Independent, that is the question. But not so much should you or shouldn’t you be independent, but what exactly does it mean for a woman to be independent. What happened to the days when independence meant FREEDOM? Now the word has taken on so many different meanings, it’s hard to determine what it means to be or not to be independent. Women who have gotten a hold of this whole “independent movement” and taken it to the extreme say to be independent means “I need no one, I am my own woman. Hear me roar!” In the hands of a man the whole I only like independent women movement leaves women wining and dining the men saying she got it, picking up tabs all the time. With so many suggestions from popular culture and songs I’m not quite sure I’m buying into their ideologies of what it means to be or not to be an independent woman. I don’t appreciate that Jamie and Neyo collabo trying to feed us with this erroneous idea of what it means. Later for that reverse psychology business. I don’t care what anyone says, what makes a woman independent can not be her ability and willingness to wine and dine a man!! My grandmother always told me that you should date a man who can only do for you what you can’t do for yourself. And I must admit that there is definitely some truth to that.
So what is it? What does it mean to be independent? I think it means that a woman is fully aware of her strength and her power yet also is willing to be vulnerable to a man to the RIGHT man. Are we too far removed from the idea that men have specific roles that they should fill? And an independent woman means to be able to do things for herself but allows a man to take his rightful position as provider. A woman who will not be dependent on a man but one who maintains her own… her own identity, her own life, her own success but allows a man to share that space with her…by choice.
I will attempt to provide a brief synopsis of the past couple of years of my “love” life, a chronicle of events that lead to me living la vida boo-less. I will probably not do a good job as I am condensing years of feelings, experiences and thoughts into an half hour summary, but here goes nothing….About four years ago I was convinced that I no longer wanted to be single. I was 20 and ready for love! With 
notion that if you let a man go and he comes back to you he’s yours, he was operating by others, namely if you’ve never slept with a woman while you two were together, it’s a good idea to at least attempt to. Needless to say, it didn’t last very long….that was not the love I had sang about, cried about longed for or imagined.
