by Aja Dorsey Jackson
Yesterday morning the Ricky Smiley morning show posed a question to listeners about marriage and whether it made sense to get married or whether it was better to just avoid all of the “drama” and shack up. At some point I had to stop listening because the conversation started to make me feel a little sad about the state of marriage in the Black community.It wasn’t the fact that there were people who didn’t believe that marriage was the right step for them to make. While I am a proponent of building strong marriages, I don’t believe that marriage is a step for everyone to take all of the time. My problem is with the actual reasons why people believed that building a family together without being married made sense.
For those who believed that it made more sense not to get married, the reason was mainly “what if it doesn’t work out?” Just so we are clear, we are not talking about childless couples who make the decision not to become legally wed. Instead, they are men and women believing that it makes more sense to become baby-daddies and baby-mommas than husbands and wives, because in the event that the relationship doesn’t work out, it is a lot easier to walk away than if you have the paperwork of a marriage to deal with.
This point really struck me. If you are bringing children into the world, why should you want it to be easy to walk away? Whether the family becomes broken because of a divorce or because it was never together to begin with, the children are being raised in a broken home nonetheless. Don’t we owe it to them to at least go into the decision to have them making an attempt to keep their family together?
Having had my daughter during a relationship, not a marriage, that didn’t work out, I can attest to the fact that drama comes with the dissolution of any relationship that involves children. You are not avoiding it by declining to say “I do”. While the decision to get married is a personal one, we have seen that the negative results of having an overwhelming number of Black children born to single mothers goes far beyond “to each his own”.
No one could offer me a guarantee when I walked down the aisle that my marriage would last a lifetime. As determined as I am for us to last forever, I can never know that tomorrow he won’t lose his mind and walk out the door. But making that commitment, to raise our son under one roof, for better or for worse, means something to me. Sure there is always a possibility of failure, but because it could fail does that mean that we shouldn’t even try?
Aja Dorsey Jackson is a freelance writer and marketing consultant in Baltimore, Maryland. She can be reached at aja@ajadorseyjackson.com