You Ain't Hungry Then

My coworker is a single Black woman in her early forties. She often shares with me about past loves and how around 35 she decided that her playa days where over. I know, playa days? Anytime I meet these type of women who used men like Kleenex it disrupts my notions of what women are and aren’t. Sillly me, I guess. Just yesterday she told me she turned down a marriage proposal because she was sure she would cheat on the dude…repeatedly. Wow. I will just say Amaretto’s mind was blown. Needless to say my co-worker is selfless and I would say that she leads a full life. She has worked on her as they say women ought to do in their singleness. She’s involved with her church, her sorority, her undergraduate school, has travelled, teaches yoga, home owner, drives a nice car, keeps physically fit...but has come to the point of being so tired of being alone and on her own…and well who isn’t right?

During one of our sessions, after exhausting endless meet and greet possibilities and going out with men that she just wasn’t really attracted to, she whispered to me that she recently signed up for eHarmony. I said that that sounded exciting and was happy for her. And then she went into how she never thought it would come to needing online dating... Now granted I am younger than she, and as the years have marched on-online dating no longer screams desperation…I mean I love the movie You’ve Got Mail-can you believe that was eleven years ago?! But maybe for a woman who once lived her life as a player…well this is a big step that she wants to make way under the radar.

So yesterday I asked her how the online thing was working out, and well at the moment it isn’t. One of her matches turned out to be the ex-husband of a woman who went to her church. Yikes. Others seem to be too old looking (she calls them crawdaddies) or too short. Or too much of what she isn’t looking for. So I wondered what Jesus would do in this situation, and I asked her to cast her net a little further. Maybe look at a man who isn’t Black, or doesn’t have an MBA. One who doesn’t enjoy working out in the gym but loves to go dancing. And maybe even just go out on a date with someone who doesn’t have it all, just to see if maybe, possibly there is something else that you didn’t know you could like.

She said-HELL NO!
She knows what she wants.
End.Of.Story.

And to me that was sad. I told her that sometimes you get to the point where you have to be unorthodox to find what you are looking for. My dad answered my stepmother’s personal ad in the newspaper, and they have been married for over ten years. And I realize I am saying all of this as a person who is over a decade younger than she, and I haven’t had the panic of living my life alone truly set in yet…so what do I know? To her, I might be asking her to settle, and like Sam I Am-she already knows she doesn’t like green eggs and ham. But I do know, that if you are hungry enough you’ll eat things you never thought you like…and just might be surprised by how good it tastes. It just seems to me, that only a Black woman is willing to starve herself...when everyone else, will gladly eat from the plate in front of them!

See You In Seven