Marry for Stability, Love Second

One day my mom's friend looked me dead in the eye and said, "Always marry a man who loves you more than you love him."

Later that day I brought the idea to my mom. She silently agreed, then added that you can also choose peace and be alone. Even if I didn't understand it then, I understand now: every woman who has ever dated a man has, at some point, been deeply disappointed by one.

For generations, women were told marriage was the only real path to security. Now, more than ever, we make our own money, buy our own homes, build our own businesses, and somehow still want a man to pay for dinner. Not because we need it, but because some part of us is collecting on an old debt.

Reparations, at their core, are about repayment for harm that was never properly accounted for. It's a way of making whole what was taken, even generations later. That's what this is. Not literal reparations, but an emotional version of the same logic. A woman today asking a man to cover the check isn't asking to be taken care of. She's asking him to put something back into an account that generations of women before her kept overdrawing from.

It is carried memory.

We watched our mothers give decades to cleaning, cooking, raising children, and running households, only to be treated like the help. We watched women shrink their careers so their husbands' could expand, only to learn that devotion doesn't come with a loyalty clause. A man is going to do what he wants regardless.

We know men can be more sexual than women because of their disposition. I've seen a lot of TikToks discussing how men weren't exposed to as many women on social media in the past. Their grandfather only ever saw their grandmother, which is part of why they'd end up having three or more children together.

But that doesn't excuse the disrespect of lying or cheating, on any side of the spectrum. Many will argue men aren't the only gender that lies or cheats, and they're right, but historically, men have done it the most. Why? Simply because women had to depend on men. We couldn't go to school or vote, which made us more susceptible to accepting treatment we knew wasn't right.

Nick Cannon, who has twelve children with six different women, sat down with Dr. Umar Johnson on his show Counsel Culture to talk about fatherhood and his approach to relationships. Cannon spoke about growing up between two households, his mother's and his grandmother's, because his mother had him at a young age. He believes this is why he can do the same in his own life, despite knowing that a two parent household is best for raising a child, not only for the child but for the mothers, who need that help and support too.

Dr. Umar pushed back, pointing out that of the six mothers of Cannon's children, only one, LaNisha Cole, his most recent child's mother, is a dark skinned Black woman, and that this pattern among successful Black men sends a message that can wound the self esteem of dark skinned girls, including Cannon's own daughter with Cole, Onyx.

What hurt me, as a dark skinned Black woman, wasn't just the pattern itself. It was him doubling down and calling her Afro Latina, as if being just a Black woman wouldn't have been enough. That rebuttal only confirmed what I call his hatred toward dark skinned Black women at large. And this isn't just a Nick Cannon issue.

This isn't about race, but it is about Black women and the disrespect we experience from Black men in our community. It's more than cheating and lying. It's also about the majority of Black men choosing a certain type of Black woman, treating her as the prize, while any woman who doesn't fit that look is treated as less. Yes, you can have a type. Yes, you can date outside your race if you choose, but you should be able to acknowledge that colorism is an issue in our community. Two things can be true at once, it does not have to be one or the other.

Nevertheless, this brings us back to reparations.

After watching what our mothers survived, we decided to break the cycle by refusing to overinvest in a man whose loyalty hasn't been confirmed yet. We don't need the money. We just refuse to be the only one spending ours.

So we marry for financial security, not because we have to, like the women before us, but because we've learned that love alone isn't collateral.

The goal is still both love and stability.

But if a woman today has to pick one, she's picking stability, and letting love find her some other way, because that part, at least, is her choice.

Written by Ketia Jeune