(ThySistas.com) Loyalty and self erasure are not synonyms, though the romance script handed down to most of us treated them like interchangeable words.
My family kept a version of one story on damn near every branch of the tree. One aunt paid a light bill eleven years running on hair money and a night shift, and every time her husband resurfaced after another disappearing act, she fixed him a plate and asked him nothing. Nobody called that dysfunction. They called it standing by your man. Somewhere between the church pew and the beauty shop chair, endurance turned into evidence of devotion, and a sista who survived the worst of it earned a crown no one else could see.
Crowns like that get heavy.
Before anybody files this under bitterness or some imported theory that supposedly has nothing to do with our community, understand that bell hooks documented this exact wound decades ago. She did it without painting our brothers as monsters or our daughters as fools. Her writing came from tenderness. It also came with receipts.
In All About Love, she borrowed a definition worth taping to a bathroom mirror. Love, properly understood, is a deliberate act of extending yourself so you or another person can grow. Feeling alone does not qualify. Intention counts. Behavior counts. Measured against that standard, plenty of what gets celebrated at bridal showers falls apart on contact. She argued plainly that cruelty and affection cannot share an address, no matter how long the lease has been signed.
Then came Salvation, where she turned directly toward our households and made an argument that still stings. Generations raised under domination absorbed warped blueprints for intimacy, and healing would require naming what got broken instead of decorating it and calling it culture. Suffering was never our inheritance. Survival was. Somewhere along the way we confused the two.
Sisters of the Yam went further into the psychology, examining what happens to a sista trained from girlhood to be unbreakable. Strength stops being a quality you possess and becomes a costume you cannot remove. You perform capability in public, cry in the car, and answer “I’m blessed” when somebody asks how you are holding up. Nobody checks on you because you have made yourself impossible to worry about.
Her book on masculinity, The Will to Change, deserves mention too, because it explains the other half of the equation. Boys get taught early that feeling anything besides anger makes them soft. By the time that boy becomes somebody’s husband, he has been emotionally disarmed since boyhood, and the person who married him inherits the job of feeling everything for both of them. She interprets his silences. Apologizing on his behalf becomes routine. His moods get translated for the children in her voice. That labor goes unlisted on every anniversary card.
Which brings me to what actually happens inside these arrangements we keep romanticizing.
Emotional absence gets rebranded as personality. He does not communicate, does not repair after conflict, goes quiet for four days behind an argument, then walks back through the door like nothing occurred. Meanwhile she has spent ninety six hours reading his silence like scripture, wondering which verse offended him. Girlfriends tell her she is patient. What she actually is, is exhausted.
Money supplies another layer nobody enjoys discussing honestly. Investing in a partner during a rough stretch makes sense. Real partnership includes a season where one person carries more than half. Six years is not a season. When rent, groceries, insurance, and his phone bill all come from your direct deposit while he chases a vision that has yet to file a tax return, that is not belief in a dream. That is subsidy. The difference between the two lives in whether he is building anything at all or simply comfortable being carried.
Infidelity carries its own mythology, and honestly this one makes me tired. Men will be men. All of them do it. At least he comes home. Aunties said it, cousins repeat it, and somewhere in there a young sista learns that betrayal is weather rather than choice. Forgiveness gets treated as spiritual advancement, proof she has grown past pettiness. Genuine reconciliation requires repentance, changed behavior, and transparency he offers before being caught. Absent those things, pardoning him is just the shortest route back into that bed and that same lie.
Control might be the most cleverly disguised item on this list, since it arrives wearing the clothing of protection. He wants your location out of worry. Finances land in his hands since you are supposedly bad with numbers. Your friends are messy, your sister is jealous, your mama stays in your business. One relationship at a time, your world contracts until he is the only voice left with an opinion about your life. Then somebody at the salon calls it passion and everybody nods.
Social media turned all this into competitive sport. Scroll long enough and you will find a scoreboard where devotion gets measured in tolerance. She stayed during the incarceration. Three outside children arrived and she stayed. Years passed while he refused therapy, refused work, refused accountability, and still she stayed. Comment sections crown her. Reality television pays her. Nobody films the anxiety, the lost sleep, the doctor visits, or the daughter who is quietly memorizing all of it as instruction.
Hardship shared is not the identical animal as hardship imposed. That distinction is the entire argument. Two people broke together in a studio apartment, each working, each contributing, each aimed at one horizon, that is struggle, and there is something beautiful in surviving it side by side. One person depleting so another can consume, that is extraction. Calling those two arrangements by the same tender name is how we lost track of which was which.
Church language complicated matters further. Long suffering became an instruction manual for staying, and submission got quoted at sistas by pastors who skipped right past the verses aimed at husbands. Patience with people who are genuinely trying is holy work. Permanence inside harm is something else entirely. Grace was never designed to function as a hostage negotiation, and no scripture obligates you to be somebody’s ministry until your health fails.
Reaching midlife changes the math. At twenty five, three wasted years feel survivable, almost educational. By forty seven, you count differently. You calculate how many good decades remain, what energy remains, whether you want to spend your fifties still auditioning for basic decency. That arithmetic makes you honest in ways your younger self could not afford.
None of this argues that our brothers are disposable. The late cultural critic never made that case, and I refuse to either. Plenty of Black men show up completely, do the interior work, apologize properly, handle their business, and deserve every bit of the loyalty they receive. Her point, and mine, is that we need language precise enough to distinguish those men from the ones performing the role while draining the woman beside them.
So read her. Start with All About Love because it will reorganize your thinking, then move through the rest as your spirit allows. Read her with a highlighter. Pass the copy along to your girlfriends. Read her especially if you recognize yourself in these paragraphs and feel defensive about it, because that reaction is usually information.
Devotion should require effort from you. It should never require your erasure.
Staff Writer: Brenda Poole
BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…
Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.