"Marriage Is For White People," according to inner city kids. What's interesting about the article to me, however, is how little the attitudes the author describes seem confined to urban blacks.
My observation is that black women in their twenties and early thirties want to marry and commit at a time when black men their age are more likely to enjoy playing the field. As the woman realizes that a good marriage may not be as possible or sustainable as she would like, her focus turns to having a baby, or possibly improving her job status, perhaps by returning to school or investing more energy in her career.
As men mature, and begin to recognize the benefits of having a roost and roots (and to feel the consequences of their risky bachelor behavior), they are more willing to marry and settle down. By this time, however, many of their female peers are satisfied with the lives they have constructed and are less likely to settle for marriage to a man who doesn't bring much to the table. Indeed, he may bring too much to the table: children and their mothers from previous relationships, limited earning power, and the fallout from years of drug use, poor health care, sexual promiscuity. In other words, for the circumspect black woman, marriage may not be a business deal that offers sufficient return on investment.
That strikes me as a pretty good description of what's happening in every community, no? Not to suggest that practical considerations regarding economic stability have no place in the bargain, but utterly missing from either sex's considerations in this article is the desire to love and to give. It's all about "me," and spouses and children just get in the way. Or as Sartre put it, "Hell is other people."
Knit into the very fabric of our nature is the need to give what JPG called "the sincere gift of self." Marriage becomes possible and desirable only when the focus is on the other more than the self.
