Until I Get Married

This is a post I’ve been trying to write for a while, but whenever I tried, it just wouldn’t come out right. So here we go again, my attempt at expressing a dissenting opinion of a popular myth.

The common belief is funny women don’t win when it comes to relationships. I can’t link to any studies to support this theory, but I’m pretty sure most of us have heard it from other people or seen it played out one way or another.

They say a woman with a joke is something like a woman with a tool belt, sure it may be useful, but it’s unnecessary. Funny duties are a man’s responsibility, partly because when we’re out in the streets trying to seduce a woman, humor can be our best weapon. Very few of us are fortunate enough to just stand around, we have to crack a joke to take down a woman’s defenses. Women on the other hand, just have to have a nice smile and a laugh that doesn’t sound like a call to the wild.

I agree with none of this, and I bemoan anybody who does, especially other funny women.

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All my single ladies, stand back for a minute and allow me to speak on your behalf.

I know.

You might not need me to do this, but I’m doing it anyway because someone needs to straighten out these girls in relationships, gloating about their happiness like their personal life should be featured in an episode of “Cribs”.

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She sidled up to my left and said “Hey” but it was drawn out with an infliction of affection. More like, “Haaaay.” I smiled and put my arm around her, thinking we were all good. She ducked, said “!*&%&(@*!!” then poured the drink all over me in front of hundreds of people.

This happened Saturday night, at a party. I didn’t overreact, but I did grab her and took her out a side door, down some stairs, so she could finish telling me off in front of a security guard who was there to make sure she didn’t smack me. I listened to her and didn’t give much of a response.

When she was done we went our separate ways, her upstairs, I to the bathroom to assess how wet I looked. As I looked in the mirror I thought, ‘Not too bad, at least this didn’t have cranberry juice like the last drink I had thrown at me.” Then I too went back to the party, hoping no one would stop me to say they saw what happened.

Once back on the dance floor, the party went on as usual, the woman who threw the drink at me was nowhere in sight, and I did my best to get back to having a good time, but alas, I couldn’t. Twenty minutes later I left the party. No one saw what happened (at least no one stopped me to tell me they did) but I was too embarrassed to party on.

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A little more than a year ago, I wrote a post about age differences, explaining why at my age, I preferred to date women over 25 versus women under 25. Now let me explain why all of that was a bunch of crap.

If there’s one thing I’m learning as I get older it’s that women don’t get any younger. I have always been into dating women who were my age or older, but that’s when I was younger myself. Now that I’m going on 30, those same older women I used to dig are my age, but what’s more interesting is my changing attitude towards the women who were once my age at 25, 24, and even as young as 23.

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A few weeks ago, I was meeting up with some friends at a bar uptown. It was a mixed crowd, women and men, just a little get together a lady friend of mine planned at the last minute. When I arrived at this place, I noticed an unusual amount of women crowding the bar area. I thought, Well, that’s unusual, but I didn’t press anyone for details.

I took my seat at our table and struck up a conversation with another lady friend of mine. A waitress came by our table and my friend asked if the ladies night specials were still in effect. Now before she asked our server this question, I already had it in mind to buy a drink for my friend and I. I didn’t really want to drink, but most women hate to drink alone and whenever a guy says “Give her an apple martini, make it strong, and for me, a water” well, he just looks like a predator. But it was too late to order our drinks since my friend already asked about the ladies night deals. The waitress said they were still going on, so my friend ordered some top shelf drink. But being the nice guy that I am, and seeing that I was in a good mood, I still intended to buy her the drink, but I had to ask the waitress a very important question before doing so:

“Let me ask you something,” I said to her. “This whole ladies night deal, what is it?”

“It’s $4 for anything top shelf, 2-for-1 well drinks, and $3 beers,” she said.

My next question: “Okay, well if I order a drink for my friend here, and she’s a lady, do I get charged the ladies night price, or the regular price?”

The waitress said, “We would charge you the regular price. The deal only applies to women who order their own drinks.”

I looked at my friend who was cracking up by this time, and then I looked at the waitress and said, “I’ll just take a water.”

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There was a woman who once loved me. A lot. And when I say a lot, I mean, more than I could handle.

The end to our story was not messy. As a matter of fact, she’s still around to this day. I run into her from time to time, we see each other pretty regularly and when we do, we are friendly. As a matter of fact, I would even go so far as to say we are this way towards each other because we are friends. So there is no ill will between us, no animosity.

For a long time, there was just, a stir of uneasiness in me whenever she was around. Part of it was guilt that I chose not to pursue things further than they went, and I knew that hurt her. The other part of the uneasiness was I had no real good reason why I cut things off in the first place.

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I really do hate when I have to go here. Putting any relationship talk through a race-based prism is always the exact opposite message I attempt to convey on this blog. There is a reason I don’t use race to describe any of the women I date, and that’s largely because I don’t want anyone to think my problems, my issues, my checkered history with women from my past has anything to do with the race of women I date. In other words, I never want to give someone the opportunity to tell me something like, “Well, maybe if you dated more than just black women, you wouldn’t have the problems you had.”

There is something I find disturbing in the reactions I get when I say I only date black women. People jump to these conclusions based on their own preconceived notions, and no sooner do I make my declaration do I have to defend it. Maybe it’s because I’m mixed and people are confused why someone of mixed race would inherently choose one. As Jermaine told me over the weekend, “People only ask you why you only date black women because of the way you look.” Or maybe it’s because in America, the standard of beauty for most men is almost never a black woman, except if her name is Halle Berry or Beyonce. Whatever it is, every now and then I get fed up with the questions and even more fed up with the assumptions about the type I prefer to date. So here it is folks, my little attempt to debunk the myths about men like me who prefer to date black women, STARTING WITH THE ONE I STATE IN THE TITLE.

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It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally, when interviewing a subject for a story, there comes a transcendent moment. I don’t know when or how it usually happens in the moment, but I can always tell when the interviewee and I have gone from a formal discourse to personal dialogue, when we’re not just having an interview, we’re having a conversation. The professional in me is thrilled at this because I know it means I will have a wealth of material from which to work when I start writing. But there’s something even more enriching to come out of such a moment.

For me, an enriching conversation with a stranger reminds me of why I got into this business in the first place. Sure, I wanted to talk to the famous people of the world and create good stories from my conversations with them, but more importantly, I am always in search of a lesson from them of some sort. There are things I have learned in life from reading great interviews, so when I’m approaching my own interviews, I’m always hoping to find something teachable, something that a reader can apply to their own life. Do I want to illuminate and break news within an interview? Of course, that is my journalistic responsibility. But I will admit, the selfish part of me also wants to get hip to the game of life. For the most part, I have the privilege of talking to who I want to talk to and I’ll be damned if I let such a privilege be wasted on just the facts. I always try to get to a point where we’re going off the record because I know we’re about to talk about something real, for lack of a better word.

There was nothing off the record during my conversation with Salim Akil. For the unfamiliar, Salim is the director of Jumping The Broom, the brand new movie that came out Friday and went on to make over $14 million at the box office this past weekend. He is also the husband of Mara Brock-Akil, a woman who has slowly but surely become a force in Hollywood. She created the hit series, Girlfriends, and then along with her husband The Game, and she has arguably been the more visible and more successful half of the couple. As I mention in the opening line of my story with Salim, when I was doing my research for Salim, there was more about his wife, than him. Considering their careers as individual, this made sense, but it also enforced my belief that Salim’s story needed to be told.

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I want to call attention to a disturbing trend I have noticed amongst one half of the text messaging populous.

We can talk all day about the ways people have allowed text messaging to get out of hand. I hear the complaint especially from women about how guys don’t pick up the phone anymore. They never call, they only text. When they text, their spelling is awful. Back and forth we go, punching keys, touching screens, shortening words in an attempt to express complete thoughts.

Yes indeed, things are out of control. It’s not about how often we text, but how much of our life we want to text away. Texting is cool, but must we text so much? What, if anything at all, is a subject we should never text about? These are serious questions because I have three friends who recently have been sent text messages from women about things that frankly, shouldn’t be discussed over the screens of our cell phones.

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The first video I saw was via my friend Shani’s Twitter feed, who saw it over here. Below it, I saw a link to a similar video which inspired the first one I saw. Then, that video had a link to one more video. All three videos are below the jump and feature a boyfriend/fiancee/husband doing the makeup for his girlfriend/fiancee/wife.

This is fascinating stuff. I didn’t watch all three videos; matter of fact, the only one I saw from start to finish was the first one, and I didn’t even watch that video in its entirety. I just let it rock while I browsed through other things on the web because I wasn’t really playing any of these videos to see how to apply makeup. What I was more interested in was how the men could do such a womanly thing without making themselves looked like their whipped.

I have a thing about holding a woman’s purse, and when I say a thing I mean, I don’t do it. I will sooner help her find a place to put it down than I will hold a woman’s purse in my hand.

I’m kidding.

Sort of.

I have held a woman’s purse for her. I don’t like to do it, but it’s nothing to which I’m allergic. I bring this up because it’s something I thought about when I was watching the first video; how men sometimes get so immersed in their relationships that they tend to let down their guard and make compromises on being their own man for the sake of being their woman’s man. It’s not to say any of this is bad,  this is just what happens when we fall in love. Without thinking twice, I’d hold the purses of any ex-girlfriend (no longer than 30 seconds!), but girls for whom I haven’t gotten close to, I might think twice.

I think we’re seeing an extension of that attitude in these videos. Obviously all three of these videos were made in good fun, but what’s even more obvious to me is they were made out of love too. I don’t wish I had a woman here so I could film a video of me putting on her makeup. But these videos do remind me of how real love can be filled with silly moments. When we’re in love and with the person we love, we do silly things like sing a song we barely know the words to entirely off key or we have cartwheel contests. We have silly next names for our lovers and makeup silly games or contests.

And when we’re in love, we don’t think twice about doing any of these silly things. If you take a look at any of these videos, note how none of the men are making apologies for doing their women’s makeup. There’s no posturing here, because that’s what real love doesn’t do, it doesn’t front. I can’t say I’m in a rush to do a woman’s makeup, even if she is the woman I call a girlfriend/fiance/wife, but I can say this much: I’ve been in love before, and it sort of looks like this.

Check out the videos and discuss in the c-section.

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