Category Archives: dating

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I’m in the Mood for Love…and Marriage…

Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher, the longest married couple in the world...

Smooches,

Today is the day — the day when my affinity for all things that have to do with love, dating and relationships is actually celebrated instead of berated…Yes, I began crushing on boys in the first grade and by the time I was 13 years old, I was known as the boy-crazy chick in my group of friends…but today, my tendency to swoon over and pay attention to the charm of hot guys is actually just fine…

Over the years, I have always kept several guy friends — in part because I like the perspective of guys that is unlike any of my girls and because I like variety…even when I had a boyfriend, I always had several guy friends to bounce things off of and to be there when the boyfriend of the day acted up and was let go (or vice versa…)

But about two years ago, a married friend told me that when I got married or if I aspired to be married, having a bunch of guy friends would not be tolerated…And what she said made sense…She suggested that I should stop hanging with all of my dudes and mainly reserve my friendship for my girls as a way of preparing myself for the arrival of The One…and that made sense too…so I did…I rarely talk to any of my guy friends anymore…And it’s actually okay with me…They are still my dudes, but unless I’m your main chick, you are not getting all of my convo…I’m hoping that on a Valentine’s Day in the future, I will actually be married…

I’m thinking if I want to get married, maybe I should befriend more married women and soak up more of their wisdom…I expect this was the principle in mind behind the Twitter event of the longest married couple on the earth, Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher. Today, the couple will be responding to tweets about marriage. And they should know…They have been married for 85 years…And isn’t it crazy that the Fishers are on Twitter? Guess I need to go ‘head and set up an account…

So on my V-Day post last year, I posted my Top 14 Love songs…This year, I will post my Top 14 movies about dating, marriage, love, etc…and please share yours… And in no particular order…

1. “Titanic” – I saw this movie years after it came out, and I nearly kicked myself that I had not seen this movie before. Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet convinced me that their love would go on…although the Titanic ship didn’t…

2. “Love Story” – Since this movie came out three years before I was born, I obviously didn’t see this movie on opening night either…But I did catch it late one night when I couldn’t sleep…Love means never having to say you’re sorry…Swoon, swoon, swoon

3.  “Purple Rain” – Believe it or not, I saw this movie for the first time in December…I Would Die 4 U – Love it…Love Prince and his bike in that movie…

4. “When Harry Met Sally” – Classic. It is THE movie for friends turned lovers…

5. “Love Jones” – This movie totally brings me back to the mid ’90s…Larenz Tate hadn’t looked this good since!

6. “Jason’s Lyric”  – I met Allen Payne Memorial Day Weekend in Miami years ago…Dang, he is fine!

7. “Grease” – The soundtrack is so fun…”You’re the one that I want…”

8. “The Notebook” – Would you marry for love or money…I say both! But I would prefer love if I had to choose…

9.  “Something’s Gotta Give”  – This movie has the most realistic crying over a man scenes of any movie I’ve ever seen….have you ever woken up in the morning and then a moment later, you remember that y’all broke up…and your heart drops and the tears fall…what a horrible way to start the day…but that’s real…

10. “Beauty and the Beast” – Hey, cartoon movies should get love too…I saw this movie on a first date in high school…at the time, this guy made my toes curl and it didn’t help that we saw this sweet movie on our first date…

11. “The Bridges of Madison County” – I don’t know much about being a bored housewife in the Midwest, but this one right here made me almost wish I did…Meryl Streep is the Greatest!

12. “The Wood” – Loved the soundtrack…”You’re my latest, tell you you’re my greatest, my latest, my greatest inspiration…” Miss you Teddy P!

13.  “Love and Basketball” – I really don’t care what movie Omar Epps is in…I’ma watch it…

14. “Walk the Line” – almost made me wish I was dating a country music star…

Any thoughts?

To honor Black History Month, I will offer a memorable quote from someone in black history on each post I write this month…

“Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever…”  Audre Lorde

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The Rise of the Alpha Female…and the men they choose to marry…

Who Dat?

And that’s pretty much all I’ma say about the Super Bowl…I was gonna write something that had to do with the Super Bowl, but I’ma keep it real…I don’t get into football like that…although I know the Saints will be marching in by the end of the day…How can they lose with a name like that?

So after I saw the third article on this topic, I knew I had to discuss it here on this blog…In one article I read, former Us Weekly Editor-In-Chief Janice Min made more in one paycheck than her husband made in a whole year!!!(Apparently, she made roughly $2 million a year…I would say that is PHENOMENAL for a journalist. READ: Can I get somma dat some day?) According to an article in The New York Times, more men are likely to marry women who earn more money than they do than ever before according to Pew Research Center data….NPR,  in another article,  “Modern Marriages: The Rise of The Sugar Mama,” explored the same topic using the same data. In this article, one husband is married to a woman who works at the same company as he does — except she is two management levels above him. And THREE of his wife’s brothers are in a similar situation…Below is an interesting excerpt from the same article…

“I think this is really an example of an outdated idea,” says Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage: A History. Coontz says that in a 1967 poll, two-thirds of women said they’d consider marrying a man they did not love if he had good earnings potential.

“Now, women have a completely different point of view,” Coontz says. “They say overwhelmingly — 87 percent — that it’s more important to have a man who can communicate well, who can be intimate and who will share the housework than to have someone who makes more money than you do.”

So how do y’all feel about that? Could you marry a man who makes less than you do? A friend and I were discussing relationships yesterday as we often do. We talked about how some of us who are still in the game (the dating game) still tout money as one of the main qualities that a eligible man must have. She said the term “love” rarely comes up as a quality – meaning that women rarely talk about a man loving them as an important quality. She cited a Bible verse…

 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her… However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Ephesians 5:25-33

In sum, husbands are commanded to love their wives, and women are commanded to respect their husbands…So I wonder if women need to look at love as the most important quality to look for in a man…But then again, some women may not be able to respect a man if his earning potential is less than hers…

But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.  I Timothy 5:18

Now to be fair, providing for your household does not mean that you have to make more in my opinion. It does means that you have to provide your share…But some women may interpret that verse as meaning that a man must make more money than they do…What do you think? What do I think…

Well, when I was in j-school (journalism school), I found out pretty quickly that journalism was not one of the careers you chose if you are simply trying to get paid…People typically become journalists become they love the written word and have an insatiable curiousity. (READ: Me in a nutshell.) And now that our country is in its current economic state, journalism, as y’all probably know,  has become even less lucrative across the board…With that in mind, would it make sense for me to marry a man that makes less than I do…I’m honestly not sure…but judging from what I’ve seen in the news, some of the world’s richest, most powerful men make the worst husbands…And then again, just because a man is not rich and powerful doesn’t mean that he’s a keeper either…

Any thoughts?

To honor Black History Month, I will offer a memorable quote from someone in black history on each post I write this month…

“No person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended.”  Alice Walker….(Did y’all know that Alice Walker has a blog?)

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Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby…Let’s Talk About You and Me…

True or false?

True or false?

Hello World!!!

After a blog writing hiatus (I needed it), I am back baby! So to get this party started right, I thought I would write about a subject sure to get a few comments…That’s right, I’m talking about sex…I’ve been hesitant to discuss this topic because of its very personal nature, and trust I won’t be revealing much about myself here…but inevitably, I knew I had to bring it up…so here goes…

If you’ve attended church for at least a month, you are pleasantly surprised to know that you can contact the God who rules this universe by simply praying. It’s a definite perk of being a Christian. And if you’ve been introduced to a few scriptures particularly those in Psalm, you know that God promises to take care of those who take the time to honor Him and seek His guidance – undeniably a benefit of being a Christian. And if you are at the right church, you discover that you can meet some really good people who can be “God with skin on” when you really need to hear from God through human voices…There are countless benefits to being a Christian!

But there a few edicts that come with being a Christian that frankly aren’t that appealing…one of those is premarital sex…Apparently, if you are married, you have a license to “get ur freak on,” but if you are single, you must “flee fornication. ” (I Corinthians 6:18 if you are interested…) I started hearing about all of the many verses in the Bible that discourage premarital sex when I was a teenager…At that point, it’s all good…You are still a little scared of boys anyway…Well, let me speak for me…As a teenager, I was not ready for sex…I knew I had all sorts of strange feelings when I looked at boys I considered fine, but the idea of having sex with them was certainly farther than I wanted to go…

Where these Biblical principles get tricky is when you are fully grown and you know what to do about it…Y’all know what I mean, right? It just ain’t cute anymore when you hit 30 years old, but it clearly states in God’s word, if you love Him, you will keep his commandments…(John 14:15)…So what are single Christian women and men of a certain age supposed to do when we are no longer “never scared” when it comes to sex…Being the bibliophile that I am, you know I’ve read numerous books about the topic…the most recent book I’ve read is “Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity” by Lauren F. Winner. She makes a lot of good points about why it’s wise to wait…

I may bring up some points from her book as I write this post, but let me bring up a few reasons I think that premarital sex may not be the way to go with or without the Bible verses…By most studies, women and men are getting married later in life as time progresses…Chances are most people have dated quite a few people by the time they finally do get married…so the potential to have had several sexual partners in a lifetime is quite possible…I just have to think that eventually could be draining mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually over time…Maybe for men that would not be as much of  a factor, but from the women I know, every time you get involved with a man fully and it’s not your husband, a little piece of you dies…And it’s hard to be optimistic about dating over the long haul when you invest so much only to get back so little… ( I don’t care what the women in Sex and the City say…)

And while I believe in women’s liberation and all, we know that there are double standards in what is appropriate sexual behavior when it comes to women and men that cannot be denied…when you have sex with a man who is not emotionally invested in you, no matter what comes out of his mouth, he is not feelin’ you the same way you could be feelin’ him…A man recently told me that if he has sex with a woman he is not into, her whole house can go up in flames with her in it the moment he is done having sex with her, and he frankly wouldn’t care…That’s straight harsh, but it’s something to think about…And we all know that it takes a while for a man to get emotionally attached to a woman – typically much much longer than it takes a woman…And because men are hunters, we gotta respect the natural order of things…men respect what they have to wait for…if you just give him  “hot sex on a platter” if takes away from the hunt…

Since I’m a black woman, I have to speak from that perspective…I think much of our issues in the black community can be traced back to our loosening values when it comes to premarital sex…In a conversation I had last night with a fine man (yes, I’m talking about you 🙂 ), I told him that if all single black women in the A decided to stop having sex unless they are married, there would be some real and quantifiable results. Let’s say that today, Sunday, October 18, 2009, women declared on the steps of the Fulton County Courthouse that there would be no sex without a ring…A year from today, I guarantee the marriage rate – whatever it is – would double…Women may be able to go without sex for a long, long while, but most men cannot go without sex for the same length of time…And the people who got married would be more likely to have long-lasting marriages as women and men would make choices that wouldn’t be as dependant on sexual attraction…As it stands now, when you tell a man that you are a celibate, he may stick around if really wants to be there, but he has many, many options if he suddenly decides he can’t take it anymore…

There would be no children born outside of wedlock…Yes, it’s possible to raise a healthy child as a single parent…I’ve seen it many times, but I think most single parents would rather raise their children as a two-parent household…Goodness gracious, I cannot even fathom all the changes that could come as a result of children being raised by two parents rather than one…We’ve all heard of some of the issues that children deal with when they are missing their mothers or fathers…More men would know how to be or even want to be real men because they would have seen it growing up…More women would make better choices about men because they were raised with their fathers…Poverty would decline as many single parents are poor…The jails would be less full because people would be more likely to learn responsible behavior because both parents were in their lives and were able to devote full attention to them…I know I’m skipping over a few things, but just consider what the ramifications could possibly be…

Who knows where sexually transmitted diseases come from, but I guarantee there would be less of them if people refused to engage in premarital sex…I don’t know all of the stats, but I think I’ve heard there are hundreds of STDs although only a few of them are well known – obviously HIV, HPV, herpes, etc.

I could go on, and this is by no means an organized discourse on the topic of premarital sex….these are just some random thoughts…The older I get, the more demystifying the term “sin” is to me…I simply think that sin is something that harms our relationship with God, our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with others…I think God declared that premarital sex is a sin because He knows how far reaching the effects are…

Any thoughts?

P.S. Yes, I know that one of the effects of this edict would be that the premium would go up on prostitutes…that’s another topic for another day…

P.P.S. And maybe the music about sex would get better too…Although everyone seems to be having sex nowadays – married or not – no one can really sing about sex like the old school singers…I remember the first time I saw the video for Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.” I think I was six years old…I didn’t know what sexual healing was, but I was sure it was good…