Black women: You’re allowed to be heartbroken & you deserve to love & be loved, radically.
We are not a task to be done nor a feat to be won
I decided to embark on the research of heartbreak leading to deep self-partnership in women and now, more specifically, in black women. I believe that it is very audacious of us to be in charge of the way that we love and prioritize ourselves. Too often we have been otherized and given an explanation of how we’re allowed to show up, how we’re allowed to process pain and who we’re allowed to be. Women have expressed the lack of honor and control they feel when it comes to love but black women aren’t even offered the soft, demure, characteristic that our white counterparts are given. Instead we are supposed to appear strong, but not strong enough to be seen with male equivalence, we are the strong black woman (we didn’t ask for that by the way). However, the strong black woman is often also seen as problematic and hard to love. So how does one express oneself wholly in love when before you even get the opportunity someone is looking towards your love as a mountain to climb? A bull to tame?
When we’re heartbroken, disrespected and on the end of inconsiderate individuals we don’t want to feed into any of the narratives we just want to give the proper, natural response that anyone in a similar situation would give. That’s it. Why does it have a different meaning other than the fact that we are a person who’s hurting?
The blame is often placed in the wrong hands and we get more versions of, “well what did she have on?”, than anyone.
In Film
Another thought- So I don’t agree with what Disney has presented with their fantastical representation of what love is and the role of women in romantic relationships but I do notice that even in that space we aren’t presented with any love fantasies for black women. like wow, we can’t even get the fictional romance? They created “The Princess and the Frog” which, ok thanks, but Princess Tiana was in love with a damn frog for the majority of the film. A FROG.
Recently, with the help of stories created by black writers and black creatives we’ve been able to feel like we can be a part of romantic love stories, and even the heartbreak that may come with said love story. We have shows like, insecure and movies like the photograph and really love which are beautiful depictions of our multifaceted existence in love but there’s much more work to be done. we don’t feel loved & we don’t feel represented in it. do you know how hard it is to be what you can’t see?
Grief
For so long we haven’t been given the space and permission to grieve lost love and it has become apparent that the spaces currently created aren’t created with us in mind. Because of that, thoughts about our pain, our suffering or are hearts at all, are seldomly considered.
But consider this: Our heartbreak is big. We are heartbroken for our fathers who weren’t there because they weren’t taught how to love from their own fathers who may or may not have been physically, spiritually or emotionally present. Our heart breaks for our black men who equate being with “more palatable” ethnicities to success and long for the adjacency to something “finer”. Our heart breaks for our community crippled by a system built to break us. And lastly, our heart breaks for our ancestors who didn’t get the opportunity to experience pleasure and the comfort and the right to love out loud. I’ll admit, we in this newer generation are finding more comfort in loving out loud and we’ve turned up the volume to our heart’s song but our love still cracks and breaks in silence- even in our tight knit circles.
Some of my fondest moments, as gut wrenching as they’ve been, were the times when my girlfriends cracked open their shell built by society and showed the ache in their chest. When they said, “Wow, he fucking hurt me.”, They were aware only at the soul level that this is a revolutionary act.
Value
What is our love’s value? What is our romantic contribution? Often what we bring and value is only valuable when it comes from someone who doesn’t look like us. No other group of people on the planet can truly understand what that has done to our collective sense of security.
Lack of security brings about a scarcity mindset and a collective scarcity mindset doesn’t support sisterhood because we feel that we must compete for resources, i.e. MEN. We look at other black women as competition because at a deep level we feel that there aren’t enough men available who would find us attractive or desirable. instead of looking beside us at our sisters for support, we look towards men to prove that we’re lovable in a world that tells us we’re not, and then we prioritize their existence and stop looking at and loving our own.
As I reflect, perhaps looking at our own existence is too much to confront?
A Black Woman’s Futuristic Love Story
So here’s the big question- how does the world change if black women are allowed to love? And if that love spirals downward, how do we grieve through heartbreak and begin to boldly choose to prioritize ourselves with the objective to love ourselves and others fuller, more genuinely and radically.
I believe that this is worth attention and intention. It counts. We want to participate and we deserve to.
