Category Archives: Relationships

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Lovapalooza….The Good, The Bad and & The Ugly of Love on Valentine’s Day…

Hello World, me and Rob

Happy Valentine’s Day to you! And hopefully, you ARE expecting a HAPPY Valentine’s Day…This is my first Valentine’s Day as a married lady so I am feeling grateful for the love that God sent to me…In fact, Valentine’s Day will forever be special to me for a few reasons…Yesterday marked the 4th anniversary of my first date with my hubby! (Monday was our six-month anniversary!) One the ways that I knew he was the one God had for me is how he pushed me to write my first book…Above is a pic of us at my book release party, and my first book After the Altar Call: The Sisters’ Guide to Developing a Personal Relationship With God came out on Feb. 14, 2012! So we have a lots of good to celebrate tonight!

But not everyone is expecting good today…Unfortunately, some are actually expecting bad…and if it’s very bad, it can get ugly…so to make this post interesting I’ve decided to share some of the good, bad and ugly stories I’ve heard about love this week…And I’m offering my prediction on whether the people in these stories can expect the good, the bad or the ugly today…

1. My current favorite talk show host Wendy Williams (my all-time favorite is Oprah) is hosting “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” tonight at 10/9c on the Investigation Discovery channel…I am obsessed with this channel…Maybe it’s the storyteller in me, but the juiciest stories are those that involve crime…LOL…I know…My husband doesn’t get it either…I predict these stories will be good although the people featured in the stories are likely expecting ugly today….Below is a preview video…

2. “Why I Don’t Love My Fiancee'” This is a blog post that I came across earlier this week. From the title, you would expect not-so-good, but it is very good actually. This is a sweet story of young (he’s only 21 years old) Michael J. Pittman and his 20-year-old fiance’ Amanda…They are getting married in approximately 130 days 🙂 I predict a good Valentine’s Day for him….

3. “Georgia sheriff cancels Valentine’s Day due to weather” If you live in Georgia or have access to the news stations, you know that this is the second time in just a couple of weeks that we have been snowed and iced in…..and this particular snowstorm/ice storm happened to fall on Valentine’s Day week so the Oconee County County Sheriff’s Office announced that Valentines Day has been CANCELLED from a line North of I-16 to the Georgia/Tennessee border. Sheriff Scott Berry posted on the department’s Facebook page. “Men who live in the designated ‘NO VALENTINE’S DAY ZONE’ are exempt from having to run out and buy lottery scratchers and Hershey bars from the corner stores until February 18, 2014, due to ice, snow, freezing rain.” LOL…This can good or bad depending on how you look at it…If the women in this area wanted Hershey bars, then that’s bad for them, but if they are looking to spend some quality time with their hubbies, that can be very good 🙂

4. “Black History Month: Black Love on ESSENCE Covers Through the Years” ESSENCE has compiled its most stunning black love covers they have featured since 1970…It was heartwarming to see some of the covers from right around the time I was born! Also, it was encouraging to see some of the couples who made the cover of the magazine and are still together today! And sadly, while some of these couples were beautiful together, they are no longer actually together today…It’s mixed bag of what these couples are expecting today, but hopefully the ones that are still together as of today are expecting good…Check out the pic of Oprah and Stedman in their early years together…black history indeed!

5. Usually, at any wedding, the bride is the focal point(sorry grooms)! And this wedding is no different but for an entirely unique reason altogether…Watch what Arianna Pfledere does as she walks down the aisle to meet her hubby-to-be Ryan…So sweet…I predict a good Valentine’s Day for this couple as this is their first V-Day as husband and wife…

6. “I just got engaged and immediately doubted my decision. Here’s why I still said ‘yes'” Another blog post about young love….Here are a few words from Mo Isom’s post. “But the fact of that matter is that as soon as the boyfriend I cherish became the fiancé I promise to cherish for the REST OF MY LIFE, my human nature began to doubt. And I began to realize how much my mind and heart had been crafted by the world, rather than the Word.” A great post about getting engaged at any age…I predict a good Valentine’s Day for them….

7. Season 3 of “Mary Mary,” the reality show featuring gospel duo of sisters Tina Campbell and Erica Campbell, returns on Thursday, Feb. 27  at 9|8c on WE tv. In this season, we will see Tina Campbell dealing with the fallout after discovering her husband Teddy has been unfaithful to her….”Whenever I’m on the road, I think about what my husband did to me. He was unfaithful to me while I was on the road. So I’ve got to wonder, ‘Since you got caught, are you faithful now? Do you really mean that you want to be a better man to me? Or are you still who you were?” Below is a preview video…Hopefully, as this show was likely filmed a while ago, Teddy and Tina Campbell will have a good Valentine’s Day…

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This Novel That I’m Writing…

four women

 

(While this post was sponsored by Grammarly, the opinions are my own…I use Grammarly’s plagiarism checker because being sued is not sexy.)

Hello World,

Today as I write this blog post, I am sequestered at home as my beloved A is immobilized due to a snow storm…Yes, that’s right, HOTlanta is not very hot right now…In fact, we are freezing…my space heater is spewing heat behind me so hopefully, I will be warm in a bit…

Anyway, it’s a perfect day to write and think about writing…If you don’t know, I have been working on my first novel…I once heard that “Sex and the City” was a love letter to single women everywhere….And I was single for just about 20 years before marrying a month shy of my 40th birthday last year, I know that single women could use a good, mushy, empathetic, well-written love letter from time to time…So my book is a love letter to all single black women, particularly those of us who call the A our home for better or worse…

Below is a quick synopsis about my novel….

Four friends’ quest for love and marriage in Atlanta, the media proclaimed no-man’s land for black women, threatens to destroy their careers, their reputation, their sanity, and — their friendship.

The book is inspired, in part, by my experiences as a single woman….The summer before my 30th birthday, I embarked on a journey to myself that prepared me to receive romantic love in my life…It was a 10-year journey that was often simultaneously demoralizing and uplifting at the same time…God used all kind of tools to fashion me…some of them included intentional and unintentional mentors, books written decades before I was born, bad-for-me men I found myself attracted to in spite of my values, emotional breakdowns and on and on….The irony of it all is although I would never want to go through all of that again, the collection of those experiences will probably inspire me for the rest of my life…I wonder if 20 years from now, I will have same thoughts about marriage…we shall see…

grammarlyI will admit I am being intentionally vague about this novel that I’m writing, but I feel that writing is like cooking…No need to tell all of the ingredients until it is done…But as I write my book, I will be using Grammarly,an automated online proofreader that finds and explains grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes in all types of writing. The online tool also “improve[s] word choice with context-optimized vocabulary suggestions” and also helps writers “avoid plagiarism by checking [our] texts against over 8 billion web pages.” I think Grammarly’s plagiarism checker is the best feature so I use Grammarly’s plagiarism checker because being sued is not sexy…And my book is about single women who are sexy…Yes, Christians can be sexy too 🙂 LOL….

Any thoughts?

 

 

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Does Long-Term Celibacy Lead to Careless Dating Decisions?

Hello World,

When I first heard the story about a metro Atlanta minister being accused of infecting unsuspecting women with HIV last year, I knew I had to write about it at some point…On Tuesday, Craig Lamar Davis, a 43-year-old Atlanta minister, was found guilty of two counts of reckless HIV by a Clayton County, Georgia jury after having sex with a woman without disclosing his status…Although the woman has not tested positive, she said the experience has been on “ongoing nightmare” and that “whenever [she] tests, [she] gets anxious.” Davis, who was reportedly married at the time that he was involved with the woman, will be sentenced on Feb. 21 at 10 am. He faces up to 20 years in prison for both charges, according to Tracy Graham Lawson, Clayton County district attorney. James H. Walker III, the woman’s attorney, said they plan to pursue charges in Fulton County.

I pray this woman continues to test negative. However, the second woman who testified in the case has tested positive unfortunately. According to the article “Second woman testifies in Clayton HIV case” in the AJC, Davis met the second woman in church where he led the men’s ministry, and she worked with the bishop of the church. Their interaction at church led to a romance. This woman had been celibate for 15 years prior to having a sexual relationship with Davis in 2010!

I cannot pretend to know this woman’s state of mind when she met Davis nor do I want to trivialize what has happened to her…But her testimony has me asking several questions. First of all, I’m assuming that she opted to be celibate because she is a single Christian woman. What made her throw away her celibacy to get involved with Davis? It has been said that one should never be too hungry, too angry, too lonely or too tired (H.A.L.T.) because any of these could cause a normally reasonable person to make a poor and often regrettable decision…Was this woman so lonely after 15 years of celibacy that this minister appealed to her when he normally wouldn’t have?

I mean we are told in the very first book of the Bible that “it is not good for a man [woman] to be alone,” and even animals entered into Noah’s Ark “two by two.” Not to mention the verse that says “it is better to marry than to burn.” And then again, on the other hand, Paul said he wishes everyone could be single like him but concedes that not everyone has that gift…

While every human being comes into this world as a single person and will likely live as a single adult for sometime, I’m not sure that God intended for most people to be single for decades and decades….I’m not a Biblical scholar, but I imagine that the average age of a person getting married during that time was considerably younger than the average age for getting married today. According to Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America, the latest report from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, and the RELATE Institute, the average age to get married for the first time is now 27 for women and 29 for men, which is a “historic high.”

Since delaying marriage is a current cultural trend, I wonder what churches can do to help support men and women who endeavor to be celibate for decades…Or should single people be encouraged to marry earlier?

Any thoughts?