I’m not so sad about my situation. I know one day I’ll be able to love freely and not fear so much. But I am sad because now that i’m aware of my “problem” I’ve now also become painfully aware that so many black men and women share my story in some way. Something has lead them to fear love and to be mistrustful of others and that’s just sad. I feel like we all want to love each other…. I know I do…. but we just…can’t. It’s not even that we’re scared… some of us just don’t know how to accept love and some don’t know how to love others…. I’m 18 and so many of my peers say they’re never getting married and they don’t believe in love and it just makes me so sad…. when I hear that I just think that they have lost all hope. In the Bible its pretty clear that God is love and I just wonder if people stopped believing in love does that mean they stopped believing in God too?

Of my 3 siblings, I am the only one still married to the first wife or husband. Interestingly, most of our friends are people with long term marriages. Perhaps that is why we haven’t seen the extent of the devastation to the Black family outside of our circles.

What is so revealing is that the widespread devastation has shifted the dialog to “healing strategies” away from “building strategies.” The advice we received as a young couple about how to build a strong family didn’t begin with how to heal from pain and hurt and infidelity. It began with trust and support and love and commitment.

While I certainly appreciate the reference to “survivors” and “perpetrators,” it is frightening to me that the dominant conversation treats the mass of us as if we must recover from something before we can have a chance of a successful relationship. Working on bliss and joy and happiness and mutual esteem seem to be far off in the distance. I heard a marriage counselor say to a group recently that “we are all in recovery or denial.” My wife and I looked at each with the same thought, “What are we missing? Is there something you aren’t telling me? Are we blissfully ignorant, or genuinely happy?”

Of course we were married young — at age 20. Maybe in today’s society hwere marriage is put off or avoided for so long, each party arrives at the decision with a lot of baggage.

Whatever the case, I just want to put in a plug for those with doubt. It is possible to grow old together and become happier with each passing year. The woman I am married to after 43 years is not the girl I married at age 20. We have both “invested all we have” in helping each other to become the best at what we wanted individually.

I am overjoyed at how the invest has payed off. She is not the person I wanted her to be, as I foolishly compared her to others early in our mariage. She is the fully developed person that my heart knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. The result of her investment in me is an older, wiser, confident, and secure man who know he has the total and full support of his wife for life.

We need to paint more pictures of this reality for those with trepidations about calling a truce in the Civil War, and changing our approach from a negotiated settlement to an “all-in investement.”

Yes, we must be forgiving and repentant. And then move on to building a relationship that will withstand the storms of life. Most importantly, we need to demonstrate “stable role models” for our children. Perhaps many children approaching adulthood today decide against marriage based on what they have witnessed. If all they see is “survivors and perpetrators” they are not encouraged to invest in happiness, but rather invest in protection against pain.

The man has a serious look on his face. The woman is covering her mouth, which is what I typically do when I’m concentrating or doting on a deed well done by another.

I thought the two of them had just completed a kind of “where do we go from here?” type of discussion, that the woman was content at that point to follow a man whose focus had shifted from just himself to the future of his family/marriage. Her look was a look of relief and gratefulness.

Crazy, huh? LOL

Taking these steps is a vital action towards helping, especially our boys, to become better husbands and dedicated fathers when they get older. If it will take a generation, what better time to start than now?