Try Loving her for her intellect

He keeps asking me to come back, 
this is so not going happen!

I’ve struggled with this reality for years. Why are some people so surprised when they discover women are smart. Men and women alike would first assume that women are less intelligent than men. When I was talking to some friends about a woman I admire for her brains and how she carried herself. The first response I heard was “she is so damn upper-ty”  I SMDH why did this fool go there? He does not even know anything about her!  Well, here I go thinking that because my friend referred to her as “upper-ty”, I rushed to defend her, he was a “fool.” Putting others down has been a bad habit, we go negative before we go positive. Making an assumption about things and people we know nothing about.

We are often so caught up in appearances that we don’t stop to think that the person has way more to offer than how they look.

You are so chauvinistic to think that without your admiration my beauty is wasted and useless! 

 Men are now finding themselves caught behind the proverbial “8 ball,” which happens to be black and has a figure “8”  on it. Women have that figure “8” which causes men to stop and stare at what he knows is not obtainable. So much so that many men are staring at her figure so long that they are being left behind… losing ground every day. While women are growing by leaps and bounds. Getting advance degrees,  starting businesses, and moving up the corporate ladders. We men even find ourselves wishing that her opportunities had come our way, even if she earned it and men were not willing to put in the work. This envy is growing and wreaking havoc in relationships. A quick story. I had a wonderful relationship with a beautiful woman, we met on Wall Street, not a girl because she was my senior by a couple of years, when I was finishing my senior year at the Univerisity. She had already graduated and had started her career with a Publishing firm.

I was proud to be seen on her arm because she was so very accomplished, and she looked great on my arm. she was also a great dancer who made me look like I also was a good dancer we were smooth on the dance floor together..

However back then the glass ceiling was a solid concrete floor. Women had jobs, not careers that took them to executive offices.

When I graduated I was offered an internship at IBM, (I was a token black man that was going places) this took me away from NYC. to upstate N.Y. when I returned  to the city I was ready to start my career as an IT professional and grow, I interviewed for a job with a consulting IT firm that wanted to send me to Illinois. She became upset with me that I was thinking about taking a job in

Northbrook Ill. to work for Allstate Insurance on a contract. I never thought she would be upset, about me hitting my stride since we had already had 6 months of being apart from each other when I was at IBM. My new career as a stepping stone for me to gain the necessary experience, and it was initially for only 6 months, I just didn’t see what she was seeing. I was being selfish as most young career mind black men were, and she was being insecure. She had grown as far as she thought she was going to grow in her career. Instead of me seeing what she was feeling I was very excited about making the move to Illinois which was 800 miles away, an 1 and a half hr plane ride, or a 12 hrs drive away. I knew this because I drove from N.Y. to Ill a couple time in my brand new T-bird, with the glass T-top, I might not have been able to afford that car if I stayed in N.Y. things like car Insurance, parking in my underground apt. building garage, life in N.Y was way more expensive than it was in Illinois, plus I paid move taxes in N.Y. than any other state I lived.

She broke off our relationship telling me “I had made my choice!” and “she was not my choice. I had picked my career over love.” I was young and therefore  L-O-V-E was a four letter word to me.

We saw each other only once after that, I returned to NYC to pack up the rest of my stuff to be shipped to the mid-west and I visited her at her highrise apt. on the 10th floor, I'd taken a pic of her on the balcony before I left. She was happy to see me, initially, because she thought I had returned to resume our relationship, but I told her I was making my move to Illinois a permanent move.  So I came by to tell her Bye Bye. That was the end for us.

Dialing forward to things as they are now: Women are being put in these positions of growth in their careers, men are now finding themselves in these types of positions, of resentment. We don’t handle split-ups very well, because we know if she leaves us, it will be just a matter of time before we are forgotten, and she would have moved on. While women in the past would pack their bags and leave with her man whose career had taken him to another place to live, men are less likely to do this, these days.  Men start thinking like cavemen, having internal conversations with themselves something like this; “So what do you really expect? That she was going to give up a great opportunity to stay here with your sorry A$$ as you wind down your second-rate career?”   

Maybe that 25 yr old woman I knew back then, as I was just a 22-year-old and going places... may have been thinking the same type of things, since she was from N.Y. and had never ever thought about leaving the state or the city for that matter, her boundaries was the George Washington bridge…... she was home … I, on the other hand, was not from N.Y. I only went there to seek my advanced degree… and I had gotten it… therefore I was leaving heading for a new major city was an option that intrigued me I had never been to Illinois before that move, so I was looking forward to the move….regardless of how my move made her feel. I was cold-blooded, I guess, thinking back I felt bad, while I thought about how I had made her feel as I drove back to Illinois, it would have been nice to have her as company on those long stretches of lonely highways, we would have talked things out, bring clarity to how we both felt.  Maybe I made a wise career choice, I settle down in Wheeling Ill., one town over from Northbrook, and lived there for 4 years almost 5, got married. And when I decide the freezing Chicago Hawk winters, from late Sept to June of the following year was too cold for a tropical fella like myself, so I talked, my then young wife to move 1,300 miles away from her closely-knit family and start a new life in Miami Florida, where she did have some family, 2 aunts an uncles and a few cousins. Her brother left Ill. and joined us a 1 year and a half later when we settled into our newly built first home and lived with us for 4 years, while he attended the University. He was and still is my brother, as we became very close, not just my brother in law and the godfather to my first born son. When he got married he continued to live with us for about 6 more months with his new bride, before they bought their first home. His wife was from Engeland and had moved to Miami to pursue her new career in nursing. Maybe she left a lover behind in London, who knows. Well, in the end, she divorced her husband and continued to pursue her new career, now she is an MD. in the state of Indiana. I started to notice, at that point the new Pattern of women choosing careers over love, which was making women move for Jobs, nixing the wants and needs of their partners, who were often stuck in a rut for a few years, wondering this or that.

So what’s for dinner my stay at homemaker husband?

“Your favorite” my Career oriented wife.

Final thoughts   

I don’t have any regrets about my various life-altering moves, I had gotten used to making good choices, they worked out well for me, career-wise. Maybe on some level, these moves forced me to get out of my comfort zone and push harder to succeed, not having a safety net in a new highwire act, which looks dangerous to some folks,  but when you can walk the tight rope like I had learned to do and have faith in your potential success… then you know that you had done what was in the cards, the hand you were dealt was played out and you won. My mindset is now a bit different, because of my experiences. As I see women having to make choices and having to leave their comfort zones I know to some degree what they must be feeling, to just grow and don't let no one hold you back.

Best of luck to all you, career-minded ladies!