Your Approval is Not Needed

Don't let the title fool you. Oh I mean it, don't get me wrong, but this isn't about the annoyance that caused me to feel that way. This is about empowerment.

I've been happily divorced for nearly 8 years. In this time, I've encountered a plethora of men who have ummmm...let's say they have interesting perspectives on single women, dating, and their role as it relates to both. I once thought that the older I got, the more likely I'd be to encounter a mature, stable man who was goal-driven, family-oriented, and ready to make one woman his forever. Instead, what I've encountered is a bunch of emotionally immature, financially and mentally unstable males who are looking for help, sex, or using sex as barter for help and have done absolutely no work to acknowledge or overcome childhood and relationship trauma.

This leads me to the reason for this blog post. I have taken the stance that I simply don't want to be in situationships that only yield frustration or me being the source of pleasure for a man who I can't call my own. If I go into every potential relationship with sex being the prerequisite to us getting to know each other, then I'll be having sex with man after man simply in the hope that he'll choose me. I refuse to operate that way and ladies you absolutely should too. This is contrary to what Kevin Samuels had to say in a video that I was recently sent. The video is embedded below.

A 37-year-old woman with 2 children called into Samuels' show frustrated about being single. She said that she was celibate and would not have sex until she was married because the men she was being intimate with would become "pu&&y whipped" and crazy. Kevin Samuels went on to tell her she was crazy to be celibate after having 2 children and her being 37 with 2 kids meant she should be giving "it" away to try and get a man.

Say what now??? God rest the deceased, but this is precisely why I did not like him. This is horrible, reckless, demeaning, and dangerous advice. Black people still have the highest number of HIV cases in AmeriKKKa and while he didn't advise her to have unprotected sex, you have to be absolutely ignorant to not know that sex is more than a physical exchange of pleasure. It's spiritual too. So, his advice to single mothers over 35 is to irresponsibly swap energies with strange men until one of these men decides they're worth keeping. SIGGGGHHHHHHH!

Once you hit your 40s, it's safe to assume that most of us have baggage. If we don't have children, we have ex-spouses. If we don't have ex-spouses, we have ex-significant others. That's par for the course as an adult, and these realities don't disqualify any of us, male or female, from deserving meaningful relationships with people who value us and the parts of our past (children) that we bring with us. Ladies, how you decide to treat your body and your sex life belongs to you. The right man is the one who will respect your personal code of ethics. Not ask, or worse, expect you to abandon them. Don't let anyone determine your value or undermine your ethics because they feel your sense of self-worth is too high a price for them to pay. That simply means that they are at Whole Foods when they should be at Dollar Tree. Don't offer discounts or coupons, and don't dare change who you are for someone who can't see your value as you are. Sis!!! The days of men who are willing to court a woman are not gone. There are men out there who want to get to know you and who want to love you. If you find yourself attracting the same type of man, just like I did, you have to examine what it is you're doing, exuding, or accepting to yield the same results. After all, you're the only common denominator.

As for the men who read this and subscribe to this absurd ideation, do you really want to be with a woman who has sex with every man she meets in hopes that he'll choose her as his woman? Are you willing to be number 17 in 2022 with four months still left in the year? Are you OK with accepting the body count that naturally comes with this ridiculous expectation? No woman owes you her body for the price of your attention.

The bottom line is we all have baggage at this age. No woman or man in their

40s is going to be baggage free. If it's not kids or exes, it's going to be trauma from some event(s) in their lives. The important thing is that we all do the work necessary to not carry dirty laundry into the next person's life. If you don't have good intentions for someone or you don't agree with their terms and conditions, then move along. No need to degrade people for how they choose to love themselves. There are too many people in this world to settle for what you don't want. If you can't find them, change where you're looking and/or adjust your search filters. None of us want to die alone, nor do we want to die as Kevin Samuels did, with some stranger he'd just met the day before. Even still, don't you dare change yourself unless it's a choice YOU made for you! We are no longer doing permanent experiences with temporary people.