Swedish women are having ALL the sex. Can ladies and fellows be "just friends"? How to win his mom over on Thanksgiving. Auto-correct may ruin your entire life. There are a few things dudes need to just quit doing, like sending penis pictures. Six reasons you're pretty, awesome and pretty awesome. Some men like cucumbers pickled and some men like curly hair. Is it love or insecurity?
Behold, woman's new best friend. Rapports Opus is a police dog in Sweden who has been training for over a year to help police nab rapists by sniffing out sperm. This pup has just closed his first case. Last month, a woman was forced to perform oral sex on a man in a Swedish park. To help police collect evidence, Rapports Opus was brought in to find any trace amounts of semen left at the scene of the crime.
As an expat Dad, you find yourself repeatedly thrown into parenting situations you didn’t see coming. This is especially true when you live in Sweden and take a lot of paternity leave, because then you are not at work all day; you are home, the main driver of potty training, and talking about vaginas.
Next week my wife and I enter the modern world—that rush of jobs, school, daycare and preschool, that buzz of fast mornings and exhausted little kid evenings—for the first time as a couple. Let's put it this way: we just bought our first ever family calendar this week, and it's already full.
We try to keep our life simple in the city. We don't have a car. We only work part-time. And we stretch out that generous Swedish parental leave. Yet still, modern life is modern life. We have jobs, a toddler to get to daycare and a baby to feed. We have laundry to do, dinner to cook and a tiny apartment that never stays clean. We do fine with this, but my wife and I have different parenting styles. The kids have their needs. The volume gets a little high. We feel too busy, too connected, too distracted.
I would never have come to this place without you, without your belief in co-parenting, without you teaching me how to do things like pack the snack bag, and without your willingness to take a step back.
You know how men are supposed to be from Mars and women from Venus? Well, in a cross-cultural relationship, men are from an asteroid shooting past Mars and women are from a previously undetected moon circling Venus.
The day stretched out before us, longer than we could really understand. It was just the two of us, no kids, for the first time since our second child was born. It was also our fifth anniversary, and the day before the Crown Princess of Sweden was to be married. Suddenly, it was like none of the big life transitions had ever happened. We were still just the boy and girl who met as peace volunteers in Croatia and got engaged backpacking in Thailand.
Not many little boys grow up, hoping that they will someday meet a princess at a gym, marry her, and become a prince, but that's exactly what happened in the case of Daniel Westling. The former personal trainer began dating Swedish Crown Princess Victoria in 2002 and this past weekend, the couple exchanged vows in a televised wedding that was the biggest royal event in Europe since the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer.
Do I insist that today is the day I mow the entire lawn? That seems weird. Do I play golf? Well, I don’t play right now because I am consumed with the kids. Do I just lay in the hammock? My wife gives me that time already. When you co-parent like we do, it’s not such a burden to share sleep-ins and naps and hammock time.
On June 19, Swedish Crown Princess Victoria will marry Daniel Westling, a commoner and personal trainer turned, literally, into a prince. This marriage is a fairy tale that everyone I know—my very egalitarian wife included—has embraced. So why am I so turned off?
