Articles are grouped by subject and easier to find than hunting them up here.

People often wonder how I could split from my family.

My brother has bawled me out over this more than once.

I get it, I totally get it. From their point of view, you only make a mentally ill mother worse by running out on her. And I can see that — I can.

But, at some point, you have to consider your own needs.

I really didn’t have a family at all.

I started to understand this when I got brave enough to explain my real feelings about a career I felt stuck in. …

How many times have I heard it?

“We shouldn’t pay people who do unskilled jobs enough to live on.”

I haven’t heard many liberals make this case. Mostly this is a conservative viewpoint, and the arguments for it are few and repetitive.

“It’s just grunt work. It isn’t fair to people who work to ‘better themselves’ if somebody just doing a grunt work job makes as much as they do. These people are just too lazy to ‘better’ themselves!”

(An aside: How, exactly, do we define “better?” Another common way American society defines “better” is by body size, shape, and…

Thanks to a couple of thoughtful articles on Medium, I have now finally understood why it is that “born-again” Christians are calling Trump “Biblical” and laying hands on him, sure that “God anointed him to be president.” (And I’m quite thankful for the great articles and writers on here, because this was one question that has had me stumped for quite some time.)

Basically, what they’re saying is that, even though Trump says a lot of idiotic things on the world stage, even though he’s clearly a narcissist, even though he implies that neo-Nazis are “decent people,” and even though…

I know how it feels to be at that place in a relationship (well, a non-relationship, really) where it’s clear that what you invested isn’t coming back. Another person is never going to take you up on it, to come back and give the relationship their all the same way you did.

Actually, that person is never going to give the relationship anything.

This is where we jilted “other women” are comforted by other people saying things like, “Don’t worry, honey, there’s a right person for you.” “You deserve someone who’s all yours and will actually be there for you.”

…

Affair situations are tough, no doubts there. Perhaps worst of all is the time-honored (or maybe that’s dishonored) scenario where a married man (usually it’s a man) is caught in flagrante delicto or thereabouts, and then can’t make up his mind.

Back and forth he goes. Is it the wife, or the girlfriend? The girlfriend, or the wife? Some of these folks bounce between houses like a pinball around a pinball machine.

And the rest of us get annoyed. We snicker behind our hands. We lose all respect. Can’t this person just make up his mind already?

Well, surprise. The…

I see so many folks who blame the cheater for absolutely everything that goes on when an affair is revealed.

Oooooh, the cheater, the cheater is responsible for the marriage, the marriage’s demise, all the feelings, everything.

Even former Other Women (or men) do this. The cheater used us, the cheater lied, the cheater hurt us, strung us along, left us to rot.

Boo, hoo. Hoo.

I often advocate that the cheated-on spouse “own their part.” So, here goes:

My cheater did not do even so much as one single thing TO me.

I did it all to myself.

I was the one…

Tonight on Medium I am watching a reformed cheater beat himself up for being the reason his cheated-on spouse is in trauma and all her trust has been destroyed forever.

This is nothing new. Search the infidelity-related tags on here and you will find many vitriolic commenters saying the same thing. With blistering invective, more often than not.

This viewpoint is so common that it has become accepted gospel. YOU, the cheater, traumatized someone else. YOU are the cause of all their anguish!

Yeah. I get that. If the person hadn’t cheated, the spouse would have come face to face…