying my first route of the day. A Washington Metro employee spots me and inquires, hospitably, where I’m going. I don’t know how to answer...
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