If you really enjoy being around your parents, even an entire four days a year probably isn't enough. Go back on your own time, by yourself. One of the things you'll need to learn about marriage is that you're not joined at the hip.

Yeah, maybe you're too young to get married. Maybe you only know this guy from your school environment. I made both mistakes and still have a wonderful marriage. Wonderful, not perfect. (Intense but occasional arguments over approaches to domestic labor notwithstanding.) That's another thing you'll learn about marriage.

A third is that you are not your parents, or his parents, nor should you be. Your parents have flaws which you will discover as you get older--and so does their marriage, most likely. If his parents have a marriage that works for them, then it appears his mother either doesn't mind being controlled (maybe she's a good, submissive religious woman) or she just lets him have his way on a lot of superficial things. You have no idea what's really going on, and neither do a lot of posters here who have absolutely no idea what your fiance is really like other than that his father is controlling.

In any case, it's good that you'll be distant from your families. That was really something that helped us, seeing them only once or twice a year. Also, we don't see them at holidays--we spend our holidays by ourselves and visit them at other times of the year. Holidays will only disappoint.

Wait wait wait wait wait...

"thousand dollar edible male thongs"?

You're joking, right?

It's been like this for years. You so-called journalists are either obsessed with the completely trivial or busy proclaiming to us the Important Truths we figured out the better part of a decade ago. It's like the recording industry suddenly waking up and saying, "Duh! We should have been putting out quality music!" Quit phoning it in and tell us something we don't already know.

Sorry. If you're not willing to learn (and since you're reading Salon, you should be smart enough to be capable of learning) then you deserve all the snide over-50 remarks you get. This woman refused to learn to operate a particular model of cell phone AND a snowmobile properly, and when confronted will probably shrug and say, "I'm over 50, what do you expect?" It's so typical of so many older people to expect the world to simply acquiesce to the crystallization of their grey matter as though it were an inevitability. When I'm fifty, so help me God, if I turn out to be like this, I will drink a bottle of Draino.

...where he'll get more federal bang for his buck and can continue to bash the government's tax-and-spend with impunity.

Like...oh, let's see...Mississippi. Gets $2.02 for every taxpayer dollar spent.

Or Alaska. $1.84.

It's small consolation that my big blue state, from whence our President and socialist-in-chief hails, is subsidizing these red-blooded, anti-tax, stand-on-your-own-two-feet Amurrikans to the tune of 25% of our own federal revenue and probably won't get a second look from Limbaugh.

http://blog-me-no-blogs.blogspot.com/2009/02/tax-sucking-red-state-deadbeat-stats.html

Not sure what there is to rag about in this essay. Refugee from publishing industry figures out where the money is, gets licensed, starts raking it in. You could argue that she's something of a "sellout," but to me that word has no meaning anymore.

I guess really the only question she might have asked herself, all along, is whether she bothered to find out whether her buying clients could afford the mortgages they'd been granted. But I'm guessing she was probably operating under the assumption that if someone has a $500,000 loan to buy a house, they probably have the means to pay it off regularly. I was kind of staggered myself to find out that mortgage companies weren't asking for proof of income or employment or good credit or any of that. Our mortgage application was actually pretty thorough.

I'm guessing that of all the cogs in the machinery of this disaster, the real estate agent was probably one of the less culpable. The mortgage companies came first. Then the sellers, many of whom were trying to get as much as they could for their little shitboxes (and in some cases buying and flipping as fast as they could). Then the buyers, unwilling to live within their means and somehow utterly deafened to common sense--why settle for a $150,000 house when the bank was waving a $500,000 loan before their eyes?

You could always move to appraisals, you know. My mother-in-law is supposed to be semi-retired, but she still has more work than she knows what to do with. Hang in there and don't beat yourself up. Good times don't last, but neither do bad ones.

those boys must have communicated, somehow, that they were asking for it. They could have, you know, not left themselves in such a vulnerable position, and they shouldn't have underestimated the aggressive sexuality of those girls. I'm sure that if they weren't wearing such tight jeans their erections wouldn't have been so noticeable.