PDA: Someone Get These Two A Room!

I used to shout out playfully, but half seriously "Black love is so beautiful!" every time I heard about a black person getting married. I was mocking my own up bringing where my parents inundated my sisters and me with pro-black images to inoculate us from the negativity and self-hatred that exists in Blackworld (and Whiteworld). We were regularly told that we were beautiful, that being black was beautiful and black love was beautiful. Although we agreed, it became a bit comical to us, hence the declaration at every site of "black love" and its innate beauty.

But when it comes to Michelle and Barack Obama, they take "black love is so beautiful" and turn it into a smorgasbord of warm, giggly emotion, leaving millions of black people (and brown and white people) blushing. And it send about a million black men and women pining for that special someone. We don't see a lot of black PDA outside of teenagers making out during showings of the latest Nick Cannon vehicle. My mother always joked, half-heartedly, that when she went to the mall there would be tons of white couples holding hands as they strolled around. On the rare occasion Daddy went to the mall with her he always walked about 10 feet behind, malingering. My parents love each other, but both are very reserved in that respect.

So, even for me, I guess it's pretty nice to look at this.

If you can't get enough of Michelle and Barack being "crazy in love," The Huffington Post as the slide show for you, seventeen iconic pictures of black love being soooo beautiful it makes you jump up and shout "I want to get married and have a family too!" (Or develop cavities from the sweetness.) Now some of us already wanted that gushy, mushy, lovey, dovey, commit to me forever stuff. And I'm talking about yours truly and a whole lot of other unmarried black men and women. (And I mean A LOT of black women.) But maybe this will get our people to a serious national discussion on marriage. Not just the usual, "black women are too mean" and "black men are trifling garbage." A discussion on how we need to learn how to love ourselves before we can love someone else and how much more we can accomplish by solidifying these emotional bonds.

I don't believe in marriage for the sake of marriage (no wedding's by the pound, please). I want bonds that last, that help produce upstanding citizens. If that bond is a common law bond, I'll take it. But black people need to devote themselves to someone or some cause or something bigger than themselves because whatever most of us are devoted to now (see, "Cash rules everything around me, CREAM! Get the money. Dollah, dollah bill, ya'll!") -- it's not working.

And that's my public announcement for the day. Black PDA for a better black community! Get some!

Then get the Obamas a room, please!

*Thanks reader, Isonprize, for the tip!

The Black Snob Presents: Doomed Romance

Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte in one of my favorite musicals and doomed romances, "Carmen Jones."

Back when I was still living it up in Bakersfield, Calif. I was working on a series of short fiction stories under the title "Doomed Romance." Partly out of humor and partly out of my own romantic graveyard I began collecting the stories of love gone bad.

I'm a romantic malaise mess. My love life is littered with the remains of unresolved issues, drama, disappointment and wayward, misfired seduction. I'm a chronically failed fool for love. Half my fault. Half the fault of those I've dated and like a lot of folks, male and female, sometimes I wanted to give up and for seven years I did.

After a nightmarish starter marriage that left me bruised and emotionally scarred I realized that I need to accept responsibility in some of the poor choices I'd made. So in an effort to educate, entertain and hopefully inspire, my next reader contributed series will be about relationships gone terribly, terribly wrong. Along the way I'll talk about the nine months of pain that lead to my seven years of solitude. Be prepared to know to get personal, because I plan to blare my troubles out as a beacon to warn men and women away from the pratfalls and misfortunes of toxic love. I can't protect you. But the least I can do is reveal the signs, the evidence that a naive heart, not assured in its visions can easily become prey for those who have a plan, a very, very bad plan to save what you thought was your wayward soul.

With each story we will discuss a different issue from incidents that made us chose celibacy over intimacy, considering no longer dating within your own culture or ethnicity (or stopping altogether), caused us to learn something about yourself or the souls of others, made us mad, mad us sad, we'll talk about what we're still hung up on, what you can't let go of, what we've forgiven and how we came to do so, and what we could never forgive.

If you'd like to contribute to my series, just send me your story in 500 words or less. (If you go over some, no worries. I'm flexible.) I want people to be honest, MALE and FEMALE, about these beautiful disasters, these love wars lost. Again, I won't use any names like I did with my mothers and daughters series last month.

I'd also really like to get into the complexities that come with black-on-black love. I want to hear from those who found a way to make love work for them (re: success stories!) and I want to hear from those still struggling (even within that success story). We want to generate ideas and get some catharsis by airing our heartbreaks, joys and grievances.

And I'll be right there with you because if anyone can write about dysfunctional love it's me. From my periods as a trophy girlfriend to a closeted homosexual to loving a narcissistic sociopath to engaging in self-destructive behavior with the poor rubes of Bakersfield until I benched myself from the love game, I got it bad.

I'll be telling my own stories while incorporating yours. So if you're interested I'll be soliciting stories over the next two weeks. Let's get away from the fluff and get down to the real and see what bitter hearts can reveal, can learn and where they can grow from love gone wrong.

**To contribute, write your 500 words or less story to The Snob at blacksnob@gmail.com.