Senator Ted Kennedy died last night, and today everyone is talking about his legacy—the good parts and the bad, which got us to thinking: Could an incident from someone's past make you unwilling to date them? Case in point: the Chappaquiddick incident.

A quick recap: on July 18, 1969, while driving home from a party Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge. He swam to safety, but his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, didn’t make it out of the car. Kennedy didn't report the incident until the next day, after a diver found her body still inside the vehicle.

Besides saying he panicked—Kennedy never … Read More

Online dating threw me an unexpected curveball: my career.

As a professional writer, I gave men an easy topic to make conversation about in their initial flirtacious emails: "Where do you work? What do you write about?" The problem is, these men already knew my first name was Jessica; I knew that as soon as I gave them any other clue about my work, they'd be off and Googling. That's certainly what I did to a fellow JDating journalist who worked at a major entertainment magazine told me he once interviewed Blake Lively: it took … Read More