Get Somebody Else To Do It!

    Growing up in church I was always taught to be agreeable and to think of others before myself. Though this is a wonderful characteristic to have, the world we live in does not allow for this characteristic to flourish naturally, especially for black women. To be soft you must be in an environment that provides protection and provision. Reality is you cannot walk around being soft without having some form of discernment. In a perfect world I wish I could show up soft, vulnerable and not as an “independent, strong black woman”. But when you are responsible for bills, taking care of the kids, cleaning the house, working a 9-5 and everything else it is pretty difficult to be soft.

    I am challenging myself to leave the role I saw my mother play as a woman. She did E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G herself and she did it well! Though I had the luxury of having a present father he wasn't a present husband. It took him years of counseling to realize that he had missed the mark but once he healed he was able to take accountability and he changed his behaviors. So these feelings and thoughts bring me to the following question, if men would like women to be softer what part do you think you have to play in order to relieve, black women of the independence and strengthen you so wish we did not embody?  

Let me make this clear: marriage is the “end goal” for me, however right now I am struggling on how to set up the proper boundaries to get there without having to continue to be responsible for E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G! It’s like I set boundaries and next thing you know I am self sacrificing myself again then I am burnt out and it leads to frustration. SO it's a me thing! Finding myself doing too much and not being poured back into the way I desire gets exhausting, having conversation after conversation for it to result in more waiting is frustrating. I completely understand that you are supposed to teach your partner how to treat you but what happens when they refuse to adjust to your needs? A lot of questions I find my girlfriends asking is, How do you let something “good” go for “great”? Do you wait and continue to have faith that things will “change”? How do you hold a man accountable without damaging his ego? Or should ego’s even exist in a romantic partnership? 

Now this idea of setting boundaries is not limited to romantic partners but this is where I have struggled in the most and I feel like a lot of women, Christian women to be specific, struggle as well. Encountering romantic partners outside of the walk of faith and keeping my boundaries always seemed so hard! So how do women end up in relationships with men who do not share the same values as them? Even in my opinion, Biblical principles really lean into the fact that marriage is a partnership. In my experience I could never find a guy I was attracted to who attended church because his values were still like the guys I dated outside of the church, if not worse. When I ask my guy friends about marriage, more often than not, they always describe wanting a wife but the desire of being an actual husband is never really touched upon. I always hear things like: want my wife to be like this or that, she can’t act like this and needs to look like this. In defense of men, I haven’t dated nearly enough to past judgment on ALL men however, these are my thoughts that I have been battling with lately.  

Back to boundaries, here is the conflict I’ve found myself in: as a young Christian girl I was raised to always have wife-like qualities but not taught who to give these qualities to. They did not teach us how to duck and dodge romantic partners who were not equipped to handle relationships that they desire. How do you pick the "perfect" spouse/husband for you?

This blog post was inspired by the below image I seen on Facebook. Please feel free to comment, like and share.