The origin of Valentine's Day has nothing to do with love and everything to do with "torturous martyrdom." On second thought, perhaps the origin of Valentine's Day has a great deal to do with love*

Originally, the feast day of St. Valentine honored two third century martyrs by the name...

"What are you thinking?" is a booby-trapped marriage question. I know this, but I can't always resist its shiny lure.

My husband John and I were on a long car ride not long ago. Our son was taking his first solo airplane trip to visit my sister, and we...

What do you get for being a governor who cuts $860 million from his state's education budget and forces schools to slash their arts education? A Lifetime Achievement Award for support of the arts from the Pittsburgh Opera.

That's what's happening this Saturday to Pennsylvania governor...

"Plan now. Relax soon."

The concierge of a fancy resort has sent me this "Quick! Relax, Goddamnit!" email. My husband and I are looking forward to attending a wedding at the resort next month.

The concierge urges me to make "pre-arrival" relaxation arrangements, which isn't...

This is a polemic: Access to birth control isn't really about my "health." It's not principally about the management of ovarian cysts or the regulation of periods.

Birth control isn't about my health unless by health you mean my capacity to get it on, to have a happy, joyous...

My cell phone is an idiot. It's a straight-up, dingbat dumb-ass. It can't do anything, except make phone calls, and has no competency to tell me where I am, why I am there, how I got there, or what I should do, think, feel, and see now that I'm there.

I just learned that our neighbors are moving, to another state. My heart broke a little when I heard this. They're moving so that the mom can take a better job, with a saner boss. It's an important goal.

Over the last decade we've been close, as far as neighbors...

The New York Times reports today on the growing backlash against Apple founder Steve Jobs and his post-mortem apotheosis.

It was bound to happen. We like to create and then eviscerate our idols.

I was never a passionate devotee of Jobs or Apple, nor...

"There are just THREE things you need for a wedding," my 86-year-old father intoned years ago: "Peanuts, punch and a gown." I never forgot the advice, although I never followed it, either.

When I was working on my book Marriage Confidential, I wanted to get a feel for...

Ron Suskind's brand new book, Confidence Men, portrays the Obama administration as an old boys club in liberal garb.

I've been waiting for this sort of book, and narrative, to emerge, because it describes within the administration a growing estrangement between liberalism and feminism that I've sensed...

With apologies to my parents, I'm going to spell out "bullshit" in this essay because bullshit is the serious object of my inquiry, and isn't being used as a curse. Quite the opposite.

My claims are that bullshit gets a bum rap, and, paradoxically, that it's...

It's hard to normalize the celebrity marriage and divorce for the rest of us. After all, we're highly unlikely to end up married to an immigrant ex-bodybuilder, mega-Hollywood action star turned Governor who impregnates a member of our full-time housekeeping staff.

These divorces should be consigned to the marriage...

I have a few self-declared Google-stalker friends. It's a common pastime of the clickerati. They pursue details about their friends' lives and work through habitual online searching.

For myself, though, I make it a point not to Google friends, colleagues or acquaintances, even though I've occasionally broken this rule....

How much actual conversation is there in family conversation? I'd like to see this depicted on a pie chart, because after years of observing family conversation, it seems that a depressingly large percentage of domestic talk today is devoted to procedural, logistical banalities, and less to qualitatively richer themes, by...

March is Women's History Month. This is of most urgent interest, I'd guess, to middle school essayists, public television, and designers of educational posters.

However, thinking of the occasion did inspire me to browse my collection of yellowed "second-wave" feminist paperbacks, from the late 1960s and early 1970s. I...

Romance fades. Everyone knows this.

The first flush of true love in marriage mellows into something less combustible. Some spouses mourn that loss quietly; some divorce when it happens; others welcome it.

I've got something else in mind, however, when I propose that we're entering a post-romantic age....