Not true. I've travelled alone (admittedly primarily in Europe/North America/Australia) lots, and there are very few cities I would be concerned about being alone in.

Come to Stockholm! Ridiculously safe, and beautiful with masses to do and no one will so much as blink an eye at someone dining/hanging out alone. Direct cheap flights on Norwegian from London...

Seconded - except I loved Stockholm so much after a random solo weekend here that I moved six months later... and that was two and a half years ago!

I guess it's something that you can see you were irrational, but I'm curious about why you aren't willing to change. Do you think that you persuaded anyone to see your point of view by telling them that they should be killed and eat shit?

Thanks for expanding, I understand better what you were trying to say, and it does indeed seem less condescending than how I first read it ;-)

On board with all of these, except for no 2. Maybe never hook up with/casually date a friend's ex, (at a stretch) but if you could have serious feelings for someone who happened to date your friend previously, then I don't believe his past relationships shouldn't stand in the way.

Undermining grown adults' choice not to believe in what you do by dismissing their views as due to 'a bad experience with Christians' is not respecting them.

Firstly, you can't 'illustrate' with a hypothetical that you've posed. "See how I prove my point with something I just made up...?" Doesn't work.

How is saying the bible is fiction and burning 'some qu'rans' the same thing? My belief that all religions - equally - are a load of nonsense isn't about offending Christians, it's about believing that religion is nonsense and if anyone finds that insulting so be it. But I wouldn't go out of my way to burn a bible…

That's one of my biggest problems with the idea of showers, too. In the UK we tend to give gifts when the baby is born. I'm happy to give a gift to a new little person who will be in my life, but somehow baby showers feel more like a celebration of being pregnant, which can be pretty horrible for those who are not not…

I went to a convent school in England, and a nun with a very dry sense of humour taught us to put condoms on cucumbers, taking great care to mention that she'd heard "they aren't normally green". She explained at the top of the class that this went against the church's teachings, then pretty much said "anyhoo..." and…

That's a stretch. For one thing, the Puritans left the UK* for America for pretty specific reasons relating to their name. Secondly, this was quite a few hundred years ago - we've moved on, apparently many of them haven't.

Thanks for your permission, random stranger who is awfully excited about this! But you're missing the point. It isn't about me, I think marriage itself is a load of old bollocks so it's not something that I have to worry about either way (and my surname is shit by the way, I don't love it in the least other than the…

It bucks the patriarchy because it changes it from now on. I can't see myself researching my family tree to the extent that I could find the origin of our name and take his wife's maiden name, so I'm stuck with keeping the name I was born with. My name.

I find this to be an incredibly irritating argument. My last name isn't any more my Dad's than it is mine: he was born with it, so was I.

Out of curiosity, why do you specify where you work if people ask what you do? I work from home too but when people ask what I do I say I'm a writer - I'd only mention I do so from home if we were talking about commuting or something.

Well put. I got into just that argument with a conservative friend of a friend on Facebook (I know, I know) who pounced on our mutual friend's statement that she wished abortions would always be "safe, legal and rare." Conservative nutter was all, "if you don't have a problem with them, then why do you want them to…

Me too! This actually gets me irritated well beyond all reason, especially as a "British" accent is usually meant to refer to BBC/Cumberbatch/Downton Abbey accent. I am from Glasgow which is most certainly to be found in Britain and nearly took the head off some halfwit that kept insisting I didn't have a British…

In so far as neither is a random stranger's business, they're pretty much the same.

Leaving aside the comically ridiculous notion that the US singlehandedly won WWII (not that their contribution wasn't significant, nor appreciated) the suggestion that the European Allied countries would have randomly started speaking German upon surrender, is adorable.