Maybe the club is not the best place to meet a man, be he is tall, chocolate with chocolate brown with a muscular build and eyes that are piercing your heart from across the dance floor. He steps to you correctly, “Hey lady how you doing, my name is _______, what’s yours?” Then the two of you sit at the bar and talk from midnight till last call. You discover he’s single (check), he has no kids (check), he’s in school (check, check), and he is employed (check plus). So you give the man your number, and the honeymoon begins.You and your man are clique tight and falling in love: movies on Tuesday, dinner on Thursday, and museum on Saturday- everything is perfect. You are hooked. Then as quickly as it began, the honeymoon ends. As time progresses, his frequent phone calls become text messages and the romantic dates you share become obsolete or just few and far between.
On occasions when he accidentally leaves his phone in plain sight you see unfamiliar female names pop on his screen that are his long time “home girls.” You question his honesty but avoid pushing too hard because you don’t want to come off as the typical-sharp-tongued-untrusting-prying-black-female and most of all because you don’t want to push him away.
You know something is going down, but you continue to give it up anyway.
Judging from the frequent cases of one man dating two or more women simultaneously on campus, one would think that the male/female ratio was 5:1; however according to the Texas Monthly 2004 assessment of Prairie View A&M University the ratio is almost 1:1 (45% male/55% female). So how is it that so many young ladies find themselves in the dignity-robbing situation of being just another player on her man’s team?
“My boyfriend and I had been together since freshman year,” says senior Tanya Griffith. “We were making plans for our life together after graduation when I found out he was still sleeping with his high school sweetheart and some girl living in UC.” According to Dr. Edward Laumann, author of The Sexual Organization of the City, Griffith’s unfortunate situation is common. “African American men with higher levels of education are more likely to be serial polygamists than any other group,” says Laumann. Apparently black women are clinging to the educated men who are most likely to have a large and steady paycheck, status, and other material things. This desperation and clinginess give the “serial polygamist” the leverage to have his cake, ice cream, sprinkles, cherries, and whatever else he may want without real consequence.
“When I really look back on our relationship, ” says Griffith. “I knew he wasn’t being faithful but I was just scared to let go and be alone.” She is not alone. The majority of women have been there, whether they were aware of it or not. In fact, statistics gathered by Laumann in a recent study say that the average number of days that a black man maintains two or more concurrent relationships is 250 days, in contrast to the 10-day average of white men.
The question now many may ask is, what can a black woman in search of monogamy do? Ladies first need to examine what they are doing wrong. From day one of any relationship, a woman need to set fixed boundaries and have standards that must be met before she allows herself to fall in love. Don’t become intimate to soon, if the first goal of him getting with you is to get laid you are not the only woman. Just use your head and avoid viewing your partner through rainbow colored glasses. Too much is going on in the black community directly damaging the fabric of the female soul, including but not limited to being the highest group infected with HIV and dealing with “down-low brothers,” to continue to allow herself to take part in this epidemic.
“Despite how much it hurt me to just walk away from all those years together, it got to a point where I woke up and refused to be someone’s fool,” says Griffith. “One day he will realize that he is playing Russian roulette with people’s lives, he will realize how good of a woman he let get away, but he will look around for me and I will be gone.