I think another factor is hearing how your parents talk about other people. My mom always said I was beautiful, but to hear the stuff she said about her own body would make you cry! And my dad didn't really hide the fact that he wished my mom were a bit skinnier either. Oh, and strangers used to always comment on how…

lol, no. They thought I was a tumor, had been telling my mom for like 2 months that she wasn't pregnant (she was negative on pregnancy tests, but was still sick, gaining weight around the middle, weird cravings, etc.). So they x-rayed to try and find this supposed tumor and found me instead. The way she found out she…

either way, I was definitely x-rayed as a fetus and I turned out ok. I think.

ugh, that's hard, especially the resume part. Since I've finally been spending more time with friends they've helped me see that I was being emotionally abused, and so among friends and the man I'm with now when I say, "well I kind of lost a year (same amount for me as well) getting over an emotionally abusive…

agreed, but sometimes it's terribly difficult to be honest with yourself! After all, our brains are sneaky buggers, at least I don't usually know that I've been lying to myself until the truth somehow pops out and surprises me.

I was in a similar situation, and the response I sometimes get is, "wow, it's like you're divorced!" Unfortunately, the other type of response that I get is, well at least you didn't marry him that would've been soooo much harder. Really? What makes you think that it wasn't already fucking hard?

I think the point is that if you find yourself making those excuses, that either you're not quite ready or it's not quite the right fit.

I think you've hit on a great point here: a lot of the time when one partner is aching to get married and the other is all "I'm not ready yet..." the issue is insecurity. As soon as you hear someone say they're not completely sure they want to marry you, it's really easy to react in a defensive way, questioning why,…

if you actually read the discussions here, most of them aren't about not wanting to get married, they're about when it is or isn't right to, not about some blanket decision that we don't want to. You can believe whatever you want, but please stop trying to put words in other people's mouths.

oh I lived with someone who did this too. I don't think he thought about it a whole lot, just that he interpreted my "no, not now" as me not giving 100%, and at some point made the decision that if I wasn't 100% in, then he shouldn't be either. And that way of thinking can just be a low-level thing that you don't even…

This. In a previous relationship (6+ years, 5 of which were cohabitative) I was solidly against marriage. I didn't get the point, not being religious, not necessarily wanting kids, it just didn't seem necessary. But after that relationship slowly and silently fell apart, ending eventually in me moving two states away…

unfortunately I think there can be distance between what is good for the victim and what is good for society. It would have been better for more people to try and get this guy locked away, or at least get the public to know what he's capable of, in the interest of protecting potential future victims. But at the same…

yes. Also, I need recovery days. I tend to fall into a different schedule than you, more like I have about 10 or so stress-out days per month, and I know that I need to buy frozen food and do laundry to prepare for these times. I need to forgive myself for not making it to the gym. And then afterwards, I need time…

it isn't actually membership only from what the stories have said. That's just a line they use when they don't want to let someone in, but nobody can find out how someone would/could become a member in the first place. That dog won't hunt.

I'm with you on that... I trust my guy, but something just feels better to me about continuing to take the pill. I know that I've taken it properly, and if I were counting on him I would probably bug him a lot to check in and make sure he wasn't forgetting. Not because I think poorly of him, just because it's…

yeah, I learned it through a sociology class (on rational choice theory). I thought Sociology = soft sciences = ladieeeeeez?

agreed! My bf and I have actually talked about game theory and relationships before, so I was excited to see this brought up, until the author played the dumb-girl card (where did THAT come from, Jezebel?).

I've had the worst boss experiences when the boss's wife is in the same profession as me (I'm a graphic designer and usually work in-house with other kinds of designers). That just means I get all the sexism coupled with the assumption that they know more about my job than I do. Double-awesome.

also, why would you need to get home at a decent hour? At my last job I had to point out that not having kids didn't mean I didn't need a life. They seemed to value employees with families more (who knows why), so I had to tell them hey, if I am expected to find someone and develop a relationship that leads to that…

I remember a study on this a while back that found that when working in an overall sexist work environment, women tended to basically be bitches to the other women in their office, and posited that this was a result of them perceiving success in that environment as a zero-sum game where only one of them could do well.…