Posted on Sunday, February 7, 2010

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“I think this is really an example of an outdated idea,” says Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage: A History.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?)

Posted on Sunday, January 31, 2010

Pssst, girl have you heard…aka Sins I Still Struggle With…

Hello World!!!

I hope that even though the New Year is a officially a month old as of today, you still have the fresh-faced optimism that a New Year brings…I do…And while it is a New Year, I realized last week that there are some behaviors that I should have left in 2009 but have managed to stay with me in the new decade…

So last week, I reconnected with an old friend that I haven’t spoken with in years. And this old friend gave me some good ole juicy gossip – not new stuff necessarily but stuff that was sooo inflammatory I felt like I had to tell somebody…Now if y’all are dyed-in-the-wool gossips like I am, you know you can’t tell your good ole gossip all willy nilly lest your news be ill received or worse, not responded to at all…So like a cheetah eyeing its prey, I found just the woman I wanted to tell my gossip to…I knew she would appreciate it just like I did…and we would laugh together in glee at the news we were privy to…Well, I said something like, “Girl, when you pass by here again, gone head and stop because I got something good to tell you.” I kind of snickered in a devilish way for effect after my statement. “And if you don’t appreciate gossip, you might not want to hear it.” That my disclaimer. She smiled and said to tell her next week because she was fasting then…Oh well, as we gossips know, everybody ain’t ready to hear what you got to share…That’s cool though. You just got to find another worthy person which with to get in cahoots…

So about an hour or so later, I was on the telephone with another friend. I was reasonably sure this person wouldn’t appreciate the goods either but I tested her out anyway…I said, “Girl, I shouldn’t be gossiping but…” She rebuked me like the devil and told me she was fasting too and didn’t want to hear it…Well, then my feelings were hurt…Well, not really…I knew then that God was trying to get my attention…so I didn’t attempt to share my gossip at Bible Study that night in the form of a prayer request like I can do sometimes…”Well, y’all need to pray for so and so because they are going through___________.” Scandalous, I know….

I guess what is so difficult for me is that I am truly nosy by nature and it has served me well in my chosen career…and journalists are, in fact, paid to be nosy…And I relish it, let me tell you…and sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between when I’m doing my job and when I’m carefully trying to ferret out details that are really none of my business…So how do I differentiate between gossip and news? Well first of all, I believe that God has no problem with me reading my gossip blogs…My girl from LuxeTips and I are notorious among our girls for knowing all of the celebrity dish…Some people tune into football…We tune into the celebrity world…I honestly don’t feel there is a problem with that…We laugh about folk’s drama according to certain blogs or discuss who was wearing what at different events…No harm, no foul…I think most celebrities think that if you’re not talking about them, they are not relevant anyway…

But I do feel a pang of guilt when I’m talking about takes on a life of its own and I find myself discussing Jay-Z and Beyonce’s relationship with a passion that I know would better be directed toward my own life…And I certainly know its wrong to collect gossip on people I know like I have some sort of mental file cabinet in my head in which each person has his or her own file…And I am guilty of that…And God is not pleased…I was talking with someone last night and they finally had to cut me off like I was a drunk at a bar…This person had shared some great dish up until that point but even they had enough of my pleas to “Tell Me!”

Since today is Sunday, it’s a perfect opportunity to renew my commitment to live within the will of God…and sometimes, it can be hard to figure out God’s will…But when the issue is clearly addressed in the Bible, I know there is no excuse to act ignorant….