Sandra Tsing Loh’s essay, “Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off” in this month’s Atlantic, which advises people to avoid marriage lest they “suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty” of divorce is raising a few eyebrows and some interesting questions. In response to Tsing Loh’s confession that after 20 years her marriage has failed, Meghan O’Rourke at Double X wonders: if a marriage that lasts 20 years, produces “two kids and a lot of domestic support” isn’t a success, what is? Why is a marriage considered successful only if it ends in death and not before? Is a marriage that ends in divorce really less successful than an unhealthy, dysfunctional, perhaps even abusive relationship that remains legally intact?

Couples that live together are twice as likely to become obese than those that live separately, according to new research. Although cohabitation does result in some health benefits, like decreased cigarette smoking and lower mortality, Penny Gordon-Larsen, associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, found that married couples and those living together had greater weight gains than other people of the same age, and the couples had a greater risk for obesity. She said age may not be the cause of the weight gain, but the pressure of changing behaviors could be. People living together tend to eat together, cook bigger meals, and eat out more frequently than when they were single, said Gordon-Larsen. Spouses, she added, can be good influences on each other, as long as, they realize what’s going on. That may be how they avoid packing on the extra pounds. [Telegraph via Impact Lab]

While “Hitched or Ditched” is quite possibly the most terrible show on television, I have found myself watching it on more than one occasion. The show gives a couple who seem to be ready for marriage but are avoiding it the chance to have their dream ceremony. Over a period of four days, they have to decide whether they should indeed get married, or split up for good. Of course, drama ensues, exes are brought back to life, and in-laws do embarrassing things.

My favorite sex and relationship columnist, Dan Savage, is now on Nerve and a few days ago he tackled a question from a woman who revealed she started talking marriage with her boyfriend three months into their relationship. Savage balked at this admission. His response, after the jump…

You may not have heard of Max Drummey, so I’ll fill you in. He’s a guitarist for Chester French, a pretty decent band. He has hipster hair. And he married and divorced Bob Geldof spawn/Miss Ultimo model Peaches Geldof earlier this year. But now you can just file him away in your brain as a dumbass.

Max mouthed off to the Daily Mail about Chris Brown’s alleged beating of Rihanna, and said:

“We’re guys who have been hurt by women and I’m glad people like Chris Brown are finally taking it back and hurting women.”

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Ahh, marriage. Certainly men think long and hard about whether they want to get married right? Or maybe the answer is a no brainer, requiring very little obsession and thought and magazine purchasing? Being that it’s Wedding Week on The Frisky, and because I’d hate to leave the fellas out of such a sexy topic, I went to the guys on our IM to find out how they feel about marriage, weddings, and everything in between… Prepare to be touched!

Parents just don’t understand. Back in high school, my dad dissed a dude with green dreads who came to pick me up for a date. Pops just wouldn’t let my knight in shining Doc Martens take me to the movies. It was totally embarrassing and infuriating, so, in retaliation, I dyed my hair bright red. Ha, take that! But now I’m beginning to think I’m not really that bad ass. Over the weekend, a 25-year-old Egyptian man took rebellion to a whole new level—crotch level, that is. The man lives in Qena, an impoverished and very old school region in the south of Egypt, where marriage is seen as a contract rather than an eternal union with a soul mate. This young guy, who comes from a wealthy family, fell in love with one of the regular people. After two years of his father refusing to let him marry the lady from a lower class, the man lowered his pants and chopped off his own penis. Ouch! That’s love? Though he was rushed to the hospital, doctors weren’t able to reattach his member. Now that the son has shown he’s got, um, balls, will his parents cut him off completely? [Boston Globe]

Some female bloggers call the U.K. paper the Daily Mail the “Daily Fail” because the paper likes nothing more than to bait its readers, especially on its women’s interest “Femail” section. It’s the go-to source for incendiary articles about how bosses should distrust women who don’t have children and you can’t have a family and a career. Nope, we weren’t making those up.

But nevertheless, the paper is fascinating to us—especially a recent article about what it is supposedly like to be a French wife. We romanticized about the sexy accents, and yummy facial hair, but zut alors!, it sounds a bit like being the captive of a very demanding tyrant.

Read on for more tips from French wives…  [Daily Mail]

My grandparents are celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary this summer with a big party of family and long-time friends. I’ll be flying to St. Louis with my fiancé, my sister’s flying in from Austin, and my parents will be visiting from their home in Germany. It’ll be as much a family reunion as a celebration of my grandparents’ long marriage — a testament, really, to the bonds they’ve helped create and nurture over the last six decades. As a gift, one of my aunts wants to make a family tree, which seems like a nice enough idea. But when another family member alerted me that my fiancé won’t be included on the tree because our wedding isn’t until several weeks after my grandparents’ anniversary, it got me thinking: when does a couple become a “family”?

Does your groom have delusions of grandeur when he talks about the size of his ... reception hall? Then he might be a Groomzilla! Craig Bridger, author of “Surviving Groomzilla: A Bride’s Guide” discusses how to tame the beast that has taken over the wedding planning.

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In Bad Mother, author Ayelet Waldman encourages women to aspire to be “not bad” mothers and resist the pressure to meet the extremely high standards of success that society has for women and motherhood. Waldman wants women to stop trying so hard and just be. She argues that mothers can and should be honest, flawed, and, yes, selfish sometimes—your ability to care for your children will not suffer.

Waldman’s book is a welcome change from the usual motherhood self-help nonsense that lines the shelves at Barnes & Noble. The book deal was struck after Waldman wrote a controversial piece for the New York Times‘s “Modern Love” column a few years ago. In “Truly, Madly, Guiltily,” she wrote about loving her husband, author Michael Chabon, more than their four children. Her confession came about after observing how many other mothers didn’t seem to have as active a sex life with their husbands, a fact she attributed to their focus on being moms rather than wives.

Single and on the prowl? Triump International has developed a high-tech bra outfitted with a timepiece that marks the time it’s taking you to find a husband. Talk about baggage you can wear! But this bra doesn’t solely support your boobs—it’s includes a pen with which you can sign the pre-nup, and the minute you get engaged, you can stick the ring in, and it’ll play “The Wedding March.” Is this bra puke resistant? We’re about to lose our lunch. [Talk2MyShirt]

I’m getting married in a little over two months, and though this is a happy, exciting time in my life, there’s a bittersweetness. It started when I moved to New York a year and a half ago to be with my boyfriend. Up until then, our relationship had been long-distance; he was in Manhattan, and I was in Chicago. Through daily phone calls and frequent trips back and forth, we fell in love while still maintaining solo lives in our respective cities. It was a unique experience to be in a fully committed relationship, but continue living the same single-girl life I’d known since my last serious relationship (minus all the unsuccessful dating, of course). When I wasn’t in New York or hosting my boyfriend in Chicago, my weekends were filled cultivating other relationships — those with my closest friends. Life was filled with wine-drenched, late-night talks, long bike rides along the lake, picnics in the park, afternoon shopping frenzies, potlucks, brunches, and impromptu sleep-overs — all with my single friends. Now that I’m fully immersed in “coupled life,” I realize I’ll probably never have friendships like those again.

What factors play into a man’s decision to get married? Love? Money? Children? A panel of five guys discuss their views.

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Over the weekend, British budget airline easyJet announced that it hopes to soon hold in-flight wedding ceremonies. It’s not official yet, but the airline is looking into whether it can get its pilots authorized to officiate weddings in the air, a feat that may be easier said than done, as Heather Dsenisi, deputy registrar at the Southampton Registry Office, explains: “Officially, British marriages have to be conducted in a licensed building, which has to be a permanent structure that doesn’t move, and the ceremony has to be officiated by a minister of religion or by a registrar employed by a local council.” If easyJet does manage to get the go-ahead and couples start marrying mid-flight, their nuptials will join a growing trend of increasingly weird weddings. In the last year, we’ve seen a candy shop wedding, a Taco Bell wedding, Barbie weddings, and even a Hello Kitty wedding. Are these quirky ceremonies just good fun, or do they mock the sanctity of marriage? Have weddings been reduced to nothing more than an avenue to express creativity?

It wasn’t so long ago (1980, to be exact) that the average age of American women marrying for the first time was 22. Less than 30 years later, the average age for a first marriage has jumped to 26 for women and 28 for men. In a recent column for the Washington Post, Mark Regnerus argues that this trend is dangerous because women are putting off marriage during their most “marketable” years, before they have to “beg, pray, borrow and pay to reclaim” their fertility. He writes: “Marriages that begin at age 20, 21 or 22 are not nearly so likely to end in divorce as many presume,” but he certainly fails to convince me, a 32-year-old woman not quite married for the first time yet.

Before getting your moral molars all impacted, we’d like to make clear that we’re not endorsing having an affair or ruining a perfectly good marriage (or an imperfect one, for that matter).

Whether single or taken, flirting is fun. Getting hitched helps out in the tax and health care departments, but married social life can start to feel like a blur of “dinner at the Newman’s” and “girls’ nights out.” We already know that flirting at the office helps business and is good for substance-free spirit-lifting. Unlike flirting with single blokes, hair flips and deep conversations with married guys aren’t automatic green lights for making a move. Here are ten other reasons to flirt with a man in a (wedding) band.

Well, this is a first. Rather than making me roll my eyes and gag, one of the wedding announcements in this weekend’s New York Times not only inspired me, it actually delighted me. Instead of the usual pedigree of good fortune, this announcement read more like a quirky rom-com starring a Lucille Ball look-alike. Besides an impossibly sweet girl-meets-boy story, the marriage of 46-year-old Dixie Feldman to 48-year-old Jeff Laite is a hopeful tale for anyone who’s ever worried that love and marriage is only for the conventional.

A first marriage for both, theirs will be non-traditional not only because they’re past the age of needing new cookware from a gift registry, but because they plan to “maintain separate residences and spend weekends together” (though Dixie herself told me on Twitter “he usually sleeps over four nights a week.”). Just last weekend I was having brunch with some girlfriends and we shared fantasies of having similar arrangements in marriage one day. While I really enjoy living with my husband-to-be and building a home together that’s “ours” and not just “mine or “his,” I daydream of having a second home — a cottage in Vermont or a small Condo in Chicago, maybe — where each of us can go for a weekend or a week or a month and recharge alone. So the union of Dixie and Jeff is a nice reminder that marriage can be whatever you want it to be, look however you want it to look, and often happen when you least expect it.