(ThySistas.com) There is a particular kind of tired that lives in the bones of a woman who has spent years trying to earn what should have been offered freely. You know the one I mean.
Let me sit with you a minute, because somebody has to say this plain. You are not an audition. And this thing is not some trial run you pass by staying sweet and agreeable. Yet too many sistas treat a whole relationship like an unpaid internship. Put in the late hours. Figure out what he likes before he thinks to ask for it. Cook as though a judge is sitting in the kitchen. All of it chasing a title nobody ever wrote down anywhere.
I have sat across from women who gave every bit of that and walked off with empty hands. Plenty of them.
A grown woman meets a man. He is fine, sure. Maybe funny. Kind of easy to be around, smells good, tells you what you want to hear whenever he needs something. So she gets to work. She learns his mama’s cornbread recipe. His apartment ends up cleaner than her own place. When his check comes up short, hers stretches to cover the gap, and she calls that love. Months roll into years. She is still cooking, still cleaning, still covering, and that ring she keeps picturing never shows up on her hand.
Here is the truth nobody wanted to tell her.
You cannot labor your way into somebody’s heart. Effort is not attraction. Sacrifice is not a strategy. A man who genuinely wants to build forever with you should not require years of demonstrations while offering little certainty or effort of his own. He is not sitting there tallying your casseroles, waiting for you to hit some invisible quota before he commits. That is not how desire works.
I think a lot of us learned this the wrong way. Somewhere along the line we got the message that a good sister proves herself. Somehow proving it got tied to how much a person was willing to lose. Our grandmothers kept whole households upright on faith and stubbornness and barely a thing beyond that. We honor them, truly. But some of what they shouldered, they shouldered because the world handed them no other door, and we went and picked it up as if it were an inheritance. Aching over him got treated as evidence that you cared. Endurance turned into a badge.
But endurance for whom?
Sit with that a second. Somebody you have to talk into staying, what is it you think you are really holding on to? A brother who has you paying his light bill for two years while he decides whether you are wife material has already told you everything. He decided. Made that call way before you came around. The auditioning is happening in your head, not his. He is comfortable. Fed. Housed. Financed. Why would he change an arrangement that costs him nothing?
That part stings, I know.
Let me speak on the money for a second, since so many sistas have handed it over as if it were tuition. You loaned him rent that spring and he has yet to pay it back. Cosigned on something you had no business cosigning. Covered his phone so his mama could reach him. Somewhere in your mind, every dollar was a down payment on a future the two of you were building. He saw it differently. To him it was a sweet arrangement, and a selfish man rarely walks away from a deal that keeps arriving on schedule. Generosity is beautiful. But when it is aimed at a fellow who treats you like an ATM, it turns into slow heartbreak with a receipt.
Now let me be clear about the disrespect too, because here is where it gets dangerous. Patience got dressed up as a virtue, even when it was pointed straight at a fellow who had not earned an ounce of it. Your birthday slides past and he claims he lost track of the day. You cover for him anyway. At the cookout he calls you his friend, right there in front of his people, and rather than fix it on the spot, you feel it settle somewhere in your chest and go quiet. Three days pass before he texts back, and you thank God he bothered at all. Baby, that is not patience. That is negotiation with somebody holding every card, and you keep folding a winning hand.
You were not put here to shrink.
I need the younger sistas reading this to hear me, and I need the ones my age to hear me too, because plenty of us are still doing this dance at fifty. Worth is not a thing you earn through service. You do not become valuable by being useful. A refrigerator is useful. So is a dependable employee. You are supposed to be chosen and wanted, not just kept around because you handle the kitchen and rarely say a word.
Real commitment, the kind worth having, tends to move different. It shows up. Plans ahead. Introduces you correctly to the people who matter. Grown Black men who mean it do all of that without keeping a scoreboard. It does not require a woman to audition for a role she was born qualified to fill.
Now somebody is going to read this and say, well, don’t I have to put in effort? Of course you do. Partnership takes work. But hear the difference. What two people build when they both show up is a garden they tend together. Meanwhile the picture I keep seeing is one woman out in the dirt by herself. She plants. Drags the hose across the yard with nobody helping. Waits on something to break through the soil. And him? Up on the porch with a full plate, eating what her hands set into the ground. Call that partnership if you want to. I will not.
Ask yourself something the next time you catch yourself performing. Who is pouring into me? When was the last time this person did a thing for my comfort without being asked, without a reward attached, without it being tied to whether I stayed? If no answer comes, you already know.
I am not saying love should be effortless. My point is that it should not feel like a job interview that never ends. You should not have to reapply for a position you already hold in your own heart.
Some of you have been holding on so long you forgot what it feels like to be pursued. To have a person plan around you. A partner who checks on you when the weather turns bad, who wants your opinion, who says your name to his people with pride. That feeling is not a fantasy sold in movies. It is available. But you will never taste it while you keep offering yourself at a discount to a man who had no intention of paying full price.
So put the apron down for a minute. Stop rehearsing. The right one is not looking for a performance, and the wrong one will let you perform until the curtain closes on your best years.
You are not somebody’s tryout. Never were, and it is well past time you started moving through this world already sure of it.
Staff Writer; Raven Jones
Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.