Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Because laughter is only the best medicine if you can't afford the other ones."
Dear Polly,
I am recently hot for a man who is also hot for me. But my very closest friend has been hot for him for a year. He told her after one make out session that he just wants to be friends with her, but she has been hoping for more anyway. She has worried about me meeting him because of potential hot times between me and him. I am not some raging slut. I assume she sensed that [...]
If you're married and old enough to have endured whatever horrors requiring "work on the marriage," space tourist/rich person Dennis Tito has a great plan: He wants to send an adult married couple on a 501-day round-trip flight to Mars. This could be you, and also your spouse!
A tycoon announced plans Wednesday to send a middle-aged couple on a privately built spaceship to slingshot around the red planet and come back home, hopefully with their bodies and marriage in one piece after 501 days of no-escape togetherness in a cramped capsule half the size of an RV.
Young, inexperienced people have no idea what it's like to spend [...]
So the Brooklyn baby boom for the white hipster crowd is in full amazing swing. Saturday in Carroll Gardens is Dadurday! So many bearded tattooed dads in cool kicks. And this crowd (ages 26 to 35, essentially) is relentlessly nuclear. These couples live alone with their one-and-a-half kids. So many scooters with matching helmets. And they are split between renters and owners.
Now, what I can tell you about this amazingly traditional set is that, as they approach 40, about half of them will be getting divorced. I'm sorry! But yes.
The stages of urban young adult life are: marriage boom, baby boom, divorce boom, believe it. It happens [...]
It's not even December, but the "aggravating trends in holiday commercials" list is already filling itself out quite nicely, and right behind the chart-topping scourge of twee that is Pomplamoose has to be the surge in ads for diamond merchants like Jared, Zales, and Kay, all of which have decided that the best way for a man to celebrate the season is to put a sparkly ring on his intended's finger. But all these ads are doing for me, a red-blooded American female, is solidifying my belief that that I never want someone in a relationship with me to feel like they have to "propose."
"Marriage is like water. You have to drink it. Swinging is like wine. Some people feel it's delicious the first time they try it, so they keep drinking. Some people try it and think it tastes bad, so they never drink it again." —Ma Yaohai, a resident of China who has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison for what the government calls "crowd licentiousness," i.e., engaging in group sex. The 53-year-old Ma was a member of swingers' clubs who held some 18 orgies in the two-bedroom apartment that he shared with his mother. China's laws against sex acts involving three or more people are [...]
Recently, in New York City, a woman lost one of the diamond stones from her betrothal ring. It measured 4 carats. "I wake up in cold sweats dreaming that I'm going to lose my ring — and the funny thing is, I did," she told a local paper about the status symbol. Funny thing! The shiny stone, a symbol of her worth, was later found, however, by a watchful man. Now she can retire to privacy of her home, ring intact.
Q. "When two men get married and one takes the other's last name (rather than creating one of those hyphenated thingies), how do you refer to his former last name?" A. "Slave name."
