(ThySistas.com) Chaka Khan recently sat with a British newspaper and said out loud something plenty of grown women confess only to their closest friends. Talking about what she wants from life at 73, the Queen of Funk waved the subject of romance off. “I’m partnered out,” she told the Observer, adding that she would rather mosey along and let life do what it do than go hunting for somebody to complete her.
And Lord, you already know the kind of opinions a comment like that can stir up.
You would think the woman announced she was moving to the moon. Folks who never mailed her a birthday card suddenly feel entitled to opinions about her bedroom. Some clutch their pearls. Others want to fix her up, arrange something, locate a nice gentleman before it is “too late.” And that is exactly the kind of meddling she was trying to head off. She would not spell out any wish of her own, because the second a sister says it aloud, some well meaning busybody starts scrolling their contacts for a setup.
Real talk. She has already lived through more than most of us ever will, and not one of us gets a say in when she quits looking.
Look at who we are talking about. Ten Grammys, music sales and streams topping 70 million, a voice big enough to turn “Sweet Thing” into a full church service. She married at 17, married again down the line, and has spoken openly about how complicated relationships can become. In 2017 she came clean about a doubt that gnawed at her, wondering whether a man loved Chaka the legend or Yvette Stevens, the girl from Chicago. Sit with a question like that long enough and calling off the search stops feeling like defeat. After everything, who could blame her for being done.
Sistas of a certain age understand this without translation.
We have watched our mothers and aunties pour everything into households that did not always pour back. Many of us saw women shrink themselves to fit beside partners incapable of growth. So when one of our icons stands in her full power and declares she is content on her own, plenty of us do not hear sadness. We hear a bell ringing clear.
Peace has a way of becoming the point once the noise dies down.
There is a whole generation of older Black women rewriting the meaning of a rich existence after 50, after 60, after the kids are raised and the papers are filed and the funeral programs are tucked in a drawer. They are traveling. Some are buying the little house with the porch they always wanted. A few are gardening, mentoring, laughing at brunch until the waiter gets nervous. Their calendars fill up without a husband’s name penciled in anywhere. Companionship is welcome in that picture, sure, but nobody is holding the door for a warm body just to dodge an empty seat. The seat, it turns out, is not empty. It is finally theirs.
That shift matters, because for generations the culture handed us a single script. Get chosen. Stay married through whatever storms roll in. Measure your worth by the ring and the last name. Anything outside that lane got labeled tragic, bitter, or busted. A quiet spinster past a certain birthday was treated as a cautionary tale rather than a full human being with a passport and a pension.
The Queen of Funk just tore a page out of that script on the record.
Now, let me be fair to the other side of the coin, because peace is not the same thing as a locked heart. Picking yourself does not mean slamming the door on love for good. Plenty of folks stumble into something real in their 60s, and they will swear it beats whatever they thought they had figured out at 25. That later kind of affection usually shows up without all the theatrics. No shame at all in wanting someone to sit beside on a slow Sunday. And wanting a person to look at you like you hung the moon? Nothing wrong with that either.
So the question sits right there in the middle of the table, and I want you to actually sit with it.
Should an older woman shy away from romance because she has already given it two or three honest tries and come up exhausted? Or should she keep her heart cracked open, betting that the right sort of gentle bond could still find her on a Tuesday afternoon when least expected? Is “partnered out” a wall, or is it simply a queen refusing to beg for a thing that ought to arrive on its own?
I do not think a single answer fits every situation, and anybody selling you a tidy rule is really selling you their own fear.
What I do believe is that the choice belongs to her, to you, and to nobody standing outside the union trying to referee it. Maybe you meet somebody at 65 and wind up slow dancing in the kitchen till your knees start fussing. Plenty of us never do, and the quiet suits us just fine. Neither ending is a runner up prize.
We trip ourselves up the moment we start ranking these lives against each other, pinning a blue ribbon on the married sister and a pity face on whoever is flying solo.
Black women have been the ones holding up households and congregations and movements for generations, so long that plain rest can feel almost against the rules, like something we have to steal in secret. When a legend models the audacity of enough, she hands permission to every reader quietly wondering whether stopping is allowed. Permission is granted. It always was.
The icon has a fresh album, “Chakzilla,” arriving September 18, still creating, still hungry for the stage even as she guards her private hours. That balance holds the whole lesson. A person can stay wide open to the work she cherishes and draw a firm line around her heart at the very same time.
So decide for yourself what your next season requires. Guard your quiet if quiet is what heals you. Should tenderness keep whispering your name, do not be too proud to answer it. Just refuse to let the crowd, or the pressure, or the dread of an empty chair make the call on your behalf.
Chaka settled her own answer. The rest of us, sistas and everybody watching, get to settle ours.
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.