(ThySistas.com) I am old enough to remember when a woman could keep her business folded up and tucked away, and nobody assumed she was ashamed of it. My mother ran a whole marriage that the neighbors understood only through a porch light left on and the smell of Sunday greens drifting down the block. She announced nothing. So when I watched Coco Jones marry Donovan Mitchell earlier this month, initially keeping most of the ceremony away from public view, my chest settled. A young sister was doing the old thing. Protecting what belonged to her.
Let me lay out what we actually know. The two met back in 2023 at Michael Rubin’s Fourth of July White Party, a creative gathering where phones were not allowed, so they found each other before they ever found each other’s feeds. They announced their engagement in the summer of 2025 and married on the first of August at a private residence in New York State. There was no livestream turning the vows into content for everybody else. When The Breakfast Club pressed her about the ballplayer a while back, she offered a single clean sentence. Happy, she said, and that was all she had to say about it.
Chew on that for a second.
Do you know how rare that restraint has become? We live in a moment where couples build whole brands off the courtship itself. The proposal gets a videographer. A gender reveal calls for a drone. Anniversaries turn into carousel posts with captions long enough to pass for term papers. And somewhere in all that documentation, we started believing a moment is only real if strangers witnessed it happen. That is the lie I want to sit with today, because the true subject here was not this one famous couple. It is us.
Visibility is not intimacy. Let me say it plainer for the folks in the back. Being seen by thousands is nothing at all like being known by one. A million likes cannot hold you the night your daddy passes. Comments do not show up with soup when the flu has you flat on your back. Yet a whole generation of beautiful young Black women has been schooled to believe that the applause is the point, that a bond carries no value until it has been posted, tagged, and blessed by people who will never once help you move a couch.
Coco and Donovan eventually shared their wedding with Vogue, giving the public a beautiful look inside the day. But there is still a difference between choosing when to open the door and building an entire relationship with that door hanging wide open. They did not spend the courtship feeding strangers every disagreement, every date, every private milestone and every tender exchange. That distinction matters. Privacy does not mean nobody ever gets to see the joy. It means the couple decides what belongs to the public and what remains theirs.
Donovan stood at a Cavaliers media day podium once and said she brings him peace, and I have not stopped chewing on it. She brings him peace. Not spectacle, not content, not some brand extension. A ballplayer inside a league that runs on attention reached instead for the language of stillness. Our young brothers need to hear that, the ones who got sold the notion that a woman is a flex, an accessory to wave around for status.
Now let me talk to my Sistas directly, because this is really about you and me and not two famous kids who got married in New York. How many of us have watched a friend perform a whole relationship for the timeline while the actual romance rotted behind the filter? The matching outfits. Staged date nights that never once happened off camera. Captions swearing he hung the moon. Then six months later the account goes quiet and you learn she had been crying in the bathroom the entire run. We confused the highlight reel for the marriage. Somewhere along the way we mistook the audience for the union.
There is a particular weight that lands on Black women right here, and I will not pretend otherwise. We get told so often that we are unchosen, too much and somehow never enough, that when a good one finally arrives we feel this itch to prove it to everybody. See? Somebody wanted me. Look at the ring, look at my man, look at the receipts. I understand that hunger. Felt it myself, more than once. But a bond you have to broadcast before you can believe in it is a bond you do not fully trust yet.
What Coco modeled is a confidence that needs no constant witness. She knows exactly what she has. She does not need me validating it from my couch, and she is not sitting around waiting on the comment section to co-sign her joy. That is grown. Settled all the way through. A woman who understands the gap between a private life and a secret one, since a secret is what you bury out of shame, while privacy is what you guard because it is sacred.
I am not saying disappear. Nobody is preaching that you hide your happiness or act like the man does not exist. Post the wedding shoe if it moves you. Share the anniversary if your spirit says share. Let Vogue photograph the dress if that is what you want. The real question is one of source. Are you showing yourself off because the feeling is spilling over, or manufacturing a performance because the silence has started to frighten you? One flows from a full cup. The other pours out of an empty one dressed in good lighting.
My generation of Sistas has watched this culture shift in real time. We came up passing notes and holding hands in hallways where no algorithm kept score. There was a sweetness to being unseen, to belonging to one person instead of an audience of ghosts. It worries me that our daughters and our nieces are losing the muscle for that kind of belonging. They are learning to date for the feed instead of for the man standing in front of them.
So here is what I take from this young couple that much of the coverage sailed right past while it fussed over dresses, photographs and ring size. They guarded the good thing before deciding what pieces of it they wanted to share. In a world begging famous people to stream every stage, narrate every feeling and spin every milestone into a running brand, they kept the relationship itself largely between the people actually living it. I find that beautiful. Not because nobody eventually saw the wedding. Because the public never owned it.
May our daughters learn it too. Let them figure out that the deepest bonds do not need a camera to be real, that a person saying you bring him peace in a quiet room will always outrank ten thousand strangers calling you goals. And every Sista reading this ought to remember she is allowed to keep something back just for herself. You do not owe the internet your marriage. Never did.
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.