Ring the Alarm

Perhaps this will be one of my most informal entries.  I have a thousand things to say yet have no idea how or where  to begin.  So many thoughts, yet organizing them right now will require more mental energy than I am willing or able to exert at this point (for various reasons).  And rightly so…this is an emergency…who can think straight under extreme conditions?  I’m just a little concerned and I think an alarm definitely needs to be sounded at the decline of eligible bachelors for those of us who are not getting any younger.  The older you get the margin of available men decreases more drastically than I am comfortable with.  It’s nothing new that the availability of men for black women is already low due to black men going to prison.  This is a dynamic that has been in place for quite some time, yet it never really concerned me until now. 

I have been about my boo-less life for some months now and I am becoming increasingly concerned as I see what various women older than myself are up against.  They are alone because there are no available men.  Either unavailable due to being married, being in a long term relationship, having several baby mama’s, or even worse yet, they are single but are emotionally unavailable.  What about the men that have grown so accustomed to the single, bachelor life-style that (1) they would not be wiling to exchange that for a serious committed relationship and (2) there is no woman I know that would ever be comfortable with it.

This is the part that alarms me…the implications!  What does all of this suggest?  What are our options? 

Does this “BOO-RECESSION” mean:

1. Whoever you can get that is half-way decent, you better hold on to ‘em?
2. Rather than deal with the fear of facing the rest of ones life alone, you settle for whoever is willing to be with you?
3. You lower your standards and assume the life-style of an eligible baccalaureate?  Not seeking any more than just a few flings so that your sexual itch is scratched?
4. You suffocate your dream of having a relationship with someone that is based on friendship, deep appreciation and admiration because like the job market, qualified men becoming obsolete?
5. My reservations against Jagged Edge, Let’s Get Married, don’t apply any more?  I used to hate this song.  How could a man site his number one reason for wanting to marry you was the fact that you two aren’t getting any younger.  These days I am beginning to understand that; even that admission now is regretful.

Can ones twenties be likened to the Bermuda Triangle?  They say once people travel in that area, they never return.  If you escape your twenties boo-less is it a Bermuda Triangle experience trying to find a man, or will you remain single for the rest of your life?  Ring the alarm…cause I’ll be darned if I leave my twenties without a boo on my arm!

Living La Vida… Boo-Less

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 India Aire’s song, “Ready For Love” as my inspiration at the time, it was in heavy rotation on my CD player and it’s lyrics would almost indefinitely leave me in tears every time:

I am ready for love

Why are you hiding from me?

I’d quickly give all my freedom

To be held in your captivity

Indeed this song was written with me in mind, if not every song lyric, every strum of the guitar seemed to convey accurately, like nothing else could, the melody of my heart. I was young and while every one around me seemed to be enjoying a “boo-ed up” life, I was determined to leave many a lonely night behind me. Of course, I payed less attention to other of this same song’s lyrics such as the part that said:

Lately I’ve been thinking that

You’re (love that is) not ready for me

Maybe you think I need to learn maturity

They say watch what you ask for

‘Cause you may receive…

It’s only in retrospect that I can say that indeed I didn’t know the first thing about love and even the love I so desperately sought and professed to be ready for was rooted in selfishness. Love would have been right to hide from me a little while longer because I was not ready for it. Didn’t know how to recognize it, how to sacrifice for it, how it should be displayed and acceptably reciprocated. Desperation for a relationship, any relationship left me jumping at the first guy who made me laugh until it hurt, complimented me and whose company I enjoyed without even considering for a moment if we were compatible in any way. My mission was accomplished though, I was not boo-less any more. I had what I asked for…. a boo. By the time I realized the things that I had been blind to but were existent all along:

1. We had nothing in common and hence weren’t compatible
2. We weren’t on the same level intellectually
3. Our everyday normal conversations were non-existent because they were replaced with arguments over words taken out of context
4. I finally had a boo yet was still miserable

I was two years into the relationship, time had flew by more quickly than I intended it to and I was left wishing I had know sooner that:

1. I should have been just a tad more discriminatory with a man I decided to call boo
2. Jealousy will never mean true love
3. Just because a guy is great doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a great guy for you

I had a run in with a love from my teenage years when things really started to get almost unbearably rocky with my going-on-three-years-boo. He reminded me that there did exist a man who could be everything I wanted in a boo… or so it seemed.  He appeared to be everything my current boo was not and then some. He was my ticket to the love I had been ready for. I called it splits-ville with said boo and despite my desire to be single, I jumped at what I thought would be my chance at true love finally. Of course while I was operating under the 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.

Now I’m living la vida boo-less and I couldn’t be happier for the time to myself to grow, to mature and be extra careful with what I ask for in 2009!

Why the Boo-less Life?

Thanks to the boo-less life, I’ve been inundated with spare time. And what better to do with oodles of free time than to develop a boo- substitute new hobby. So let’s give it up for Scrabble ladies and gents. Yeah, Scrabble!

[applause, whistles, cheers]

I’ve invested in a close to $60, diamond Scrabble edition and have developed a new found appreciation for the thing that helps pass the boo-less days away. But of course while playing it one day my mind drifted to how a game of Scrabble so closely parallels the dating world. Here I am playing Scrabble to take my mind off of boo-less-ness and I get my greatest lesson on why people are single while playing it! Go figure. Scattered amongst my jumbled letters was a love lesson just waiting to unfold. So here goes:

Of all the things you hear the most as people murmur under their breath during an intense game, you can rest assured it falls under one of these four categories:

Positions one may find him/her self in while playing Scrabble:

1. You have an amazing word but for whatever reason, you have no place to put it on the board
2. You have lousy letters and would like to forgo your turn altogether
3. You have some really good letters but can’t seem to make a good word out of it
4. You either really love Scrabble because you’re winning or you hate it because you’re far behind

What this translates into in the world of dating and why people are single:

1. As with a frustrated Scrabble player, sometimes you have a great word, and no where to put it through no fault of your own. You have everything going for you, everything to offer, and yet when it’s your turn at love, there’s no place for you it seems. To that I’d say hold on to your letters, a place is bound to open up on the “board” (in a relationship) and then you can be content in the fact that you didn’t settle for whatever “spot” (offer from a man) made itself available to you.
2. Sometimes you’re single because you just have some horrible letters which translates into you have some serious issues you have to work out. Maybe it’s a bad attitude or this idea that you won’t be happy or complete until you’re booed up. Your rack of bad letters is probably a good thing, maybe it will lead to you throwing in your entire rack of letters which translates into doing some serious reinventing of one self.
3. Then of course there’s the person with good letters but can’t see what they have. Who knows maybe it’s due to lack of experience in “the game”, maybe it’s due to not knowing how to rearrange and restructure, whatever the reason is this person probably does not have his/her priorities in order. They have everything they will ever need to be successful in their personal and relational lives but aren’t because they can’t see clearly.
4. And finally to the person who is winning, the person who has learned how to play the game, one wrought with strategy, patience, wit and sharpness; this is the person who understands what type of hand they are dealing with during any given turn and how to handle each draw. They understand that anything at any point in the game can change and that one unfortunate draw of letters, one bad relationship, doesn’t mean that you can’t win the game.

Boo-Less Refugee

As I mentioned before, this boo-less life is wrought with numerous ups and countless downs.  And it’s not without it’s cyclical changes in attitude towards it.  As the pendulum swings in this boo-less life, it can carry you from one extreme to the next and every where else in between; as you can go from whole-heartedly embraced, relished boo-less-ness, to scrambling to find the quickest emergency exit possible (aka desperation).  Boo-less-ness can seem like a bed of roses, while other times the sting of a roses thorns make it seem like the most dreaded experience ever.  In those less than pleasurable times in boo-less-ness, one may seek to flee such a “dreadful state”, escape it, or even become a boo-less refugee.  What usually onsets this grassroots movement against boo-less-ness more often than not has a great deal to do with the perceived happiness of those who are ‘booed up’.  Everything in relationships seems that much more peachy and creamy when you are looking at them from the outside–much the same way clothes in the display window look so much more luxurious than they do once on your body.  Knowing that relationships in reality aren’t necessarily all that they are chalked up to be, is not the least bit successful in tapering the desire to be un-boo-less at times.  So you begin planning your escape route, and it’s very indiscriminate, every and anyone is a viable rung in your ladder of escape out of the boo-less life.  When you are at the end of your boo-less rope, any one will suffice.  Hunger makes everything taste so much better and unfortunately a similar mechanism is in play once you are “boo-starved”…..any boo will do.

Un-boo-less-ness.....Here I come!!!!

I am reminded of an episode of Bugs Bunny I saw as a child.  Bugs Bunny and several other people he was with got really hungry on some journey they took.  They were all on boat together and after hours of not eating they began to look at each other and envisioned each other as being food–hamburgers and hot dogs.  They were hallucinating all due to starvation.  And it just made me think, how many times one can find themselves in that same position due to boo-droughts.  When you look around you, people who have always been there begin to morph right before your eyes into the most satisfying prospects at being your accomplice as you make your boo-less exit.  I wonder how that unsuspecting boo would feel, to know he was only a consideration because your boo-less-clock was ticking and as a result you envisioned him as something he wasn’t?  I always knew Bugs Bunny was good for something….that’s all folks.

The Blissful Life

I know I have been away for a while. This hiatus has me returning not only with a new leash on life but with an entirely different perspective all together. It’s dawned on me that I have been approaching this thing all wrong. The boo-less life is not the drab, worthless, depressing existence I had previously chalked it up to be. Well, at least that is the approach I assumed for most of what I have posted thus far. Granted, having just come out of a three year relationship, immediately followed by a three-month-relationship with an ex from my very distant past, I found myself suffering from a severe-or-not-so-severe case of the boo-less blues. But after three weeks of: tears, recounted memories, reflections, re-evaluations, rants, dissections, inspections and the like, I am convinced that a simple shift in focus enables one to see just how blissful life can be without a boo–or at the very least, my life is more blissful without the boos I’ve had. Now while I can count on one hand the amount of relationships I’ve had, that of course is neither here nor there, I do know enough to know that the boo-less blues is nothing more than a phase, a fleeting, passing moment in time that is temporary-however permanent it may feel. And get this, it’s completely normal. When you’re in love, you’re said to be wearing “rose-colored-glasses,” these tinted lenses of love that somehow manage to taint everything your boo does so that it all looks beautiful to you. It blinds you to all their faults, magnifies their good qualities, distorts their least flattering features, deletes most if not all imperfections, and causes you to overlook his/her short-comings and inconsistencies. Once you’re boo-less, I think you put on a different pair of glasses altogether, perhaps “blue-colored-glasses.” With these set of lens through which you view your life and your most recent past experiences, they may blind you to the real complications you had while in the relationship, magnify your own faults and newly found singleness, distort your self-image so that you view yourself as a failure, delete the possibility that your life is perhaps much better without that boo and makes you overlook the fact that you are still hot stuff. However I am convinced that there is a cycle every single person goes though, once I piece it together I will be sure to post it. But at the moment some of the stages include:

1. Newly found boo-less-ness
2. Boo-less blues
3. Blissful boo-less-ness
4. Frustrated boo-less-ness
5. Attempts at escaping boo-less-ness
6. Embraced boo-less-ness
7. The Boo-Less Spokesperson

Which one are you?