No Role Modelz
“I want a real love, dark skinned and Aunt Viv love
That Jada and that Will love” — J. Cole
There is much we get wrong about the things we take for granted. Misconceptions on how things are supposed to work, to feel. In the preceding weeks, we’ve been forced to confront those misconceptions in the public eye.
Black Twitter has never failed me, and I would be lying if I didn’t enjoy a few laughs at the expense of my favorite black couple. Though, after the news of August Alsina’s “entanglement” surfaced, I tried my hardest to avoid the drama in the Smith household. Yet this news has revealed negative societal beliefs we hold about love and the relationships born from it.
As a society, I find that we believe we should strive to achieve perfection. We believe that through enough effort and work we can realize this perfection and never again make a mistake. We do this in our relationships, our friendships, even with ourselves — (enter unreasonable beauty standards stage left). Though, these are all unreasonable notions, both to ourselves and the people we hold dear to our hearts. Not discounting the fact that we can work hard and push to be better, slowly nearing our way to perfection. However, we can never reach this unattainable goal based on one simple truth: we are all human!
We are born to make mistakes, to stumble, and to fall short of our own expectations. We also do this to the people we love, raising them up to unreasonably high expectations and demanding they live up to our criteria. This can come sometimes hinder our loving them as they are, in the present moment.
I want you to reflect for a moment about a time in which you secretly wished for a situation, a person, or yourself to be different. To be “better”. This is conditioning to perfection that we must strive to remove.
Despite being celebrities, the Smiths are also human beings. Will and Jada are not only intimately in love, but they have also raised two talented, free-spirited, independent children. Think of how many times they both fell short in their twenty-three years of marriage. How many times they were at odds and managed to work through it and grow in their union. This is the power of loving someone as they are, and not as your false perception of perfection wants them to be.
I’m just as guilty of idolizing the Smiths as the perfect epitome of black love, but like any relationship, ups and downs are to be enjoyed and worked through. We must all strive to work through our conditioning to give and receive the real love that we all deserve.
