Source: Touché / Courtesy of Danielle Franklin
OWN debuted the second season of Ready to Love on October 30, and we had a chance to see all of the new singles from Houston interact in a controlled, albeit beautiful — but definitely controlled — environment. Champagne flutes were sipped from and haphazardly left all over the indoor/outdoor space. Several of the contestants appeared to be a bit tipsy by the end of the day’s meet-and-greets. Flirting varied between light touches and references to sexual stamina to all-out foot rubs just a couple of hours after meeting. Danielle Franklin (known as ‘Dani’ on the show), a single mother to a grown daughter, kept it light and cracked jokes, flashing her megawatt smile and killing it in a body-conscious emerald dress. She admits she was a different kind of contestant.
“Everybody was asking me if I was nervous and so on but I wasn’t,” she tells MadameNoire. “I had conversations before even going. It wasn’t anything I would typically do. I think a lot of my cast mates had thousands of followers. I had like 200,” she says with a laugh.
When host Tommy Miles — known as Nephew Tommy in certain circles — asked the men directly, “Who are you not feeling?” after meeting the ladies, the responses left some female viewers with serious questions. In reference to Dani, the men opined that she was friendly. A little too friendly:
“She’s someone I could hang with, have a good time… She’s like one of the homies…”
“Dani. She gave me such homie vibes.”
“She gave me that vibe where you could definitely kick it with her.”
To that, Miles responded, “Well, we ain’t looking for homegirls… That’s a different show.”
Is it though?
The conversation continued on social media networks like Twitter and Facebook where people like @just_caela pondered, “I hate y’all sent Dani home cuz she was ‘one of the homies’. You don’t want your girl to make you laugh?”
“[Being eliminated] probably empowered me even more because I feel like, that’s dumb to say that you would disqualify, or not want a woman because she’s being authentic with you,” Dani says of the “homie” label she received. “She didn’t send her representative to meet you. No ego, no nothing. So it’s empowered me even more to be like, ‘You know what Danielle? Keep doing your thing.’”
“If you don’t want a homegirl, or someone that carries you throughout life, someone to make you laugh, then why am I here? If you’re gonna stand there and tell these men that they don’t want a homegirl and I’m pretty sure your wife is your homegirl, then I don’t want to be here, because it’s not about love,” she adds. “My husband is gonna be my homeboy or it ain’t gon’ work. That’s what more people should want.”
Another Twitter user, @Miss_TiffyBaby said what a lot of viewers were thinking following Dani’s exit.
“Still upset about Dani’s elimination. Because ‘cool and down to earth’ gets turned into ‘she’s one of the guys’ real quick when a guy doesn’t like you.”
Damien Lemon, stand-up comedian and co-host of the podcast, In the Conversation, admits that some guys really do believe that it’s easier to frame it this way.
“I don’t get it,” he says simply. “If she’s friendly then… I think that might’ve just been an excuse for [these guys] because they just weren’t into her.”
“I don’t know the situation,” he continues. “So it could’ve just been that [the guys] weren’t attracted to her and sometimes people will just play the ‘Nah. We really just cool. There’s nothing [romantic] there,’ as opposed to saying, ‘I’m not attracted to you. I think this is just a friend situation.’ Because I think that if you’re attracted to somebody, then that’s a large part of the relationship. You’re gonna spend a lot of time together so you’re going to want to be able to like each other and enjoy each other’s company. So someone that’s friendly to me, that’s good.”
“I didn’t have an angle or an agenda,” Dani says of the way she went about meeting guys on Ready to Love. “I just went in there with the intention of being my authentic self and that’s what I did. So when I left, I left as my authentic self and I didn’t have any regrets. I was okay.”
Instead of cowering in a corner offline and blaming herself or her actions for “getting herself eliminated,” Dani has taken to the Internet and noted how many women have found themselves in this same situation of being “friend-zoned,” or penalized in a sense for being transparent, having a personality, and genuinely wanting to get to know someone for who they are. Many women wonder, if it’s not that you don’t like “her” as a person, if she’s such a great friend, then why couldn’t she be both? Why couldn’t someone like Dani be your lady and your friend?
Steven “Stevo” Dingle, a longstanding fixture in Atlanta’s hip-hop industry, holds an unwavering opinion on the topic.
“It’s hard to speak in absolutes regarding this because I don’t go into relationships with a stencil or anything,” he explains. “I operate on a sliding scale because I just know me and one thing I don’t need from my partner is a ‘friendship.’ That’s not a requirement for me to be with you. I have friends. They already fill a certain void in my life so I don’t need you to come in and be a friend to me.”
“For example,” he continues. “I like going to Hawks games or Falcons games or whatever, I don’t need my girlfriend to enjoy doing that. I have friends that are fans of the sport or the team and they’d love to go with me. It’s like I’m attracted to you, I love being around you and I love your energy. So it’s like you are a friend but I don’t need her to be my friend [in addition to being] my fiancé or my wife. You’re that to me. I don’t need for you to come over into my friend space. If it happens, fine, but it’s not a requirement.”
Dingle, however, admits that there was one time in the past where he was actually “great friends” with a romantic partner. They both worked in the music industry. Neither of them were terribly affectionate and they only saw each other once every few weeks because they lived in different cities. Dingle insists on the line between friend and romantic partner remaining clear.
“You may call your friend and lay your trauma and drama on them, but they can deal with it more because they don’t have to deal with you in the capacity that your partner does,” he says. “They can hang up the phone and not talk to you for two days. You may live with your mate and you don’t want to pack all your sh-t on them and you’ve got to lay in the bed together.”
“I should be able to walk out of our bedroom and call my friends to vent and lay with you at night so you don’t have to deal with that,” he adds. “I understand that there are some people who are like, ‘Nah. Unpack it on me!’ And yeah, sometimes. But why do you want all that? I don’t want all that. Call your homegirls.”
Lemon has somewhat of a different take on relationship preferences, proving that men aren’t necessarily a monolith and maybe it is a bit silly to pose questions like these to a male control group. But these are questions worth asking. When we inquired about whether or not he was ever able to have a relationship with someone he didn’t consider a friend, he audibly scoffed, then offered a slow and scrupulous “Nah…”
But what if she wants to come in and rant about work?
“Part of the stamina of the relationship is that you gotta lend the ear,” Lemon expounds. “Let her rock then after a while it’s gotta be ‘Okay, now we’re together [in the house]’ and let the work day be the work day. Everybody has to vent. You don’t want it to be a situation where they keep that in because you’re gonna want to vent too.”
“I think it’s about relating to the other person, being able to listen to what they’re going through, empathizing if you can and just being there,” he continues. “Because you’re going to want the same thing on the other hand.”
“Because what else are y’all talking about?” he asks after a thoughtful pause. “What’s gonna happen is that, it’s gonna be repressed, and they’re not gonna feel like they can truly be themselves with you and open up to you and that’s not good.”
With all that said, Dani isn’t changing how she goes about dating, and she’s not losing faith in finding her person. She’s even adapted to the idea that the “friend zone” is a blessing in disguise.
“We just need to appreciate the friend zone sometimes,” she suggests. “We need to get better acquainted with saying goodbye and leaving those situations that don‘t serve us, making sure that we’re going inside of ourselves, doing our work, hanging out with our friends and doing whatever until ‘he’ comes. We gotta be okay with doing our work and being rejected. It’s just being redirected to something better.”
