Until I Get Married

Okay folks, I know I’m a little behind today, and I’m sorry for the delay, but I’m a busy man over here. I have ESSENCE FESTIVAL coming up in three days, so office time is limited and therefore, extremely important.

Still, I have a lunch break today, so let me go in on this particular thing I’m starting to see people do on Facebook that is getting on my last nerve. It’s not so much the people who are doing it so much as it is the reaction to the people who are doing it. So yeah, those people, whoever you are, pay attention. I have something to tell you.

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Anyone who knows me in real life, knows the lists of turn-offs I come up with and the complaints I voice about women are not actual grounds for checking her off my list. I’m flexible. So what if a fine woman enjoys spitting hard core rap lyrics, eats a Chipotle burrito, or always puts LOL in her FB status messages? If I dig her, I dig her. She’s not coming off the list just because of something so trivial, I just like to discuss the little things because we don’t discuss details enough.

So what’s the problem? If I’m not as picky as it seems, why can’t I settle on one woman?

Today, I answer this question with a bold, sweeping theory that may or may not surprise some, but hopefully will clear things up for others. This is my line of logic as to why it’s hard for men to settle down. It goes with me to the grave.

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I always joke that I come from a proud tradition of divorce. It’s kind of my way of laughing at what is honestly a very painful part of my personal history.

Even before I was born, members of my family were getting divorced. My grandparents are divorced. My mom and dad are divorced. My uncles got divorces.

For better or worse, the loving, broken home, is not an exception in my family, but the norm. So the question is, what’s that mean for me?

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Before I jump into this subject, I want to make it perfectly clear that none of what I am about to write is for the ladies.

This is not for the females who have been hurt by a cheating boyfriend or husband. This is not about how I used to cheat, later realized it was wrong, and went on a journey in search of self discipline and the ability to make good decisions. Today’s post is about none of that and kind of, sort of, not for women, though I would never say they should not read. I just want it to be clear, today I’m not talking to them, and I’m not really talking about me, but since we are talking about cheating, let me get this much out of the way:

Yes, I have cheated before and yes I have been caught before, so I know a little something about the bad and ugly of infidelity (there is no good). But this isn’t about me. This is about the married men who cheat and why I have absolutely no respect for them.

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Eventually, the question always comes up. Have I ever cheated? And I always give the same answer: Yes.

Then, from there, the follow-up questions breaks off into one of two directions. Either she wants to know more about the times I cheated or she wants to know why I cheated. To both questions, I try my best to answer without over-explaining, but rarely do I ever avoid falling into such a trap. Because I’m a natural talker, I always end up giving the who, what, where, when and whys of what happened. And usually that is when suspicion begins to creep into the mind of the woman who asked me the question.

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As I said in my first installment of “Shaky Relationship Advice“, I really don’t know if any of this stuff works. All I know is that it worked for me at some point or another.

That being said, I really, really have no idea whether or not the advice I’m about to give today has ever worked or will ever work. It’s in regards to cheating, specifically, how a woman can keep her man from cheating if she is ever worried about such a thing.

Already I can hear the dissenters commenting saying I’m an idiot. Already I can hear them saying, “A man’s going to cheat if he wants to, it doesn’t matter.” Already I can anticipate more than a few side eyes and “psssshhhh”‘s from my readers.

Oh well. All I’m doing is trying to offer up some friendly advice. Think of me as the friend who you ask for advice from and never end up taking anyway. That’s me. I’m that guy.  Let me also remind people, I’m no expert, but I am experienced.

So here it is, my advice, my not yet proven but worthwhile approach to how to get your man to not cheat:

EVERY TIME YOUR MAN GOES OUT YOU GO OUT TOO

Does everyone understand what I’m saying or do I need to paint a visual?

I’ll paint a visual.

I just lined up some face time with my woman on the side and at the 11th hour, I give my main woman a call to cancel some plans the two of us made a week or so ago. The conversation goes something like this.

Me: Hey baby, look here, umm, I have to [insert lame excuse here] tonight, so I’m going to have to cancel our plans.

Her: Oh, sweetie, I’m so happy you called cause I was just about to call you to do the same.

Me: Do what the same?

Her: Cancel the plans.

Me: Huh? What? Why?

Her: Oh my girl just called me up talking about her friend is in town with all his friends and they want us to go out with them.

Now note, my woman never had plans in the first place. She’s just acting like she did to keep me honest. But the key is, she didn’t hesitate when I originally canceled on her. Not only did she sound unfazed by my last-minute cancellation, she sounded relieved because she had “plans of her own.” Her composure is why I am now on my end of the phone, stunned in silence.

Her: Hello? Baby you there?

Me: Umm, yeah, I’m here. Wait, you’re about to go out right now?

Her: Well, in like an hour. I just laid out my dress and I’m about to hop in the shower.

Two key things here: She said “dress”, but she didn’t say which one because she wants me to ask which one. I won’t take the bait though. She also said “about to hop in the shower” and now I’m imagining her naked in the shower and all of a sudden a night with my woman on the side doesn’t sound appealing. But before I change plans, she adds a couple more extras.

She turns on getting-ready-to-go-out music in the background loud as hell and starts humming along, which means I have to raise my voice to be heard.

Me: HEY BABY! BABY!? CAN YOU TURN THAT DOWN?

Her: WHAT?! HOLD ON, I CAN’T HEAR YOU! LET ME TURN THIS DOWN!

She turns down the music.

Me: Baby, look, I just got an email from my co-worker saying we’re all done here. I can actually get out of here. Would you be down to stay in with me tonight?

Her: That’s kind of messed up, they have a limo and table reservations.

Me: Fuck. The. Limo. Put away your dress and keep the shower running. I’ll be there in ten minutes, so get in in five minutes and leave the door unlocked or a key under the mat, and I’ll be in the shower with you before you know it.

Her: [Sighs] Fine. But she’s going to be really disappointed and now we better do something fun cause I was looking forward.

Me: Whatever. I’ll make it up to you when I get there. Bye.

Her: Bye. See you soooon.

Nothing has ever kept me in check or on my Ps and Qs more than when my woman is about to go out with her girls without me around. Every time a situation like that has occurred, I always pray it isn’t going to be the night my bad karma gets the best of me. Even if a woman doesn’t have a life of her own, she better act like she does so her man stays on point. If every time a man says he’s going out to do his own thing his woman responds with a, “Good, so am I” there is a high probability the man will start curbing his own social life for the sake of curbing his woman’s. Fight fire with fire, even if the fire isn’t real, because sometimes men only respond to what they see in the mirror.

Any man who has ever cheated knows the first person he thinks about after he’s done doing whatever he did is his woman. Usually, he tries to call his woman and if she doesn’t pick up the phone on that first call, that man is tripping, wondering if his woman isn’t picking up the phone because she’s doing the same thing he just got finished doing. The above scenario is an extension of that.

Of course, at some point, such responses are not going to fly and either I’m going to call her bluff or I’m not going to care. But I hope it never gets to that point, because once we stop caring, well, there isn’t any relationship advice in the world that can help.

Whenever I hear or am a part of conversations about sex, I can always count on one person who feels the need to be the conversation’s Public Service Announcer.

Everyone knows this person: They always reveal themselves by chiming into the sex conversation or or any other conversation regarding relationships with an unnecessary reminder of STD rates or the importance of using condoms. On this blog here, I see such people frequently in the c-section, and I am taking no shots against my commenters, because I love and cherish everyone of them, but whenever someone wants to preach on how something like infidelity leads to STDs I start to tune out.

It’s not that I don’t care about the importance of safe sex or the STD rates. It’s not like I think I’m immune from anything or against protecting myself. It’s more like, we need to speak to each other about sex like adults who have some common sense, at least when we’re talking amongst friends. We need to talk about sex like we’ve all had some before and we’ve been through some things before.

The lengths people go to to insert a safe sex caveat are sometimes so ridiculous I have to laugh. Everyone is familiar with that friend who always wants to jump into sex conversations with something like, “I hope everyone here is protecting themselves.”  I always want to throw something at that friend.  If I’m having phone sex with my long distance girlfriend, and right when we’re about to get to the good part she says, “Put the condom on, baby,” I’m going to hang up on her. In movies*, when two people are about to go at it, and the scene doesn’t include a reach for some protection, the last thing I want to hear somebody in the audience say is, “Why didn’t they use a condom?”

Such questions, such details are all just unnecessary semantics. Not only that, but the putting on of a condom is the least sexiest part in any sex scene or story. Seriously, how does one even sound sexy when they say something like, “I take the wrapper and open it with my teeth.” What? I have fillings, if I open the condom wrapper with my teeth, that’s going to hurt.

But I digress…

We should be able to have fun, lighthearted conversations about sex without the preaching, unless, of course, Magic Johnson is involved. When I talk about cheating or I talk about a one-night stand or I talk about jump-offs and casual sex relations, I’m not trying to bog down the stories with lessons on the importance of safe sex. For one, I am telling these stories to an adult audience or my adult friends who are already educated about safe sex. If I were talking to children, than of course the condom would play a starring role, but in the R-Rated version of my tales and experiences, assume I’m exercising some common sense because I am. Let’s try to elevate the conversation about sexual relationships beyond the basics and talk about sex like, you know, people who are actually having sex and people who know right from wrong.

I care very much about protecting myself, of having sex the right way because even though I have experienced the joys of what I call organic sex, I also know the peace of mind that comes with protected sex is priceless, and I think it’s safe to say many of my peers are also familiar with the risks/rewards of both. But the next time one of them wants to tell me about a night of passionate lovemaking, I’m not going to even ask about the condom, and I hope nobody asks me the question either because asking me if I wore a condom is like asking me if I enjoyed myself. Of course I enjoyed myself. Of course I wore a condom.

* For anyone who does want to see a movie where safe sex is discussed honestly, I suggest Booty Call, if for no other reason, all the comic relief was tied into Tommy Davidson’s character trying to get all the necessary contraceptives.

Today is a bad day for men. Today, women are mad at men for some improper transgressions a famous man committed behind his wife’s back. Today, I’m hearing all sorts of bad things about men from women.

But today, I have learned a valuable lesson: Women don’t cheat enough.

Don’t tell me they do and men just don’t know about it because women better at keeping it under wraps. Women don’t cheat enough and they need to start doing more of it, maybe this way we can actually start getting into some honest discussions about, you know, things like honesty, faithfulness. How are men supposed to have a conversation with women when they’re stuck up on their high horses? Come down from there, get in the dirt, and play with the big boys.

Now I believe it is messed up when men cheat on their wives, their girlfriends, their whatever she is. I believe it’s wrong for a man to partake in certain types of “transgressions”. I believe it’s a horrible thing to do, to cheat.

But I don’t believe things will change anytime soon and therefore, some women need to just get with the program and get their Connie Summer on.

In my post about Tiger Woods and Cheating I said cheating “sometimes, it’s a woman thing, although, men hate to hear that sort of thing.” Well, I hate to hear women complaining about how wrong men are all because, for better or for worse, a man stepped out on his woman. Will someone please sing me a new song? This one I keep hearing  about men doing what they shouldn’t be doing is getting old and tired and instead of waiting for men to sing a different one, women should just remix it. Flip the script.

To the women who have already started singing the song, bravo, but a little louder please? Let’s just throw away the idea of a fairer sex, because there is no fairer sex. The best we can do is treat each other fairly, and ladies, if that means seeing more than one guy at the same time, so be it.

I have completely resigned myself to the possibility that once in my life a woman  might cheat on me for whatever reason. Maybe I will have deserved it. Maybe it’s already happened. Who knows? What I  do know is if it does happen to me or it already did and I hear about it much later, I’d be able to handle it. And that is not to say I would know what to do, it’s just to say I know what I wouldn’t do, and that’s go completely crazy, which is more than I can say for a lot of other men.

No man ever wants to come to grips with the idea of a woman cheating on them, doesn’t even want to imagine such a thing. Unfortunately most men (not all, as I may have implied in the post I wrote  earlier this week) don’t treat a woman the way they would want their woman to treat them. Most men interact with some women who is not theirs in a way the woman who is theirs would frown upon and there is nothing we could do about it.

I know cheating is dead wrong. There’s no ifs ands or buts about it, no right way to spin it. But any woman who wants to get all up in arms over every act of infidelity they hear or read about should just go ahead and join the cheaters party too. Get it in and often. If for no other reason but to see why men do it. Then tell a few people about it, send out some text messages, and come back to the fidelity conversation. Us men will be waiting.

Over the weekend, everyone heard about what happened with Tiger Woods. How he was leaving his house at like 2:30 in the morning, and got into a car accident. How his wife came outside and busted open the window of the car with one of his golf clubs. How he had to go to the hospital because, among other things, his face was looking like he got in a fight in a Lamborghini with Chris Brown.

Once the news hit, the rumor mill started spinning like rims on a  2009 Cadillac Escalade, and of course the most entertaining and scandalous rumor of them all was Tiger Woods was seeing a woman on the side. According to this New York Times article, in the 36 hours after news of the accident broke, over 3,200 stories were published in print and on the web, and without reading even 32 of them, I’m pretty sure most of them were running on the gossip juice.

Now I’m not one to keep the rumor mill churning. Personally, I believe the media should stop all the speculating. Unfortunately for Woods, speculating is so much fun. We’re all throwing rumors out their, just hoping Woods will confirm them. We want him to come right out with it and say he was doing something he shouldn’t. Bonus points if he holds a press conference and cops to adultery with his wife by his side like Kobe Bryant.

But if Tiger Woods cares about his family more than his fame, he won’t say a word. And by doing so, not only will he be protecting his clan, he will be protecting his race too, at least one half of it.

Cheating may not be a black thing, but damn if it isn’t portrayed that way in the media. The majority of great African-Americans, athletes especially, are almost always humanized by stories of adultery. Pay close attention to biopics like Ray (about Ray Charles) and Ali (about Muhammad Ali). Both movies exploit their difficulty with monogamy in an effort to make them seem more like us. Check out what Clint Eastwood who directed and produced an upcoming film about Nelson Mandela, entitled Invictus, said about meeting the man in the current issue of GQ:

GQ: When you met Mandela, did you learn anything from him on how to be, how to live?

Eastwood: Eh, no, because he was a guy who had a lot of faults…he had problems with women. I guess he liked…Ah I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that.

GQ: He said with a grin.

Eastwood: His private life was probably not as great as his public life. He’s a man underneath it all.

The implication of Eastwood’s answers is when it comes to women, men will be men, no matter their color, creed, or class.

Because cheating isn’t a black thing, or an Asian thing, it isn’t a football or a golfer thing, a rich thing or a poor thing. Cheating, I hate to say this, is a man thing; a grown man thing, and sometimes a little man, still in high school, thing. And sometimes, it’s a woman thing, although, men hate to hear that sort of thing. It has been my thing, it has been other men’s thing. It’s been the thing of fathers, husbands, brothers of sisters. Now, it could possibly be this one-of-the-most-famous-and-richest-athletes in the world thing,

But I’ll tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t a new thing.

Nobody should accept cheating in their relationship, but we should accept the fact that every man does it and it’s not bound to one particular group of men. As I said on Twitter the other day, if that man did in fact cheat on his wife, the “I Am Tiger Woods” slogan has become truer than it ever was.

When all the rumors about Tiger Woods cheating on his wife started to surface, and many women I know wanted to blame it on stupid things like him being black, I was reminded of the time I was playing Taboo.

Everyone knows how to play Taboo, the game where one person must refrain from using a list of clues to describe a person, place, or thing and his or her team must guess what it is based on other clues not listed. On this particular night, in this particular game, it was men against women, and it was the women’s turn. A woman picked up her card, and the first clue she gave was, “He cheated on his wife.”

From there, all the women started to scream the names of famous black men. I’m talking everybody from Kobe Bryant to dare I say, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Unfortunately, all of those answers were incorrect. It wasn’t any of those guys. The final answer wasn’t even the same color as any of those guys. The final answer was actually white. You may have heard of him. His name is Bill Clinton.

Sometimes, certain topics that come to me don’t need 500 or more words. Sometimes, they’re  better in brief than they are at length, and because today seems to be one of those days where no one particular idea seems to be dominating my mind, I’m just going to put them all together in one post and share them.

Consider this a behind-the-scenes look at my creative process.

ONE DAY, WE WON’T EVER TALK AGAIN… a post in which I discuss how the words, “Don’t ever talk to me again” are pretty much pointless.

Excerpt:

There are a handful of  women from my past who never told me they didn’t want to talk to me ever again, who last I checked were still cool with me, and I with them. Though what’s odd is how I haven’t spoken to them or heard from them in ages and I didn’t even realize it until months and sometimes years had gone. I always wonder how those women are doing and of course, I wonder if they wonder how I am doing.

FIVE WAYS YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE TURNED ME OFF…a post in which I list five things I am easily turned off by after I see a girl’s Facebook page.

Excerpt:

5) Her Favorite Quotes Are All Her Own: Girl, why do you insist on quoting yourself so much? What kind of self-righteous, narcissism that? What’s funny is how the quotes they do write are almost never worth re-quoting, which means not only do they talk to themselves too much, they think what they say to themselves is actually hot.

THERE’S BEING SINGLE AND THEN THERE’S BEING WITH YOU…a post in which I try to break down the difference between a man who wants to be single and a man who just doesn’t want to be in a relationship with a woman.

Excerpt:

Yes there are those men who know when they’re staring a gift horse in the mouth and choose to walk anyway because the single life is twice as good without anyone else. But those men won’t lie about who they are. The men I’m talking about are the ones who start something with a woman, only to never finish it, and the women who refuse to acknowledge the real reason why

Some women don’t know the difference between the man who wants to be single and a man who just doesn’t like them enough to take it to the next level. They convince themselves the man is the one with the problem, the one with commitment issues, that’s why he doesn’t want to get into a relationship. Well the truth is the only problem the man has is committing to you because in his eyes, there’s something about you that’s not quite right, and he’d much rather you stick around while he figures it out.

ONE MUSTACHE, TWO GIRLS… a post in which I talk about the time in my life I was in two relationships with two women simultaneously and how my mustache (or lack thereof) almost always got me in trouble.

Excerpt:

Funny how whenever I shaved off my mustache, one girlfriend thought I did it for her, and when I grew out my mustache, the other girlfriend thought I was doing it for her too. The truth is I wasn’t trying to satisfy either one of them more than the other, I was simply doing what I wanted to do. It was the same line of thinking I applied to dating both of them at the same time.

THINGS THEY DO IN MOVIES  THAT DON’T HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE…a post in which I break down certain things men and women do in movies but in real life, either never happen or aren’t as good as they look on the screen.

Excerpt:

Shower sex is always better in the movies than it is in real life. In the movies, it always looks so smooth, and what’s crazy is the man and woman actually look like they took a shower just to have sex, as though the porcelain or marble tile and slippery floors are way more comfortable than a bed’s cushioned mattress and soft sheets. Do they ever look like they went in to the shower to wash the dirt off their bodies? No. And save the song-and-dance about how maybe I’m just not doing shower sex right. How about we just call a spade a spade and say, shower sex in real life sucks and movies lie.

Feel free to comment on any or all of the topics. I’ll see you all on Monday.