This month Aunt Acid advises a reader whose boyfriend is down about his unemployment, and another who is wondering how to tell her husband about a past sexual assault.
Asking a heterosexual man to change his entire name--first, middle, and last--after marriage can feel risky. He may cling to the name his parents carefully selected for him at birth. Maybe he’s named for Grandpa Blazegrits or Uncle Orhan; maybe he’s even a II or a III. These days he may expect no change, a hyphenation, a portmanteau, or--in some cases--to change his LAST name to yours.
I waited for my mother to notice. I waited for what felt like weeks. It was disgusting, and I was disgusted with myself; they were crawling everywhere, falling off my head onto my school books, fat with my blood. But I never took any action to deal with it myself. I waited for my mother to notice.
There are many traditions in my family that have never been fully explained to me. When I ask why we observe them, the answers I get often amount to little more than “that's just how it is.” On Christmas, we eat sotanghon -- a sort of Filipino chicken noodle soup. On New Year's Eve, my mom tells me to jump up and down with coins in my pockets so I can get taller and richer.
Rohin Guha's previous work for The Toast can be found here. BRB, setting up my biodata Tick tock tick tock. There is no technicolor line of cousins and relatives lined up and dancing at my wedding to bombastic bhangra. We are Bengalis; our weddings are somber affairs. That’s not why, though. The cousins and relatives who exist in my periphery–and seemingly only when there is a wedding or a funeral that brings us together–don’t…
Previously by Molly Priddy: My Secular Patron Saints In February 2002, when I was a junior in high school, a house burned down in Missoula, Montana. Houses can do that, burn to the ground – it's not entirely uncommon here, especially in the winter when heating systems can go awry. But in our city, considered to be the liberal, blue freckle on an otherwise very red state, even more important than the ashes was what…
On May 25, 2015, the night before my husband’s forty-second birthday, he was watching the Houston Rockets beat the Golden State Warriors at a local bar. It was raining. My daughter and I were already home, waiting for him to return after the game. She was eight and had school the next day, so after she went to bed, I texted my husband for an update on his whereabouts. The rain had turned into a…
Nicole: I think it's very significant that you and I have discussed writing this piece since Winter 2013, and only now is it being put into Wordpress. We have been shying away from controversy for too long, let us no longer be silent: The three marriages on Modern Family are absolutely terrible, and none of these people should be together. Mallory: Modern Family is a show about people who are married but also hate each other. Marriage is…
In the twenty-third year of our marriage, my husband went into surgery for a rare cancer, and came out without any memory of our life. In the hospital that night, gallons of blood pooled inside his body while I watched, trying to compel the nurse to call for a transfusion. After an emergency second surgery, the bleeding was stopped, as was the cancer. But the man he had been never returned. When Richard woke up,…
Previous installments can be found here. There will be spoilers. “An historian” is a perfectly acceptable Commonwealth convention, haters to the left [side of the road]. Edith and Percy Thompson were lower-middle-class residents of a London suburb, entirely ordinary until the day in 1922 when Edith’s younger lover, the sailor Freddy Bywaters, arrived unexpectedly at their home and stabbed Percy to death. Despite the total lack of evidence that Mrs. Thompson knew anything about the…
Talk about politics, but only about Nixon. Specifically, only talk Nixon’s final years post-resignation, how his pallor grew grey and his body wracked with phlebitis and his mind consumed with sad tales of the death of kings. Work on your Nixon impression. Remind yourself that real love means loving decrepit, angry failure and no one embodies this principle quite like Nixon, with the possible exception of most
Lindsay King-Miller's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
1. July 29, 2012
In the months leading up to my wedding to Charlie, more than a few people have asked us, “Wait, is that even legal in Colorado?” Well, no, it won’t be legally recognized in any meaningful sense (we’re already registered with the state as designated beneficiaries, which is the only form of governmental acknowledgment available to
What can I say about the emotions of my wedding ceremony that won't sound like a three-ring circus of cliches? I got married inside Boston's City Hall, one of the most hideous structures conceived in modern history, an inverted bone-gray pyramid straight out of 1984. My cousin was there as a witness and three of my husband's friends. At least the Justice of Peace's office was tastefully decorated:
This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. Said gentleman-scholar has re-upped his donation, so keep pitching me, academics longing for freedom.
When I came across recent debates about marriage and the security supposedly felt by
