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.

Oprah Winfrey got her start in broadcasting at a Nashville radio station while still in high school. Television news followed, first in Nashville, then Baltimore. On paper that was the arrangement, and it was supposed to hold. A young woman with a strong voice lands a seat, and the seat is a desk, a camera, and words some producer handed her. She didn’t fit it. Talk television came next, and she took an ordinary afternoon slot and made it a place where people finally said out loud the things they had been carrying alone. Their weight. Marriages coming apart at the seams. The shame around money. Grief they had never once named to another soul. After that she acted, and the film work brought her serious recognition. Producing came next, her name and her money thrown behind stories the studios were too nervous to touch. A book club followed, with the power to lift an unknown writer out of nowhere and change that person’s whole life inside a week. A magazine came after that. There was a school she built for girls in South Africa, and fortunes she gave away without making noise about it. A network carried her name. When the culture moved toward podcasts and streaming, she moved right along with it.

Look at that trajectory and tell me where the lane was. There wasn’t one. She kept driving over the lines because the lines were never real to begin with. They were suggestions dressed up as rules, and she treated them exactly the way suggestions deserve to be treated.

I want us to sit with something uncomfortable, because I think a lot of us need to hear it. The boundaries around our talent are usually not enforced by strangers. They get enforced by the people closest to us, and they get enforced by us. A job tells you what you are. You are the reliable one at the office, the person who handles the crisis, the manager everybody leans on. That identity feels good because it comes with praise and a paycheck. So you pour yourself into it, and slowly the version of you that writes, or paints, or wants to open a business, or dreams of running for office, that version gets folded up and put in a drawer. Not killed. Just stored somewhere you stop visiting.

Family runs the same play, and here is the hard part. They usually mean well, so you can’t even be clean angry about it. You’re the mama, the daughter who always answers the phone, the auntie whose door never closes. Everybody in the house has already decided who you are to them, and they need you to stay her, because your being dependable is part of what holds them all upright. Reach for something larger and you feel it fast. That tug in the chest. The voice asking who you think you are, wanting more, when there are folks right here counting on you. I know that tug well. I have stood in my own kitchen past midnight, wondering whether wanting a bigger life made me a selfish woman.

And then there are friends. This one stings because we do not expect it. Sometimes the people who have known you the longest are the most invested in you staying the same. Not out of cruelty. Out of comfort. If you grow, the friendship has to grow too, and not everybody is ready for that work. So they laugh a little when you mention the new plan. They remind you of who you used to be. They call it keeping you humble. What it really does is keep you small, and small is easier for everyone except you.

Oprah could have listened to all of those voices, and she had plenty of them. She was told she was too emotional for news, too invested, too much herself on air. That so called flaw became the foundation of everything she built. The thing they wanted her to shrink was the thing the whole world was starving for. That should stop every one of us in our tracks. What if the part of you that people keep asking you to tone down is the exact gift you are here to give.

There is a specific load on us as Black women, and I won’t sit here acting like there isn’t. Be strong, they tell us, and hush about what the strength takes out of you. Be thankful you got a seat at all. Somewhere in there the thankfulness hardens into a chain, and next thing you know you’re apologizing for reaching toward the thing you want. Stay in your place. Do not ask for more. You already got further than most. That messaging is everywhere, and it is designed to keep us performing one function instead of living as full human beings with layered gifts and wide curiosity. A woman can be an engineer who also sings. She might run a hospital ward and still write poetry that cracks a reader wide open. Raising children, building wealth, mentoring, traveling, starting fresh at fifty and again at sixty, all of it can sit inside one life.

The refusal to stay put is not arrogance. I need us to understand that clearly. It is honesty. When you accept that you contain more than one calling, you are simply telling the truth about your own design. The arrogance, if we want to locate it, belongs to the idea that a person should be flattened into a single useful shape for the convenience of everybody around them.

Here is what I have watched happen when a woman finally decides to stop asking permission. The first thing that goes is the apology. She quits explaining why she wants what she wants. The shrinking falls away too, that old habit of making her ambition small and easy to swallow so nobody at the table feels threatened. That shift alone changes her face, changes how she walks into rooms. The second thing is that she starts losing the audience that only ever clapped for her smallness, and gaining the audience that was waiting for her to rise. That trade feels frightening before it happens and feels like oxygen afterward.

Oprah gave us a map, whether she meant to or not. It does not say become a billionaire. Most of us will not, and that was never the point. What it says instead is that the number of things you’re allowed to become is not fixed by your first job, your family’s expectations, or the imagination of the block you came up on. You get to keep expanding. You get to be a beginner again at an age when everyone expects you to be settled. You get to disappoint people who preferred the old you, and survive their disappointment, and find that the world did not end.

So I am asking the women reading this to do a hard and holy thing. Go find the part of yourself you folded up and put away. Take it out. Look at it honestly. Maybe it is a business idea you have carried for a decade. Maybe it is a return to school. Maybe it is a whole second act that has nothing to do with who anybody thinks you are. Then ask yourself who told you that you could not, and whether that person had any real authority over your one and only life.

They did not. They never did. The lines on the road were painted by people who were scared to cross them, and you are under no obligation to honor their fear. Drive.

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.

We have got to stop crowning strangers.

Somewhere around week two, the timeline shifts. It starts sweet. A cute clip, a slow dance by the pool, a boy who finally says the thing a girl has been waiting to hear. And then the caption appears under it, bold and certain, declaring these two beautiful strangers the blueprint. The standard. The thing the rest of us should apparently be aspiring toward. Marriage energy. Loyalty personified. Written in the stars, ordained, meant to be. All of that heaped onto two people who, seven days prior, could not have told you each other’s middle names or how their mothers take their tea.

That gap between what we are seeing and what we are declaring is where I want to sit for a minute.

Because surviving inside that house is not the same as building something that lasts, and I think we know that in the quiet part of our brains even while our thumbs are typing otherwise. The environment is engineered. There are no bills in there. No sick parent calling at dawn. Nobody has to figure out whose family they are spending the holidays with, or how to split the cost of a broken boiler, or what happens when one of them loses a job and gets low and mean for a season. There is no boredom. And boredom, plain domestic boredom, is where a lot of love either deepens or quietly dies. What the show gives us instead is a pressure cooker with good lighting, endless free time, and producers who benefit financially from tension. Enduring a few weeks of that tells us these two can flirt, can kiss well, can cry on cue when the moment calls for it. It tells us almost nothing about whether they can be kind to each other on a Tuesday with nothing interesting happening.

And yet the projection starts almost immediately. This one is fascinating to me, and a little troubling. We take people who are, at best, in the very first flush of infatuation, and we drape our own longings over them like a coat. We write futures for them. We assign them a wedding. We defend them in arguments with total strangers online as though we know their hearts. What we are actually doing is looking at a screen and seeing the thing we want for ourselves, then confusing the wanting with the having. A woman aches for devotion, so she watches a boy carry a girl’s plate and declares him husband material, when carrying a plate under camera is possibly the lowest bar a man has ever stepped over. We are so hungry to see it work that we mistake the appetizer for the whole meal.

I want to be careful here, because this lands differently for us specifically, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Black women have been sold a particular kind of scarcity story about love for a long time. Too educated. Too independent. Too much. The whisper that says the good ones are taken and you waited too long. So when a dark skinned girl finally gets chosen on national television, when she is centered and adored and fought over instead of overlooked, something in a lot of us exhales. We want it so badly for her because we recognize the ache. And that is beautiful, that solidarity, that wanting good for our own. I would never mock it. But the danger sits right beside the beauty. When we are that starved to see ourselves loved well, we lower the standard for what loving well even looks like. We start calling the bare minimum a masterpiece. We hold up a six week situationship as proof that fairytales exist for us too, and then quietly measure our own decades long marriages, our own patient and unglamorous partnerships, against a fantasy that has not survived a single real winter.

That comparison is the part that keeps me up at night, if I am being fully honest with you.

Because the sister watching at home is not just watching. She is calculating. She is looking at that couple, then looking at her own man who has been showing up steadily and imperfectly for eleven years, who does not do grand villa gestures because he is tired from work and picking up the children, and some small ugly voice tells her she settled. That the screen has the real thing and her kitchen has the compromise. It is exactly backwards. Her kitchen holds the truth of it. Her kitchen has the test the villa never had to take. But the fantasy is loud and the ordinary is quiet, and loud usually wins the argument if we let it.

Here is what nobody wants to hear at the reunion. A large number of these televised romances do not make it. They barely make it out of the airport. Some are performing for the prize money and everyone involved knows it. Some are two lovely kids who genuinely liked each other under those specific conditions and then discovered, in the cold air of actual life, that liking someone by a pool is a completely different thing from liking them across a lease.

The ones who beat the odds do exist, and I want to name them, because giving them their credit is part of my whole point. Serena and Kordell won back in 2024 and are still going, even after a Casa Amor storm and that dockside blowup half of us thought was the end of them. Leah and Miguel took the long messy route and came out the other side dating for real. Nic and Olandria, who spent most of their season swearing up and down they were only friends, are somehow the pair who stuck. Marco and Hannah from a few summers back got engaged and set an actual wedding date. Taylor and Bergie are engaged now too. I am genuinely happy for every one of them. But look closely at what gave each pairing a real chance. Not the show. The months and years after it. They lasted because once the cameras packed up, those two went and did the boring holy work. The arguments nobody applauded. The hard conversations. The slow learning of each other’s wounds. None of that happened on the island. All of it happened later, in private, where no caption could reach.

So what am I actually asking. I am asking us to enjoy the show as the show. Laugh at it. Gossip about it. Root for the girl who reminds you of your niece. Absolutely. But hold the crown. Let people earn the word before we hand it to them. Two attractive people surviving a controlled experiment is entertainment. It is not a blueprint, and it is a little dangerous to treat it as scripture for how our own hearts should be graded.

Real devotion is not photogenic. It does not trend. It looks like somebody sitting with you in a hospital waiting room saying nothing useful, just staying. It looks like fifteen years of somebody choosing you again on a morning when you are not remotely lovable. It looks like forgiveness you did not deserve and repair that took months. That is the standard, and it never once needed a villa, a producer, or a nation of viewers deciding whether it was allowed to count.

So the next time a clip comes across your feed and your thumb starts drifting toward that word, pause. Ask yourself what you actually know about these two people. Ask what they have survived together beyond a swimming pool and a screaming challenge. And then, gently, save that word. Somebody in your real life has earned it far more than the strangers on your screen, and she has probably been waiting years for you to notice.

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.