Wow. What a fun and exhausting weekend! Would you believe it's taken me this long to recover? Yeah, I'm an old, tired fart. :-P As those who live along the East Coast of the U.S. are aware, this past weekend saw the arrival of the first tropical storm of the annual hurricane season. And just as luck would have it, the worst of the storm passed through us directly on my sister's wedding day. I remember saying to numerous people that morning, "It's a good thing it's raining so hard right now — hopefully that means the storm will have lightened up in time for the wedding." I was wrong. My sister had rented a large house for the event, with the intention of holding...

Over the weekend, I read a NYTimes article titled The End of Courtship? which questions the new millennials' methods of dating — or, in this case, not dating. Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, they rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other "non-dates" that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend. Traditional courtship — picking up the telephone and asking someone on a date — required courage, strategic planning and a considerable investment of ego (by telephone, rejection stings). Not so with texting, e-mail, Twitter or other forms of "asynchronous communication," as techies call it. In the context of dating, it removes much of the need for charm; it's...

A friend recently asked me how I knew J was "the one." My answer? I didn't. I don't believe in soulmates. I believe that marriage is damn hard. And I believe we are continually evolving as people so that the person you married 3/5/10/20 years ago may not necessarily be the same person with whom you vowed to spend the rest of your life. But what I did tell my friend was that my relationship with J started out differently than all my past relationships. For one, we were friends first...