Chapter 3
Marriage
Witches, Thornbacks, and Sapphires
“I am fat,” says queer-identified divorcee Erica Johnson.* “When I walk into, say, a Banana Republic … well, I see those clothes, but I know that store is not about me. When I see those stories on the news about Black women and marriage? Well, that’s not about me either.”1
African American women are half as likely to marry as their White counterparts, providing the foundation for a “Black marriage crisis” and allegedly the eventual destruction of the Black community.2 And if you trust the what’s-wrong-with-Black-women-and-why-won’t-anyone-marry-them industrial complex, Black women may not be pretty or chaste enough to merit wifedom. But most of all, the complex reminds us that Black women are loveless and Black families endangered because sisters are Sapphires—unsure of how to be properly submissive ladies who put their men first.
As (gasp) an actual married Black woman, I understand Erica’s frustration. The popular mythology about Black women and marriage not only erases women like me, it burdens Black women alone with the health of Black relationships, it suggests that they need to make fundamental changes to who they are to attract partners, it assumes that they all want to marry (and marry men), and it suggests that singleness is bad for women and society. All those screaming headlines, condescending sermons, and self-help books are not, contrary to claims, about the endangered traditional African American family or the unique situations of Black women. They are simply the modern incarnation of long-held sexist and racist views that have plagued Black women for centuries.
One legacy of the Moynihan Report is that Black American relationships are perpetually viewed as dysfunctional because of the number of nontraditional households led by single Black women. Of course, as of 2011, barely half of all US adults were married—a record low.4 New marriages are declining in favor of cohabitation, single-person households, and single parenthood. This same shift is occurring around the globe. But African American cohabitation, single-person households, and single parenthood are viewed as unique evidence of Black America’s enduring retardation.
“Crazy” Single Ladies
In addition, Black men are just as single as their female counterparts. A U.S. News & World Report article on American households revealed that in 1990, 43 percent of Black men had never been married. In 2019, it was 51 percent. During that period, the percentage of Black women who were unmarried increased from 37 to 47 percent.5 If discussion of the marriage crisis were driven simply by concern that the Black community has access to the societal and economic benefits of matrimony, then surely time devoted to dissecting the problems of unmarried Black men would equal talk about unmarried Black women. But that simply isn’t how things work. Single men are not viewed as broken and ripe for lessons in what women want. It is single women who are considered societal problems.
Once, at the ripe old age of twenty-two, I was at a party, when a guy began (clumsily) chatting me up:
“So, do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.
“No,” I replied.
“Oh, what’s wrong with you, then?”
“Sorry?” I said, puzzled.
“I mean, dudes should be interested in a woman like you. If you don’t have a boyfriend, something must be wrong. You must be one of those crazy women.”
If madness is the mark of female singleness, the delirium is spreading. The percentage of married women across all races is decreasing.6 Despite this shift, society’s views on women and marriage have hardly changed since the Irish essayist George Bernard Shaw wrote, at the start of the twentieth century: “It is a woman’s business to get married as soon as possible, and a man’s to keep unmarried as long as possible.”7 Singleness and its associated freedoms are viewed as a man’s game. And a woman without a wedding band, or at the very least an adoring male partner to signal her worthiness, is to be viewed as warily as a steak without a USDA stamp—something must be rotten there.
It is as it ever was. Way back in the seventeenth century, never-married women of a certain age were called “thornbacks,” on the assumption that they were hardened creatures like the spiny-tailed thornback fish.8 An article written by Kate Constance in the September 25, 1957, Kansas City Star is emphatic: “If you are 30 years old and aren’t married, something is wrong. Very likely it is you—your attitudes, your personality, your objectives or your appearance.”9 There have been more dire historical outcomes for single women: a disproportionate number of the 344 people accused of witchcraft in colonial New England were single women.10 We can, I suppose, take heart that today’s single women aren’t being burned at the stake. Women—be they citizens of colonial Salem or modern-day St. Louis—are judged and valued based on their ability to attract and please men above much else. An unchosen woman is likely not responding to the universal needs and desires of men. And men’s desires are always reasonable, no matter the personal cost to the women who must meet them. Women, on the other hand, should expect little.
Ladies and Beasts of Burden
So, when talk turns to Black marriage, the rub seems not that Black people aren’t getting married, but that Black women are not. And it is impossible not to recognize the prejudice behind the insistence that Black single women need to be taught (interestingly, often by men) how to be good wives and women. Because the conversation about Black marriage positions Black women as the cause of the problem, it is Black women who are expected to sacrifice for the greater good. The New Yorker illustrates this in a 2003 article titled “The Marriage Cure,” which profiles Black women attending a church-led marriage advocacy program: “[It is] an unhappy but unavoidable fact that women are this social policy’s beasts of burden.”11 Any effort to uplift a community that requires half its members be consigned to beast-of-burden status deserves to be met with skepticism, but that idea is as pervasive in the pulpit of the neighborhood African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church and the corner barbershop as it is on CNN.
The conversation about Black marriage particularly admonishes educated and successful Black women for their competence. Comedian-turned-relationship-expert Steve Harvey says in his bestselling book Act like a Lady, Think like a Man: “If you’ve got your own money, your own car, your own house, a Brinks alarm system, a pistol and a guard dog, you’re probably shouting from the rooftops that you don’t need a man to provide for you or protect you, then we’ll see no need to keep coming around.”12
Reprimanding women for, as Harvey says, “being the masters of ‘handling it,’” robs us of our accomplishments while convincing vulnerable men that their manhood is dependent on the weakness of women.13 This is particularly damaging in the Black community, which faces an even broader achievement gap between men and women than do other races. (For instance, women make up 66 percent of African Americans completing bachelor’s degrees and 71 percent of those completing master’s degrees.) Forcing Black women to justify their success to partners, who should be their biggest cheerleaders, is a troubling message for both Black women and men.
Carolyn Edgar’s ex-husband told her that her achievements—a Harvard Law degree, a partnership, and a six-figure salary—made him feel like less of a man. And he attempted to bolster his manhood through verbal, emotional, and physical abuse.14
“He was pretty candid about it,” Carolyn, fifty-five, says. “In his first marriage, he was the breadwinner and he liked that. Of course, I could have quit and we could have lived off of his paycheck, but he enjoyed the perks that came with my salary.”
Her husband was eager to control the family finances, and Carolyn tried to alleviate his feelings of inadequacy by acquiescing to purchases that she knew were impractical and unwise. He chafed at her attempts to be frugal but resented the source of the money that paid for fancy cars and her three-carat engagement ring. He accused her of being both controlling and too meek. “‘It’s hard to believe you went to Harvard, the way you let people run all over you.’” He called her a whore and also too fat to be desirable.
“I would fight back and lash out, but it was killing me,” Carolyn says. “I was drowning my sorrow in food and alcohol. I came to the realization that I would not survive if I stayed married. I knew I would kill myself.”
The final straw came when she finally unburdened herself to her mother, who had survived an abusive marriage to Carolyn’s father. “She said, ‘That sounds just like my marriage.’ That’s the day I knew I had to leave, because I could see years down the line, my daughter calling me crying about her marriage and me saying the same thing. I had to get out.
“Marriage, when it works, is amazing. I like men. I like companionship. I like all the great things that go along with having a partner,” Carolyn says. “I sometimes find myself longing for that connection with another person. But I’ve realized it’s not worth it to sacrifice the other things that are important to me just to have a man around.”
Real (Complicated) Love
The action plan being sold to Black women is not one likely to result in a love based on friendship, mutual respect, and common ground. How can a Black woman find someone to love her just as she is if she is constantly encouraged to be someone else—to execute some rote and reductive performance to appeal to the alleged universal needs of the opposite sex?
Speaking of men, the narrative around Black marriage generally supposes that men are the only people Black women can partner with. When I wrote the first edition of Sisters, gay marriage was not yet legal. And outside of the LGBTQ community, people talked much less about the myriad ways one can commit romantically or express gender. But no matter what the state or straight communities have said, Black women have always had loving, sustaining romantic relationships with other women. To leave queer Black women out of discussions of marriage is to overlook a significant Black woman identity—one that has underpinned the notion of liberated coupling, as well as the movement for Black women’s liberation in the bodies of women like Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Pauli Murray, and the Combahee River Collective.
“The lesbian—that woman who, as Judy Grahn says, ‘has taken a woman lover’—has succeeded in resisting the slave master’s imperialism in that one sphere of her life. The lesbian has decolonized her body. She has rejected a life of servitude implicit in Western, heterosexual relationships and has accepted the potential of mutuality in a lesbian relationship—roles notwithstanding,” feminist activist Dr. Cheryl Clarke wrote in her seminal essay, “Lesbianism as Resistance.”15
Whether queer or straight, the happily married women I interviewed for this book say that they resolutely approached relationships as complicated, whole women, not narrower, quieter versions of themselves. Their unions came not through playing games or following rules but by forming unique and intimate connections with the right partner. And they maintain that their marriages are stronger for it.
Nichelle Hayes, who has been married for thirty-one years, says, “I cringe at the idea of being chosen. It’s like you’re sitting on a shelf waiting for someone to come by and pick you up instead of meeting someone and having a connection and the two of you saying, ‘I think this works for us.’
“I found someone who I thought—and still think—is a good person that I could build a life with. He is a good father and provider. He has integrity and is loyal. He has worked hard and he’s been there. He cares for me deeply. It was a good choice.”16
Yes, married Black women do exist, contrary to popular wisdom. In fact, most Black women over thirty-five have been married.17 (This was surprising news to many of the single Black women I spoke to, so indoctrinated are they by the idea that Black women don’t marry.)
“I primarily define myself as married, but I need to talk about why … why I as a feminist define myself that way,” says D. Henry.18 “My husband had cancer. I have a deep sense of what it means to put my relationship first. Things were so precarious for us…. [A wife] is not all that I am. [But when asked to define myself,] it is one of the first things I would say. I identify as a storyteller. I identify as a feminist. I identify as a nerd. I identify as a political junkie. But he comes first, because I love him best.”
In 2009, D.’s husband, John, had his appendix removed after experiencing back pain. The extracted organ didn’t look healthy. A biopsy revealed a very rare and aggressive form of cancer. The next several months were filled with chemotherapy, a nasty infection that gave John blind spots and forced doctors to discontinue his treatment regimen, and worry.
Her husband, D. says, is not a noble sufferer. “He didn’t handle it well. There was a lot of taking things out on me. And I wasn’t dealing with it well. There was the nastiness, where I was screaming at him in his hospital bed and then running out to the parking garage to cry over what a shitty person I was for screaming at him in his hospital bed. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. I couldn’t even get the dog to function normally. The whole house just came screeching to a very angry halt.”
D. and John went to see a marriage counselor, who said, “I like you guys. You’re going to be easy. You love each other. You’re just fighting because of the cancer.”
“We came out of that willing to explicitly define who we intend to be to each other. Who we want to be and what we need from each other. We came out with just a strong, strong marriage.
“As I watched him get better and get stronger and become more himself again, we also got to become ourselves again. And I got to forgive myself for not being the angel, martyr wife I somehow thought I had to be. We came out of it seasoned. We loved each other a lot, but we were untested. On the other side of it, we know we can do anything. And that’s an amazing thing to have. I love him more now than before.”
In her early twenties, D. could hardly have guessed she would wind up here—in her seventh year of marriage and awaiting her first child. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life—use her theater degree, write a book, move to California or abroad—but it didn’t entail staying in one place.
Marriage is not a happy tradition in D.’s family. Most of her aunts, uncles, and cousins remain single. Her maternal grandparents, though mellowed in recent years, were once quite different. “There was definitely a lot of sniping and occasional projectiles.” Her parents’ marriage was disastrous.
Being in a loving marriage has required D. to do a lot of internal work, “learning how to trust and how to argue … learning how to rely on someone and be okay with relying on someone. I still feel a twinge here and there when I thought something was going to get done and it didn’t. I have to realize that sometimes people just dawdle. It doesn’t mean they are unreliable.”
D. met John when he walked into the place where she tended bar. In short order, she fell “sideways stupid” in love with this good, loyal man who “wakes up every morning and the whole world is new. He can fix things. He can talk to you about philosophy and rewire the house. And he has yummy broad shoulders.”
And he gets her.
“From the moment we got together, it was perfect. We were very much in the same place. We have a lot in common—a similar mindset and way of thinking.” Recalling the word games the couple likes to play, D. adds, “The nerds inside us speak to each other.”
This union, D. says, is more kismet than any right combination of tactics undertaken to escape singleness.
“My cousins who are unmarried are much prettier than I am and much kinder to strangers. A few of them could be perfectly good candidates for sainthood. It’s not about that. It’s really about time and place. But you can’t sell luck. Nobody’s going to buy luck. People want to buy an action plan.
“If I had never met him and I hadn’t gotten married, I would have been okay. If I had met him and it hadn’t worked out, that wouldn’t be okay. I never cared about being married. I care about being married to John. I don’t know that I’m a very good wife. I know that I’m a very good wife for him.”
D. doesn’t fit the popular narrative of Black womanhood not only because she is married, but also because her partner is a non-Black man. The freak-out over low Black marriage rates is connected to fears about the disappearance of Black families. And women, more so than men, are conditioned to be the keepers of family and culture. Black women viewed to be abdicating that responsibility are thought to be selling out in a way that men (who, when they date outside the race, get their own share of grief) are not. Hooking up with “the (White) man” is viewed as dancing with the Devil. And loving a non-Black man of color is reduced to perversion or fetish. (Overheard by a Black woman walking with her Latino husband: “Well, I guess that Chinaman is hung if she’s with him.”) It’s no wonder that only 12 percent of Black women marry interracially.20
The idea that Black women should expand our racial romantic horizons has gained ground. The idea was the thesis of Ralph Richard Banks’s 2012 book Is Marriage for White People? Black women should be free to partner with whomever they choose, but the idea that non-Black men are itching to marry Black women has a flaw. Black women occupy a specific and not enviable place in the romantic hierarchy. Centuries of stereotyping have done them no favors. Research has shown that in the increasingly popular world of online dating, Black women get less love than any other group of women.21 Even Black men are less likely to respond to their online profiles. As one interviewee told me, “Everyone keeps telling Black women that we should be open to dating different types of men, but no one is telling men to be more open to dating us.”
When Tiffany Met Trayvia
“You know I can’t marry a woman. Right?”22
Tiffany Allen, thirty-four, was raised a Baptist, and her religious upbringing had taught her that loving another woman was immoral. And, for most of her life, her government said that marrying another woman was illegal. Now she struggled to believe that building a life with another woman was okay.
“If it was right, then [I] should be able to get married and [I couldn’t].”
So she hatched a plan to maybe get what her heart wanted, while technically doing what “good” Black Christian women do—marry a man.
“I had a gay guy friend. I used to daydream that he and I would get married and then whoever we loved would marry each other,” Tiffany says. “We would just live in condos next door to each other. And we would just be like best friend couples. And we would know—the four of us—that the two girls were together and the two guys were together, but the rest of the world …”
So when Tiffany met Trayvia White, she wanted to be clear: “You know I can’t marry a woman. Right?”
The women were both volunteering, helping the residents of a neighborhood apartment complex that had caught fire. Tiffany was doing her Olivia Pope thing. She is a fixer. A doer. A planner. A take-charge person. Trayvia noticed her.
“It was her voice,” Trayvia, thirty-one, says. “She has this rasp, and I love that. I went home that day and told my ex, ‘I met a really cool girl. I’ve been saying I need more friends. I think she’d be a great friend.’”
They were friends—at first—taking endless trips to Target together and FaceTiming at night. After four months, they moved in together.
Tiffany laughs. “Lesbian years are different than other human years … In our world, a day is like a week, a week is like a month, a month is like a year. Okay?”
And with Trayvia, it seemed untenable for Tiffany to pretend.
Not with Trayvia, who nurtures her. “She’s really good at that, which is weird for me. I’ve never really been in that relationship. I’ve always been the fixer. I’ve never had a person to do things for me, except my mommy.”
Not with Trayvia, who came out at seventeen and had to leave her mother’s house because of it. Trayvia, who had to fight so fucking hard for her first relationship that lasted nine years, during which she raised a whole kid. Trayvia knew, even as a girl, that she would marry a woman. “My father married my stepmom when I was nine,” she says. “The things that my father did, I was like, ‘I can’t wait to treat my wife that way.’ I never saw what my father did as something to look for in a man. I’ve always felt it was interesting how he was, and I couldn’t wait to be that for my wife.”
There is no reason to hide with Trayvia, who loves Tiffany’s full self—the one that she tried so hard to hide from previous partners.
“’Cause I’m extra,” Tiffany says. “I sing random songs and dance to commercials and make up songs about picking my toe-nails. I do whatever it is because it just happens to pop in my head. And I will be sitting in silence and randomly laughing. Or say something offensive and then be like, ‘Oh crap. That shouldn’t be said out loud.’
“But I can do that with her. I don’t have to censor myself. I don’t have to be perfect. I don’t have to have it all together. And I have someone to do that or not do it with for the rest of my life. And that’s just magical.”
Not with Trayvia, who was strong in what she needed from a partner: “I wanted to make sure that this was something that [Tiffany] wanted; it wasn’t just, ‘Oh, I love you! And I want to be with you, so I want to try this.’ I didn’t want that. That is wrong to me. That’s morally wrong. If this is something that we were going to do, I will be there for you 110 percent. But I need to know that this is something that you want. I’ll be in your life regardless.”
Tiffany fell in love with Trayvia and thought, “‘Oh, hell!’ I was sitting in the therapist’s office. And I was like, ‘Why am I in love with a woman? Dammit! I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with her. This was not the plan!’
“But I can’t be with her and not want to give everything that I am to her. And I can’t hide something that is the most important part of my life … for the rest of my life.”
Real love demands authenticity.
Trayvia says, “There’s nothing that you can accomplish in an intimate relationship if you do not deal with those things that fucked you up. You have to be able to unravel yourself. If you cannot unravel yourself with yourself, you can’t unravel yourself with someone else.
“I feel the definition of a relationship or a successful relationship is so warped nowadays. Instead of being our authentic selves. We have decided to become other people so that we can make other people happy. Everyone is fighting to not heal.”
After three years, Tiffany and Trayvia got married—on October 10, 2020, in the middle of a pandemic. Tiffany thought, “10/10/2020 would be so cute. And [Trayvia] was like, ‘That’s cool.’” And Tiffany did her fixer thing and got a minister.
Trayvia says, “I like the security of [marriage]. I feel like I can move forward in my life in ways that you really can’t when you’re just dating or in a relationship with somebody. My whole life … I just didn’t feel like I had a solid foundation. Choosing to be married to Tiffany has allowed me to move forward in every aspect of my life … having a partner … [I] have that support, that’s right next to [me].”
The Allen-Whites have a ritual before they go to sleep each night. They lie together and talk about politics and memes and the day. And they say “I love you.” Tiffany insists that it is all delightfully mushy.
Society’s insistence that Black women mold themselves to someone else’s whims and desires, simply to be married, means too many of them miss out on deep, authentic, sustaining love—love that requires you to heal yourself and show up fully and to insist on a partner who does the same. And love is the thing, not a marriage license. Unfettered love is the revolution.
“We are two women who love each other and we make that decision to love each other every single day,” Trayvia says. “Don’t try to define your relationship based off someone else’s expectations. Your marriage or relationship, your commitment, is uniquely yours and gets to be designed by you.”
Single and Loving It
Erica Johnson, who I introduced at the opening of this chapter, admits that marriage was never a wise fit for her.
“My mom says she remembers me coming up to her when I was five and saying, ‘I’m never getting married, and I’m never having children.’ I knew that there were things that I wanted to do in my life. I felt like marriage would get in the way of that. Turns out that ended up being true. I ended up getting married. It did get in the way of the things that I wanted to do. I probably should have listened to myself a little bit more.”
Today, she is content and open to commitment, even if she doesn’t plan to marry again. Erica says she has all the things that eluded her as a married woman. “It’s my space. It’s my mess. Life is pretty good, despite the challenges, despite the financial stuff, despite the health stuff. Life is really, really good right now. I’ve got this. Who I am, she’s flawed. She’s not perfect. Not that anybody needs to be perfect anyway. She is a really, really cool person. She’d be a great person to get to know. She’s got a lot to offer.”
The fearmongering over single Black woman does all women a disservice because it fails to acknowledge that women who are single—whether by choice or fate—can and do have happy and successful lives. Most married women interviewed for this book speak of their single days fondly, not as some penance they’ve thankfully escaped. Men are not the only sowers of oats. Singleness for women can be liberating and fun and can offer limitless opportunities, especially today, when the number of single households in America exceeds married ones. In a 2007 article in USA Today, Pat Palmieri, author and social historian at Teachers College at Columbia University, writes: “It’s probably the best moment for singles in our history … because of the attitudes of popular support and the numbers.”23
At forty, Kim Akins, then a single attorney, didn’t see herself getting married, but it’s not that she was closed to the idea. In her twenties, she came close, but it never seemed the right time.24
“I wanted to experience the world on my own. When I first considered getting married, I remember thinking that I hadn’t seen enough of the world. I thought, ‘I need to fall on my face by myself first before I become dependent on somebody else.’”
And then, after a certain age, she figured it wouldn’t happen. But, Akins says, her life was good. She threw a party to celebrate that. She reckoned, why should she have to say “I do” to be feted by friends and family? She vowed to “live like a rich man,” with no regrets. She traveled. She partied. She lived well. And she treated her friends to pictures of strippers and boy toys—one known only as “Peach,” for his taut and rounded rear.
Akins says, “I am one of a few of my friends that claim feminism. They perceived me as acting ‘wild.’ I saw them as lacking the courage to live by their own rules.”
Even her online dating profile was geared more toward fun than commitment. She noted a preference for long-distance arrangements. But love and commitment hit her by surprise, when what was intended as a casual online dalliance with a musician living hundreds of miles away turned into something deeper. After exchanging lengthy emails and talking on the phone for hours every night, the couple had a first date in Las Vegas.
“When we parted, it was like a scene from Casablanca. I was in hysterics. He looked at me and said, ‘This is the beginning.’”
It was.
“I am very deliberate about my decisions,” Kim says. “But marrying him was the easiest decision I ever made in my life.”
Would she live her single life differently, though?
No.
“I would tell Black women to live their lives to the fullest. Don’t wait for a partner to take you to the Alps. Go see them yourself. When you fill yourself up, you’re more attractive, and if romance doesn’t happen, you’re still full of you.”