Hey all.  I visited my parents the other day and just looked at them, together. Just happy for the most part, except for when my Dad goes all Sagittarius and gets on my Mom’s nerves; you can read about their story here. Then I took a little time and teased a childhood friend of mine yesterday about his day long publicly flirtatious back-and-forth with his wife via his Facebook page. After that I took a look at some pictures I have at the house of my grandparents, who were together for 55 years, and other family members and friends who have had the ideal “Black Love” relationship. And then I silently mourned. I mourned because it is the opinion of yours truly that the idea of love unencumbered, love unconditional, and love in completion in “The Community” is dead. Now, mind you, I don’t think that love as an ideal and emotion is dead, just the idea that love is something that one can be ultimately successful in. That’s dead, extinct, just like the Dodo Bird, in this society, in my opinion.

Love in its simplicity can no longer exist for the simple reason that people won’t let it; it seems they would rather focus on everything that can derail an otherwise ideal situation.  You can’t go online without being force-fed statistics on the plight of the Black relationship. The headlines read like a clarion call of disappointment and dread.

70% of Black women are single

42% of Black successful women don’t have a man

Marriage Eludes Black High Achievers

More than half of Black Men Are Fed Up with Black Women

While these items, all of which were among the thousands of hits that came up with a simple experimental Google search, were probably meant to spur discussion on the dynamic between men and women in “The Community”, they succeed to only drive a deeper wedge between two groups that are the hope for future generations of people. Blog writers, in a search for traffic and comments, focus on the items that divide and the comment vultures start flocking almost immediately because as we all know you can draw more people with despair than happiness. Movies and plays are almost always focused on love gone completely wrong because, as the saying goes, art imitates life. Or does it?

Is art only portraying what is being lived by people in various Metros around the country or is it painting an unreal actual that people are coerced into thinking is real? My parents told me so years ago when I was a teen that “You find what you’re looking for and you are what you take in.” Unfortunately a lot of otherwise intelligent people are being hooked by the statistics of the pundits and the wailing of the whiners and believing that love can’t be found, and if you find it you’re instantly thinking of what can go wrong because of whatever reason you just read about in that link you were sent to your email, not because you legitimately believe in your heart of hearts. The more often you read about everything that is wrong with relationships the more you’ll believe it, and then when you start to believe it you start to look for it, then before long you’re believing that love can never happen for you because of what a bunch of other people wrote. And that’s why the quest of a Black man and a Black woman finding an unsoiled love free of preconceived notions and perceptions is dead. It’s dead because people are lazy and would rather have their ideas fed to them and then believe whatever it is that the most people are believing or talking about. Because of this the most inane of arguments and discussions get unnecessary run all because people don’t wish to think and live for themselves; this is an awful way for love without condition to die, isn’t it?

Now, none of this is to say that love is not without its issues. As long as things cost money there will be issues in a relationship. However what I am saying is that with the speed that news and opinion travels via the internetwebthingy and the propensity for said news and opinions to grow out of control, chances are slim that news of the demise of healthy Black relationship are unlikely to stop anytime soon, especially with the frequency that people like to hear about such things via blogs, TV, radio shows, etc. Hopeless romantic as I am, I choose to believe that such a thing for me is possible even with my quirks and otherwise questionable loose ends. And if, at this moment, you are without a relationship I challenge you to believe the same. I challenge you to ignore the statistics, to ignore those “link sharers” and others that choose to perpetuate the myths that love is impossible for whatever the reason is this week. Focus on happiness, and perhaps happiness will be on the other side of your search; but if you search for what is wrong with everything then don’t be surprised when that’s what you come across; like my parents said, you find what you’re looking for.

~thanks for reading

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