Where is The Love? ♥

So, being that I'm from Ohio, I guess I'm supposed to be celebrating this *cough*fake holiday known as Sweetest Day today... LoL. Yes, we do that in Ohio. We make up holidays. Moving on...We live in a society where marriages are becoming few, lasting marriages are even fewer, and divorce is ever-looming. For many, divorce is one of the many reasons we won't even get married. Gone are the days when people got married to their high school sweethearts and lived happily ever after (or did those days ever exist at all?)... Now, we're living in the generation of 20-year long engagements, waiting for proposals, shacking up (as the old folks call it), and for many, just being single parents. There's an alarming number of broken homes in the Black community, and the subject is a tough one to tackle in discussion...This is the reason I love Hill Harper's book "The Conversation". I usually go to the library for my just-for-fun reading, but I had to cop this one.

For those of you who aren't familiar, The Conversation delves into the disconnect between Black men and women, and why relationships don't last the way they did in generations of the past. It's a really amazing read. I recommend it to people ALL the time (lol) because it's just a great book. Whether you're in a relationship, married, single and looking, single and fed up, or just lost in the sauce...The Conversation is a great read. That being said....Where is the Love? Our people come from strong family roots, but as we all know, we were uprooted from our Motherland and brought onto foreign soil, where we had to find our way. Fast forward to welfare being introduced to our country. Men would leave their families because if there was a grown man living in your home, it was seen as his responsibility to take care of you, and financial help (welfare) would not be given to your family. So now we have men absent and women left raising children. We've got mothers telling their little girls "you need to be independent, you don't need a man to take care of you". Little boys have no idea how a man should treat a woman, because they have no concrete example in their homes. Fast forward again to the little boys and girls growing up. The girl-turned-woman goes into every romantic relationship with an "I don't need you" attitude, and men have this instinct to be the provider. To do what their father didn't do. They don't know how to respond to not being needed, so some just leave. It's all a big mess...but these issues are becoming too embedded and taboo. They need to be discussed! We can't keep sweeping our history under the rug and thinking that it doesn't effect who we are today. It does, whether we realize it or not.

Somewhere along the line, the male's physical absence apparently produced an emotional disconnect as well, because our generation doesn't have the same characteristics and statistics as the last one. Many of our grandparents are still married, and had a bunch of kids, so we've got aunts and uncles galore, and our grandparents are the matriarchs and patriarchs of the family...but who will our children and their generations have? With the state of our economy, everyone is focusing on making money, keeping money, and being able to take care of our loved ones financially, but what about emotionally? What about passing on those values that our parents learned from their parents, and so on? Back when our people had NOTHING, we had each other. Where did it all go wrong? Everyone is out for self now, and getting back to a state of unity and love isn't on anyone's to-do list...

x0x0♥