Until I Get Married

It’s a brand new episode of the Poppin’ Questions Podcast, and Jozen received some great questions this week.

One reader wants to know how it makes her look if she starts sleeping with a partner from the past after being celibate for five years.

After getting out of a long-term relationship, a reader is ready to date again, but she’s not getting approached as frequently and wants to know why.

What to do when you see a best friend you had feelings for get into a relationship with someone else?

A woman is in love with the best friend of a man she used to date, what do they do?

And why it’s important to be friends after the relationship is over.

Whew, that’s a lot for 30 minutes, but it’s all here people! Enjoy the show!

Want to send a question for consideration on a future episode of the Poppin’ Questions Podcast? Of course you do, so click here. If you prefer, email a question to feedback@untiligetmarried.com.

So as part of my ongoing efforts to stay in shape, I decided to enroll in some mixed martial arts classes. (Those who don’t know what mixed martials arts is, Google is your friend.) Though a major reason for my enrollment is to challenge myself while picking up a new skill set, I am also doing it to make my lady feel safer.

That’s right. This, like most other things men do, is for the lady in my life. I know MMA does not guarantee I win any and every fight I get into on the street and I’m still all about non-violence. But if my woman sees me undergoing all this training, I imagine she feels a little safer knowing I know how to take a punch, defend a punch, and throw one myself.

As I prepare to undergo training for my benefit and her safety, I had an epiphany. When I began to get in shape, my desire for women doing the same increased. Now as I prepare to learn how to deflect kicks and choke someone out like a master, I realize a woman who knows how to do the same might be . I know this may seem like a strange want, and not a very feminine one at that, but here are five reasons I would appreciate a Laila Ali or Gina Carano in my life.

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For Valentine’s Day, she didn’t want flowers, that would be way too easy.

She wanted flowers. Delivered. To her job.

She wasn’t subtle about it at all either. I knew where she worked, the floor on which she worked, there was no excuse. And in her defense, she wasn’t asking the world, she just wanted to show everyone she had the greatest boyfriend in the world, and to prove it, he got her flowers delivered on Valentine’s Day.

The company I went through to arrange the delivery will go unnamed and should I ever see one of the executives on the street, we’re fighting right then and there. They totally botched the delivery, and even though I bought my girlfriend at the time a dozen roses to give her when we met for dinner, and she accepted them with a smile on her face, the damage was done. She didn’t get her flowers delivered on Valentine’s Day and I didn’t get any that night.

I vowed never to get flowers delivered for a woman again. The system was flawed and I learned my lesson the hard way. Fool me once, shame on them. Fool me twice, I won’t get any again. It’s too risky! So now whenever Valentine’s Day is creeping up, I tell my lady, you may get flowers, you may even get your favorite flowers. You will never get flowers delivered to your office. The only man delivering you flowers will be me, which is not bad considering I kind of look like the type of guy who delivers flowers.

As you can imagine, this usually doesn’t go well. She insists she should not be the fall girl for a past florists mistake, and I totally get that, but still. I’m not getting flowers delivered. The fear of them never getting to their destination until the next day (which is what happened in my case) is too overwhelming.

But should I ever get over my fear of incompetent florists, I most surely won’t go with one of the big name companies we see advertising on television every year around this time. Since I live in New York City, I’m going to go with a local service by the name of Ode à la Rose, a service I hope spreads across the country and doesn’t lose itself along the way.

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One of my friends threw up this classic YouTube clip from A Different World on Facebook today.

On a sitcom with so many memorable episodes, this remains one of my all time favorite; right up there with the two part episode where the gang goes on Spring Break and the girls meet those drug dealers, but I’ll post about that one another time.

The first time I saw this episode was the first time I saw anything like this happen on screen. Two people in the middle of getting married, when out of nowhere comes the man the bride should’ve been marrying all along. I didn’t think what Dwayne did was romantic so much as I thought it gutsy. In front of a church full of people on what is supposed to be the happiest day of the bride and groom’s life, Dwayne stops the wedding. Not only does he stop it, he asks Whitley to marry him, right there. And to top it all of, to show he has absolutely no regard for other people’s lives and very little for his own, he does it all in a peach suit.

A peach suit!

I have watched this scene too many times to count, and over the years, my attention has shifted from Dwayne. Whether it’s fear of the unknown or me just wising up, when I watch now, I focus on some of the other key people in the scene. They are as follows:

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The voice is back, ladies and gentlemen! After a long hiatus, the Poppin’ Questions Podcast has returned. Five questions sent in by readers, five answers given by me. Really simple. Listen, enjoy and if you want a question considered for a future episode of the Poppin’ Questions Podcast, click this and ask away, download or subscribe to the podcast via this link!

Let us all agree street harassment is unacceptable. When a woman is walking down the street, minding her business, and men start cat calling with unwelcome and sometimes rude remarks, giving her all this attention she did not intend to get when she stepped out to pick up a gallon of milk from the store, it is wrong.

And yet, according to this chart I dug up at StopStreetHarassment.com, men are still out here doing it like it’s a national pastime with no signs of stopping.

But I didn’t need to see a chart like this to be aware of the frequency of street harassment because as a man who has partaken in more than his fair share of approaching women on the street, I’ve developed a nose for such activity.

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A couple of weeks ago, I linked to a post I wrote about my terrible, embarrassing experience with erectile dysfunction. People have asked me why I incriminated myself in such a way, to which I say, Hey, it’s happened, but it’s not happening. You get my drift.

In any case, the post was for a brand new website dedicated to men’s health called TheCheckup.com. The site is a part of a brand new syndicated radio show, called The Dr. Harry Fisch show, which airs every Saturday night from 7 p.m. — 10 p.m.. The show is classic, call-in talk radio with Dr. Harry Fisch, a gregarious, easy-going personality who makes all his listeners feel more like they’re talking to a doctor in a bar rather than in his office. Dr. Fisch has some excellent and valuable information for men, but I encourage women to listen to because it’s something you can share with other men.

This past Saturday, Dr. Fisch invited me to be a guest on his show to talk at length about my post. I can’t say I was too shy to answer his questions and ask some of my own. The most surprising fact I learned was when Dr. Fisch said he doesn’t hesitate to prescribe Viagra or Cialis to men in their 20s.

Below is the stream for the segment on which I appeared. Please take a listen as soon as you get a chance. If you like what you hear, click here to listen to the show in its entirety.

Thank you for listening to the show. If you just so happen to not be tired of the sound of my voice, and are interested in what I have to say about other topics like the State of the Union, the movie “Red Tails,” and “Love and Hip-Hop,” my colleagues at The Root invited me on to their Confab podcast to discuss all these topics.

Here’s a link to hear the show on TheRoot.com, or if you prefer, a link to download the podcast for free (the one I’m in is at the top).

Anytime there’s an article about a specific problem in relationships and women are to blame, the whole world is tuned out as I read and study every single line with the focus of a Rhodes Scholar.

Today, the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled “Meet The Marriage Killer: It’s More Common Than Adultery and Potentially As Toxic, So Why Is It So Hard to Stop Nagging?”

The article’s writer, Elizabeth Bernstein, attempts to unpack the nagging problem amongst married couples, quoting both real couples who have gone through a nagging phase as well as psychologists who study these types of human behavior issues. As far as some numbers to support her theory of nagging being to marriage what a meteor was to the prehistoric era, Bernstein cites a study done by Dr. Howard Markman, professor of psychology at the University of Denver and co-director of the Center for Marital and Family Studies.

Research that Dr. Markman published in 2010 in the Journal of Family Psychology indicates that couples who became unhappy five years into their marriage had a roughly 20% increase in negative communication patterns consistent with nagging, and a 12% decrease in positive communication. “Nagging is an enemy of love, if allowed to persist,” Dr. Markman says.

As far as who is at fault for all the nagging in a relationship, no concrete numbers are given, but Bernstein does posit a theory, which I found most interesting.

Men are to blame, too, because they don’t always give a clear answer. Sure, a husband might tune his wife out because he is annoyed; nagging can make him feel like a little boy being scolded by his mother. But many times he doesn’t respond because he doesn’t know the answer yet, or he knows the answer will disappoint her.

In a nutshell: Women be nagging.

As a man, it warms my heart to read things like these. I thought, More women should have a friend like Bernstein advising them to quit pestering me over certain things.

Then, I read the article again (remember, Rhodes Scholar like focus), and I started to notice some holes. (To be fair, it’s just an article to provoke discussion on a particular issue. I have to say this because some people tend to think articles are supposed to solve the very problems being discussed within them.)

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For the days when I am unable to write a post, a song for you, my friend. Not all will be sad, not all will be happy, but all will be great.

Listen, enjoy, and comment as you wish.

I know I said today’s post would be football term’s for ladies to apply in their dating life, but I’m postponing that topic because something else is on my mind.

This is hard for me to write about without giving some context, bare with me as I unpack a couple of things before moving forward.

I never write about my dad. My late biological father has been written about at length, so has my pop. The man my mother is married to, I refer to him as my step-dad. In my own head, these men are clearly separated and compartmentalized. To the reader, things are probably a little more jumbled, largely because I don’t write about my life in chronological order. I hop around, jumping from memory to memory.

So when I say my dad, understand I am not talking about the men I mentioned above. I am talking about the man whose last name was given to me after he adopted me as his own. He brought my sister into this world. He and my mom were married, but divorced when I was 5 or 6. From then on, he was more of a weekend dad, seeing us about twice a month.

I’ve had my issues with my dad. They’re not as deep as the issues I had with the absence of my biological father or the troubling and complicated relationship I had with my pop, but issues nonetheless. Most of these bore out of how little we saw him even though he never lived too far away. He never raised us so much as he visited us, and there were times my sister and I both resented him for it. The other issue is, how remarkably different he is from my sister and I.

Our dad is a white man from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who listens to The Doors, wears Wranglers, votes Repubican, loves Pittsburgh sports, the Steelers especially, and watches Nascar. We could not be more opposite if I was night and he, day, which made the physical distance between us feel much farther than it ever really was.

Thankfully, over the years, my issues with him have subsided. We talk most Sundays on the telephone, the conversations mostly brief check-ins, but I am proud to say, occasionally they run long.

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