Posted on Sunday, February 14, 2010

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

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….