Post 11: Desperation Isshas, Part I

If you haven't come across it already, there's a video circulating around concerning the plight of black women and how many will never get married. It was a news story on a major news program.

I'm talking some world news tonight type of program.

And I just happen to be passing by the television and I saw the program.

I remember sitting there thinking "Awwwww hellll! Here we go with this craziness!"

Us black women sitting up whining about how hard it is to find a man.

I saw the program as a perpetuation of fear: the proverbial twisting of the knife in the heart of sistas... Just a bit deeper.

Yes, we whine.

We all want a man.

Here's the issue: some of us take our self'-love and self worth seriously. Seriously enough so as not to settle for just any ol' man. Period.

I think that's what it is. Men are everywhere!!

I won't get into all that.

But I knew someone who did: one of my favorite bloggers, the Infamous La, proprietar of the La Bella Vita blog.

I love La's writing for all it's incredible lushness, honesty, and depth. I swear, when that girl writes a short story, it's like she's been working for years on the thing. Really.

At the same time, she has a raw edginess to her writing that's so sharp that it cuts through prison bars.

The prison bars of your mind, that is.

She laid out her thoughts on this whole desperate black woman ordeal. And she very deftly tackled it from the point of view of why we as black women settle.

I've posted the part that really verbalizes my own thoughts on the matter.

Thoughts I couldn't express on paper. But La found a way of breaking it down real proper like. A long post indeed (I read it 3 times), but worth going over there and absorbing it in it's entirety.

The parts highlighted in red are parts that really ring true.

This post is rated PG for language. Ya'll grown. Ya'll will be alright. Even I bust open the Good Book of Cuss from time to time. So calm your righteous tails down. We tryna handle some bizness up in this camp.

excerpted from La's "Your Resolution for 2010"

If you look for a man who's personal constitution lines up with your own, not who looks good on paper, maybe we could all stop hearing these tales of these women who stay with the dude who cheats/beats/lies.

Because I know you have all heard that.

Let's keep it 100 for just a second: If you are single and/or unmarried, look at your life right now. Look at it objectively. Have you died? Are you mortally wounded? Has every year of your life been without joy or happiness of any kind?

I didn't fucking think so.

There are plenty psychological reasons why women stay with men who are beneath them. But far more often than not it is simply just FEAR. Fear of being alone. Fear that you will never find someone. Fear that others will judge you. Fear that it means that you are unworthy. Fear that without a man, you have no idea how to define yourself.

And it's bullshit.

I have never been huge on marriage, though I have wanted to get married... to ONE person in particular, not to just the idea at large. If I never get married, I won't even pretend that I am so impervious to emotion that there aren't times where I won't be lonely, where I will want someone around, where I may even waste a small amount of time with someone unworthy just to have some occupancy in my space. I get it; I'm human, too.

But my big picture is still vivid. My life will not be dull if I don't get married. It will be no less full or happy or fulfilling or fun because there isn't a man in it. I will still do the things I love, see the places I love, share my life with the people I love who love me back just as magnificently.

Because I DESERVE that.

If I don't get married, I will not die. My life will not cease to have meaning. I will not fall neatly into some statistic or misguided WaPo article. Being alone does not mean you are somehow less than. So please, for my own sake if not yours, stop latching on to half a man just to say you have one. Having a faulty, flawed man is NEVER better than not having a man.

And who's to say you aren't missing out on The One while you are bidding your time with men that are beneath you?

Surely it's a more complex issue than I am giving credence to here. But the real talk of the matter is, no matter the symptoms, the cure is not all that deep:

Give your time to people who MATTER, people who DESERVE it, people FULLY CAPABLE OF RECEIVING YOUR LOVE, who can RECIPROCATE IN A FASHION APPROPRIATE TO YOUR NEEDS. Time is the only natural resource that we use and use that we can NEVER get back or replicate.

So why the fuck do we keep wasting it on these bitch ass dudes?"

Yeah.

La keeps it really real. Full bold technicolor and in 3-D. Full smackdown and stomps upside the head.

Really though.

And La is only 25 or 26 years old, I believe. For the longest, I thought this chick was in her mid forties or something.

She has nicely laid out YOUR resolution for 2010: Don't beleive the frickin' hype.

For she has the insight of someone my age. I WISH I had the insight she has now when I was 25.

That entire post should be required reading for any young chick. Get a real revelation of YOUR resolution for 2010.

Shoot man, when I was 25, I didn't know my head from a hole in the ground. If I would've read that post when I was 25, it would've saved me from a slew of men problems.

But she has caught a hold of some key things that I hope she won't relax her grip on.

So thanks for that post, La.

You sliced up this lie that's being imposed on us sistas...

Somebody needs to.

You know me... I gotta break down stuff from my own perspective.

I find it very interesting that I prayed about something some 7 or 8 years ago that bothered me. I was married at the time, and I didn't care to get divorced due to the simple fact that I didn't want to be wading in the pool of waters called desperation. I didn't want to get out here competing with women over some man who may have not been the best person for me.

I got an interesting answer to that prayer I prayed. 5 simple words, really.

I've prayed about things and have gotten some very simple answers. However, the answers were so simple that it took years for me to fully understand the answer.

And La's post was the final nail in the coffin, i.e., after all these years, I fully understand the answer to that prayer. I fully understand it.

But I'm not going to write about it right now...

Stay tuned...