The Old Ball Could Be Off The Chain!

via The Beautiful Struggler - Me, Myself and Eye

Marriage is a recurrent theme on The Beautiful Struggler. Not that I, nor most of my friends ~~nor hardly ANY of the Black folks I know or see on a daily basis~~ are married or close to being married. But blessed matrimony is higher on my list of life goals than career success and (God willing) will be the delightful precursor to the births of our children Thelonious, Miles and the one I let my husband name. My friend Sister Spottieottie even named my nuptial extravaganza "Bigger and Blacker: The Wedding Extravaganza". Ladies free before 10(AM).

I'm a fan of marriage, despite what a lot of naysayers say nay about it. I think that marriage can save the Black community if we focus our attention on building partnerships and families...even if your marriage is not legally recognized by all states. It's a commitment of the heart that I wish more of our people were willing and able to make. So as a champion of marriage, it makes me feel uncomfortable when I get jokes like this sent to my inbox:
A man was leaving a convenience store with his morning coffee when he noticed a most unusual funeral procession/A long black hearse was followed by a second long black hearse about 50 feet behind the first one. Behind the second hearse was a solitary man walking a dog on a leash. Behind him, a short distance back, were about 200 men walking single file. He respectfully approached the man walking the dog and said, 'I am so sorry for your loss, and this may be a bad time to disturb you, but I've never seen a funeral like this. Whose funeral is it?' 'My wife's. 'What happened to her?' The man replied, 'My dog attacked and killed her.' The other fellow inquired further, 'But who is in the second hearse?' The man answered, 'My mother-in-law. She was trying to help my wife when the dog turned on her.' A poignant and thoughtful moment of silence passed between the two men. ‘Can I borrow the dog?' The man replied, 'Get in line.'

BOO!!!BOOOOOOOOOO!!!I realize that wives and especially mother-in-laws have long since been a source of derision in American comedy. 'The Honeymooners', 'I Love Lucy', 'Married With Children', 'Unhappily Ever After', the comic strip Hagar, Rodney Dangerfield, 'I Think I Love My Wife'...just a smattering of random examples, far from all of them of course. And the bumbling, childlike husband is a comedic staple as well, so I don't want to chalk my discomfort at the anti-wife/mother-in-law sentiment up to pure misogyny, because that's not fair. However, there is something deeply troubling about the notion of wife as 'ball-and-chain' and the fear/hatred of marriage that seems to run so deeply in men across racial lines.

American entertainment would have you believe that marriage is the end all, be all goal for most young women and that men spend their 20's and 30's doing best to avoid it at all costs. This is true for a lot of people, but I often wonder if it's a case of art imitating life or instead, a 'vicious circle'. Because young men are bombarded with the 'marriage is for simps and women' imagery (AND because Black men especially tend to have a lack of counterpoints in their lives to show the evidence to the contrary), its not surprising that a lot of males in my peer group have feelings about being wed that range from ambivalence to straight-up disinterest. This speaks volumes about how impressionable Americans are; Hip-Hop's celebration of the player lifestyle has also had damning effects on the psyches of young people across cultural lines.

Now, that is not to say that all young men or young Black men are completely adverse to marriage. In fact, speaking of how easily people are influenced, the two years that Michele and Barack Obama have spent on the national stage managed to find quite a few young men changing their tunes about wives. Oh, but there were certainly some jokes about Marian Robinson, First Grandmother, joining them in Washington. Instead of lauding Barack for bringing THREE generations of Black women in to the White House, remarkable considering that past Presidents had kept Black women as slaves and concubines, I heard more than a few men lament the "trouble" brother Obama had set himself up for. During the campaign, comedian Chris Rock even came for the beloved Mrs. O, joking that while a Black woman could certainly be the president, she couldn't be First Lady. His reasoning Black women gotta run shit!", she's gonna wanna pick her husband's cabinet; "Kiki need to be Secretary of State. She can fight!" Hilarious, but once again, wives FTL.

In parts of both the Eastern world and the West, marriage was once handing over of a woman from her father to her husband. She brought perhaps a dowry. Whether she had professional skills or only domestic ones (as if those are any less valuable than your average $65k a year job), she was still seen as some sort of burden or responsibility to be taken care of. Despite whatever she may have brought to the proverbial table, the marriage was seen less as a partnership than a guardianship agreement or an acquisition of new property. Not to say that the wives involved were never loved or respected, but they weren't seen as equals.

Perhaps the idea of wife-as-responsibility is lodged in the ancestral memories of young men today, who belong to a generation that is exceedingly selfish and fearful of responsibility. To be fair, marriage IS a huge responsibility. You are no longer accountable to just yourself, but to your partner and the children you may choose to have AND, to some lesser extent, her family as well. But as women's role in the workplace has changed drastically (not so drastically for Black women, as we have BEEN working), there is much less expectation that a modern husband will be serving as the sole or even primary earner. The cost of living has changed to the point where the middle-class trappings that most folks want are no longer affordable on a single-earner budget, unless the fella is bringing home SERIOUS loot.

As far as the anti-mother-in-law sentiment, I have come to realize that our elders can be quite 'ways-y'. They do and say a lot of stuff that will drive you up the wall, down and back up again. But I know that there is a certain amount of reverence I would have for the person who brought my beloved in to this world. The only person who could really facilitate the complete fuckery of an ill-intentioned mom-in-law is her actual child and if your partner doesn't respond accordingly to her nagging, meddling or disrespect...then perhaps you need to reconsider your partner. I know that my mom can be the most annoying woman on the face of the planet (she's also the most loving, beautiful and all-around awesome one too), but you won't dog her in front of me. And as such, I would never let her disrespect anyone I care about. I'd look down at her (I got five inches on Mommy) and say "Look, dammit. There is a man shortage. I'm not losing my man to your attitude. Now ask yourself: do you want to have grandchildren or not?"

So wives and mother-in-laws will suck the life out of you and Black wives and mother-in-laws will likely take your manhood in the process, according to a lot of folks. But what about all the GOOD things about marriage? Don't people like to cuddle? Don't you want to always know where your next piece of tail is coming from? I know I do! Or is that what the long suffering, forever girlfriend is for? What about providing a stable home for your children? Not being the sole person responsible for keeping your house clean, food cooked and bills paid? Honestly, as much as I am opposed to the idea of shacking up with someone before MY marriage (it works well for other folks, I just don’t want to do it)...I sometimes wish I had a live-in so I didn't have to rely on myself for everything. Not in order to have someone to take care of me, but so I can be part of a team. If teamwork wasn't so much more powerful than solo action, then we'd watch 1-on-1 basketball instead of, um, team basketball? Ok, you know what I mean.

Perhaps I should just hope that there is one super-awesome modern man with some moderately traditional sensibilities feels the same way about marriage that I do and that he’s Black, cute and at least 6’0 tall (that’s generous, I’m 6’2 in heels). And pray that he finds his way to New York around 2014. And that he likes Brooklyn brownstones and booze and Jazz and stuff. But I’m not selfish, I want all the single ladies, all the single ladies out there to have options and all the single guys to realize how super damn dope spending the rest of their lives with us could be.

I love Nina Simone, but she was wrong; marriage is not ‘for old folks”, it’s for any folks who realize its value and who want to do the work. So how do we show the men what its worth if we have so many images to the contrary?

Share this story on: