JudgeLynn.com

I answer a lot of relationship questions in different places. One is on my Facebook Page “My Mother’s Rules.” I also answer questions on Tuesdays at 7 p.m. Eastern live on Divorce Court’s Facebook Page.

Sometimes I find that I get the same kind of question over and over again. The details are different, but the underlying issue is the same. These days the one I get most often goes something like this:

“I am 22 years old. I have been dating this guy for a year. I think he’s cheating on me. He doesn’t respect me and he causes me a lot of heartache. But I really love him and I want this to work out. What should I do?”

Before I answer questions like these I usually warn people about my biases and history. To do otherwise would be misleading.

When I was single, boyfriends didn’t have Angst Clearance. In other words, they were not valuable enough, especially in the early going, to warrant agonizing over them. In my 20’s I was all about my education and destination. If a guy wanted to be with me he had to act right because I had other things to do. Whether or not he hung around while I was doing them depended on whether or not he clogged up my mind or my time with negativity.

When I was in my early 20’s I had boyfriends because they were fun. Once they weren’t, they got fired. Or just as often, I’d get booted because they found me less than accommodating or just a pain in the ass. Such was life.

Around 26 or so I’m not going to lie, I did want to settle down. That’s when Boyfriendhood became a probationary period. Is he good for me or no? If the answer was no, I moved on. The important thing is I did not feel that the time I spent discovering that was wasted. It had value. In the interim, I enjoyed his company and had some fun. I didn’t lose anything because I had not altered my life for him; I had merely let him join me for a small part of mine. And that part was fun because once it got ugly I cut him loose.

I never asked myself, “How do I handle it?” or “Should I try to wade through it?” I always thought, “Wow, dodged that bullet.”

Now, I’m not going to lie. I may have taken the whole thing a little too far. My date and run attitude left me ill-prepared for marriage. Once married, I couldn’t just leave. I had to learn to deal with problems and I didn’t have much experience with that. So there were a few rough years as a result.

I think, however, there is some middle ground you can aim for. Having a boyfriend with whom you have a few issues is not a bad thing. Life is lumpy and there are always going to be problems.

But once it becomes a story of unrelenting unhappiness you have to know it’s okay to let go.

One young lady told me she wasn’t into all that “starting over mess.” She wanted me to tell her how to handle the misery she was in because she wanted to stay with the guy that made her miserable.

In fact, I’ve had a number of young ladies (21, 22 or 23 years old) tell me they want to make a bad relationship work because they didn’t want to feel like they wasted the year or two they’ve put into it.

My response? Any time you’ve spent learning something, enjoying yourself or progressing as an individual wasn’t wasted. So you dated someone for two years and it didn’t work out. Did you have fun? Did you enjoy your time with him? Did you learn anything from him? Did you have any new and interesting experiences with him? ALL OF THAT HAS VALUE.

Once it becomes a truly negative experience, though, it’s simply time to move on. Yes, you will feel bad but you will get over it. To be without a man is not a failure. To feel like you wasted your time just because that relationship didn’t end in marriage or a permanent relationship of some sort is, however, a mistake.

There is one very important caveat to this entire line of thought. You have to take care of your business in a way that does not make you vulnerable. If you don’t control your fertility you cannot control your life.  Don’t make major moves to please him that hamper your ability to make decisions that allow you to move on. Got that part? It’s important.

That said, feeling that you’ve wasted your time in a relationship if it doesn’t end in forever is like reading the end of a good mystery book before you’ve read the book itself. The journey, the red herrings, the false turns, the snappy dialogue, the words themselves have value.

I get it. We women want to settle down and have a permanent relationship. What concerns me is women who settle for misery in order to achieve that permanence. Please don’t.

What’s worse than not having a man?

Being stuck with one that makes you miserable.

Enjoy the book, ladies.

Make the most of everyday.

Don’t worry so much about whether you can tie down

your tomorrow that you miss today.

You early years are not about locking down a guy.

They are for loading up your life.

JLT

I just spent a heart wrenching, spirit deflating several hours on YouTube watching videos in which black women defame black men and black men demonize black women. Of course, I knew of the great – and I claim quite damaging – divide between black men and women. I hear about it a fair amount because of what I do. I read a lot and watch enough TV to know what the current mood is. But I never just dove in and watched what was out there on line.

I got pulled into it because a guy on my twitter page tweeted a picture of a black woman, with a weave, a big booty and shopping for designer sneakers and asked me something like “Can you save us from our black queens?” I responded by saying that “Black Love often struggles to survive in inhospitable circumstances. We should all do better ourselves and stop blaming the other side.”

I included this with my response:

His response was hilarious. He said, “I guess I should better myself. I’m not going to lie, I had to look up the word inhospitable.”

Of course, gender blaming is not unique to our community. As I always say men are odd and women are weird. Accordingly, we’re always going to have a few ‘What the hell is wrong with those people?’ thoughts about the other gender. To some extent we have always found each other befuddling and a bit confounding.

But I digress.

Before today I just never sat down and went through the cesspool of negativity that exists on the subject of black men and women that WE generate ourselves.

Sometimes the videos simply contained a man or a woman commenting on behaviors they have seen or experiences they’ve had. Many were accompanied by videos or pictures of either gender displaying what no one can deny is less than beneficial behavior.

Unsettling as the behavior was, what truly alarmed me was the vitriol with which each side spoke about the other. “Black women are single handedly destroying the race.” “Black women hold their children’s minds hostage to ignorance.” Or, on the other hand, “Black men are worthless.” “Black men are the weak link in Black society.’

I have a lot to say on this subject and I will return to it. But what I will leave you with at this moment is this. To universalize your own experiences or that which you see on TV and YouTube is a mistake. Each reflects certain stratum and populations within a very diverse black community.

There are historical and cultural reasons for how things have ended up the way they are. They serve as reasons but not excuses … so no one gets a pass  … but it helps to understand the challenges.

Here’s my point. What has become culturally common in certain parts of the black community cannot be solved by blaming one gender or another. We all have some fixing we can do. Demonizing one another does nothing to fix the problems we face for no other reason than that kind of dart throwing rarely, if ever, gets others to change their behavior.

I see a lot of anger and hurt, not thought and understanding. My concern is we’ll become our own worst enemy by tearing each other down in a way that doesn’t do us any good.

Today is a singularity.

There will be other days.

For most, but not all of us, there will be a tomorrow.

But Today, this particular twenty-four hours is a one-time thing. Once it’s gone you cannot get it back.

Of course, this idea is neither novel nor hard to grasp. Today and its singular nature happens everyday, which, in part, is the problem. Its regularity often obscures its singular nature. The very fact that there are so many Todays keeps us form realizing the immense value in any particular one.

And then there is the business of living that so often gets in the way. It is very easy to become consumed by every day emotional adventures. Traffic, bosses, schedules, children, waiting … it can be so constant and immediate that it sucks up all of your attention. You can easily get overwhelmed by all the things you have to do just to get from one day to the next. You work, you handle problems and you put out fires. The business of living often leaves us feeling we have time for little else.

That said, I’d still like to make a plea for celebrating Today. To honor it doesn’t take much time and the benefits are enormous. There are a whole lot of different ways you can live any particular moment. Each one, in and of itself, is both an option and an opportunity.

You can fill it with worries despair or regret. You can spend it nursing old hurts and anger. You can zone out on the couch and binge watch your way into feeling nothing at all. Or you can take a moment, just one or two, and acknowledge the singularity that is Today. Then you can decide to do something special with it.

You can do one small thing that helps you achieve a dream you haven’t thought about in a while. Small acts in pursuit of a distant goal will get you there eventually. You can perform an unexpected act of care for someone you love. You can take a moment to care for yourself by entertaining a pleasant memory or get together with others who appreciate Today as well. Community, fellowship, support in general works wonders for all involved.

Valuing Today is all about taking the time to be grateful for it and doing something worthwhile in it. The context and meaning of your life is established from moment to moment. Don’t get so distracted by the day to day that those moments just slip away.

HAVE A WONDERFUL TODAY!

Ten Things I Learned in 27 Years of Marriage

Number 1:

I had more June Cleaver, Claire Huxtable genes than I thought. Nothing like love to make you feel oddly domestic in ways you swore you’d never do.

Number 2:

I don’t know where they got this from but I did not find that 2 can live a cheaply as one.

Number 3:

People have financial personalities. Savers gotta save. Spenders … have to get with the program.

Number 4:

A marriage will glide for a while but sooner rather than later you have to put your thrusters back on before you lose too much altitude.

Number 5:

A sense of humor is invaluable.

Number 6:

You never get to stop talking about it.  Ever.

Number 7:

Marriage counselors should be a go-to-whenever event, not a near-the-end-of–the-marriage event.

Number 8:

At some point you and your partner will find yourselves hanging on for dear life trying to survive the kids.

Number 9:

Number 8 can last a very long time … just sayin’.

Number 10

You know you’ve got the right guy when the both of you forget your wedding anniversary and both of you think it’s funny.