Lillie

Wow...I read over my old posts this evening and I'd hoped things would change. Unfortunately, I'm 29 now and in the past three years, I've grown up a bit, but my current love life looks incredibly similar to my love life at age 26. As I lie here in my bed, with my cat (who is staring at me and purring loudly), I wonder if this will be my life when I'm 35...or 45. It's a tad scary, but I think it's safe this way for now. I spent most of my twenties mulling over men, when all the while, I really needed to fall in love with Christ all over again.

It is kind of amazing to reflect on my life up to this point. There have been men; some good, some bad, but all my own developments. I think most people look back to their childhoods to identify issues that they have in their adult lives. It's valid, I'm sure. I can look back at my life and blame my dad for not being around when I needed him there. I could blame my mom for never marrying. I could blame both of my parents for not demonstrating to me what a healthy, loving relationship between a man and a woman looks like. On the contrary, though, I don't blame my parents at all. I'm grateful for having had food on the table, for seeing a woman take care of herself and her own responsibilities first. I'm grateful that my mom didn't parade men through our house and I didn't have to worry about being violated by a devil-spawn with heinous intentions and warped ideals about little girls. I could tell my mom everything. I told her when I lost my virginity, when I got pregnant, about my first kiss. She wasn't the advisory-type mom, though. She would never tell me what to do in situations, but she always had good guidance and personal experiences to share. 

I've always been baffled my dad's decision to leave my mother. She was the definition of beauty: a tall, sepia-toned, poised Amazon with the heart of a goddess and the soul of an angel. She was a true social butterfly. She had the sort of human magnetism that I've always dreamed of having. People were drawn to her like bears and honey. When we were younger, our family was probably the lowest on the socioeconomic totem of all of our friends. We moved 15 times from the time I was 3 years old until I graduated from undergrad. Through all of the moving and turned off utilities, our childhood friends still preferred to be at our home more than their own. I didn't understand this for years, until I realized that my mother provided a type of stability that didn't come from her wallet. We knew that we were loved unconditionally. I don't know what the other kids' families were like, but I can only assume that they were missing something vital in order to want to stay at our house, where the gas and hot water was occasionally off. At her memorial service, over 300 people came, most of whom I'd never met in my life. They were young and old acquaintances, friends of friends, and family. It brought tears to my eyes to see all the people who came just to honor my humble mother.

November to February: The Winter of Fast Cars and Phone Calls

A friend of mine posted a Facebook status today that really hit home for me. He said, "Sometimes the person you fall for isn't ready to catch you." This really struck a chord with me because after one failed relationship this year, I found myself dabbling in matters of the heart again. It started out lighthearted enough: I actually met him on a dating website and on the first date, he taught me to play chess. We'll call him Sean for anonymity.

It was refreshing because I'd locked myself away from dating in order to get over my prior relationship. The conversation was great and he was handsome. Tall and brown and spoke very eloquently, save a few curse words! I had a few reservations: he wore really baggy clothes and told me he had recently been laid off from his job as a software developer. "Cool", I thought. "No job = safety. I won't fall for him." Having only recently been hired after an unemployment trial myself, I understood his plight and felt his pain.

Sean admitted that he was recently out of a relationship, but seemed very open to spending hoards of time with me. I'd take days off from work to spend with him. I, as always, became blinded by the physical connection. I ignored red flags from him for about a month. Red flags that included late phone calls from God knows who, his penchant for smoothly cursing me out and using profanity in all parts of our conversations, his stories about his former fiance that were always softly flavored with longing and sorrow. I thought if I just showed him that I was there for him during his unemployment and the self-doubt that comes with it, he'd see that I was worth his affections, and not just sex.

Well, that didn't happen! It all ended with him trying to show off in him fast sports car, being pulled over for doing over 100 mph and taken to jail. Ironically, my best friend (let's call him Russell), came to my rescue that night. Being stranded on the side of the road with this fool's manual transmission vehicle, and only being an automatic driver myself, I frantically searched through my phone for people who I knew that could drive a stick shift. Russell didn't hesitate to come get my dumb ass from the side of the road.  I bailed Sean out of jail, and Russell and I made sure his car got back to his house.  I looked at Russell differently that night. I knew I loved him, but things had always been so safe and vanilla between us, and he always had a chick on his arm every time I saw him.

 A few days later, I was hanging out with the ever so grateful Sean, when his phone rang late at night and I asked him if he was still seeing other people. I told him it was fine if he was, I just wanted to be aware so that we could both be on a level playing field, knowing full well that I was already too far gone to play fair. His response to this inquiry was, "To be completely honest, you're in no position to be asking about what goes on in my phone..." I got out of his bed, put on my clothes and left this house at 3 am.

When I got back to my apartment, I cried, of course, to my cat, Lucy, and took a few selfies of my tear stained face so that I could remind myself in the future of what I'd allowed myself to become. I still have those photos.

Several dead-air filled weeks later, Sean sent me a text asking if I would  help him pay his court fees, which amounted to about a thousand dollars. I think he got the hint when I didn't respond.

Cuffing season was not warm that year...

Loving like a man...

I read Steve Harvey's acclaimed book, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. I actually appreciated his insights, however, the school of thought in his book sounds quite aged. By aged, I mean outdated. At one point in the book, I believe he actually advised women in relationships to give their mates an ultimatum; to force a man who has proposed to set a wedding date, or to tell a man who hasn't proposed that if he doesn't do so by such and such date that you will break up with him. This advice made me cringe because I have heard countless men threaten to haul ass at the first sign of an ultimatum from a woman. But you know what? Maybe even calling it "dated" may be wrong, because "back in the day", I don't think a woman would have had to give an ultimatum. Mind you, this is before chivalry died and when men still believed in courtship (has that ever been true? If so, why couldn't I have been born back then?!?!).

My problem with ultimatums is that if you put that much pressure on someone to marry you, would you really want to marry them? Consider the reason that they would propose. They certainly wouldn't be ready to marry you. They'd be doing it out of sheer fear that you would leave them. Then, the first time that you had a marital disagreement, they would second-guess their decision to marry you. Even the smallest disagreements would seem torrential because that constant pressure would always be the veritable "elephant in the room", no? I, personally, would never want anyone to marry me out of pressure or fear that I would leave. I want and NEED to believe that my potential husband is absolutely 100% ready to marry me and WANTS to marry me...and no one else. I would want him to have exhausted all other potential before he commits himself to me.

Admitting truths...

Where to begin...?

I am 26 years old. I have a great career, am well-educated and come from a long line of women just like me. Let's see: my grandmother was married, had 7 children and was then widowed. My mother was never married, raised four girls all the way through advanced educations and died with no grandchildren. Mind you, I am the youngest of four girls. Yes, I did say I was 26. I love my sisters. I look up to them as role models of women that I need to be emulate, or at least copy flatteringly. My sisters are gorgeous; true magnificent women of virtue. They are wildly intellectual. Two of them are teachers and one is a network engineer. I will refrain from discussing their personal lives in detail because, as I mentioned, I am the youngest of four and I really don't want to get my ass kicked. Anyway, my sisters are stupefyingly beautiful. I am the shortest in my family, standing at 5'8", and we are all veritable "chips off the old block", considering that my mother was a model and startlingly gorgeous herself. Please excuse my mild arrogance; I must give credit where credit is due...and I can't lie, we are some dime pieces! To support my point, I will venture to say that I come from a line of tall, beautiful, black Amazonian women; all ambitious, strong, and probably...independent to a fault. 

I can't say that I view it as a bad thing that none of my sisters are married with children. I firmly believe that none of us would have achieved our professional goals to date if we'd taken different life paths and married early or borne children before we were prepared. I stress this point simply because I am 26 years old and have come to realize that my desire to be married has hit me hard, like a lightning bolt in 2010. I realize that a large number of women my age are probably in this very same boat and I want to accentuate this fact: I don't want to be married for the wedding. I would actually prefer to forgo a wedding. Who needs the huge expense when all you're really doing is spending a grip to feed a bunch of people for ONE day. If I MUST have a wedding, however, I would prefer to just show up, do the darned thing and get God's stamp of approval on it, then whisk off with my new husband to a secluded island where we can share our first moments together as a ring around Jesus. 

But-- I digress. Like I said, I don't want to get married to have a wedding. I want to be married because I feel like having a man request your hand in marriage is the ultimate display of desire for you. Isn't it human nature to want to be wanted? I've heard the arguments about loving yourself (check) and being enough by your own standards, but I cannot ignore the innate desire to be desired on much more than a basal, physical level. Despite the fact the 52% of marriages end in divorce in this unbridled day and age (yes, I, too, am bewildered at this daunting statistic), I still hold on to the small hope that I will be able to find the man that God has designed for me and my purposes in this worldly place. I pray that he and I will serve God together and lead lives that we can look back on when we are sitting with the group of dried up old farts at the ripe old age of 90 and say, "We will see you soon, Lord. It has been a wild ride and we are ready to come home". 

I fully understand that 26 is still fitfully young and I have several fruitful years left, as the old adage goes, but like the wedding thing, I don't have a craving to be a mother...not right now at least. My mother had me when she was 34 years old, so I don't believe the hype and mumbo-jumbo about missing your "healthy child-bearing years". If I am 50 and still physically able to have a child, and still WANT a child, dammit, I will have a child. Argue your medical expertise if you will. I invite you to do so. I feel that I am really ready to be married. I am ready to love. In fact, I'm so full of love that I'm ready to explode unless the right, worthy, man can come along and give me an emotionally, physically and spiritually healing release. 

My fault, however, lies in the fact that in the past, when I have loved, it has been all-consuming, self-abandoning love. I do not share this pridefully, but I can honestly say that I have lost myself in love before. I have loved myself into madness and resentment and hated myself for it after the object of my affections finally exhausted of my unrelenting, torrential downpour of all of me. I notice that I do not often heed the boundaries that I now know real love and relationships must have. Since I was 16 years old, a meager year after I started my period, I have been entwined with a guy. I quickly became infatuated with him and this infatuation lasted a total of 9 years, with several maturation breaks in between. 

Looking back at the breaks in this whirlwind relationship, which by the way saw me handing over my virginity prematurely, I see the trend I started at my sweet 16 birthday party, on March 31, 2000, repeating itself over and over with several of the "in-between" guys. The guys who I ran into during my rebound periods. The guys I so desperately  hoped would somehow pleasantly surprise me and be the saving grace that I needed to finally put an end to the relationship of my teenage years. It usually went something like this: If you are lucky enough to happen upon my undiscriminating love, you can have EVERYTHING in the can of ME. You can have what cash I have in pocket and bank account, my unfaltering support and encouragement, my time (even the time that should be reserved for family, friends and self), my body, my car...whatever I have is yours. Yes, I am ashamed to admit this, but the name of this post is "Admitting truths", right? 9 times out of 10, in fact, most guys I ran through came out better than they were before they met me. Either they learned to balance their finances, made an A in a college course for which I probably wrote their exit essays, or strengthened a relationship within their own families because I wanted them to be as strong and vital as possible if they were with me. At the very least, they were better men for the next women they encountered simply because they already knew what a woman stripped to her bare minimum looked like. If any of you are reading this now -- and you know who you are -- please silently admit this fact. I can think of only one guy who is an exception to this. If I were any less blessed at this 26 year old point in my life, I would name names, but...I'll pass on that shallow satisfaction. 

At this point, you have a bit of background information about me and my chaotic rendezvous with love...to date. I hope that you will revisit my blog and walk with me through this journey of purging. I hope that, whether you are young and just getting started with your lovely rendezvous, or already in the midst of it, you can find some piece of solace in knowing that you are not alone. Maybe soon we can hear your outpouring, too :-)