Professional Studio
In a recent interview with Page Six, gospel singer Kierra Sheard shared that her friends stay in hotels because she is careful about who is around her husband. Sheard stated emphatically:
“My momma has already told me don’t have too many people around your house … I don’t care how good you trust them or whatever it is, I’m very mindful and careful. I would buy a friend a hotel room before I let them stay at my house,” she told us.
These comments on establishing boundaries between friends and intimate partners are not new in Black faith spaces. Indeed, they speak to underlying anxiety present in our dating and marriage lives.
Her comments are rooted in a folksy generational wisdom and suspicion, and charismatic faith spaces advance these notions within ideas that one must—guard the home. We tell women to protect their marriages from exterior forces that seek to tear them apart. Women attend conferences and studies that suggest that the enemy of their marriage are sex-crazed single women. Christian article after Christian article espouses the danger of immodest women. An entire cottage industry has been built on the idea that LGBTQIA people are threats to the Christian household. But rarely do we ask who these ideas advantage? Who profits from deep suspicion? Who benefits when we tell women that they can’t trust their friends or intimate partners? Nor do we ask why men, especially those who are cisgender and heterosexual, almost always remain unscathed in it all.
The messaging around marriage from charismatic faith spaces is dank, dark and difficult but also inauthentic. Our institutional spaces have told women their job is to shield their marriages from external threats but institutional spaces have not been honest about the ramifications these emotional barriers have on the well-being of women. We have made women the cupbearers of men’s virtue and morality. Yet, we never considered the psychological strain this places on women. We tell women to “cover” their men and to protect their men. But living just below the calls for women to do the virtue work for men is the hard truth. This call for compartmentalization and disconnectedness is a system of protection, not of friends from husbands—but women from the embarrassment of their intimate partners.
The hard pill to swallow is we have constructed this generational wisdom and these communal safety nets because we know infantile men will embarrass women. And the only device in the toolkit of women is distancing and compartmentalizing their relationships so the danger of one might not impair the other. Women have sought every available recourse to communicate to men, “please don’t embarrass me.” Don’t make the life I love a joke. Don’t ruin my affections and affiliations with your adolescence. Do not embarrass me.
Not only do men fail to realize the emotional toll women are under when they are called to supplant the performative virtue for men, but they also fail to account for the professional and public costs as well. One such example that has weighed heavy on my heart was that of B. Smith. B. Smith was a model, restaurateur and lifestyle doyenne. When she had health challenges due to early Alzheimers and required additional care, her husband was her caregiver. She built a lifestyle empire on beauty, style and poise. —And at the moment of vulnerability, her husband chose to disclose an additional relationship. Embarrassment became his preferred method of facilitating care for himself. We acknowledge that people have needs, but so often men seek care at the emotional toll of their wives. We see the audacity and often cruelty that is wielded by men when they feel they are being neglected, overlooked or simply not centered in ways most women would never dare to endeavor.
And for women who occupy spaces and places that require a large platform, they often live in fear that the poor decisions that their intimate partners make will harm them professionally, socially and emotionally. While we cheer for these women openly, we privately whisper a little prayer that they are not negatively impacted by partnership decisions. But the onus of this work is not, should not and cannot be solely on women.
The weight, toll and cost of having to compartmentalize relationships rests not only at the feet of women, it costs men. Men are infantilized, believed to be too emotionally fragile to honor our wives and respect their friends. In many ways spared the essential lessons that would cause us to cultivate greater character; not because we can’t handle the truth or that we are socially inept—but because systems keep shielding, covering and sweeping under accountability to those who need it the most.
Women pay the price for our societal lack of accountability for men.
The generational wisdom that is employed to spare women the embarrassment of men works in concert to propagate emotionally flimsy men. Men who are untrustworthy because they have never had to be trusted. Men who are given a pass because church spaces deify relationships more than they honor dignity. Men who are propped up to lead but have serious moral failings because everything around them has been contrived to advantage them but not develop them.
So what must we say to the folksy generational colloquialisms that we pass on like old canned goods or gum stuck to the bottom of our interpersonal communities? A simple truth: Men will embarrass you. We keep telling that truth until we are no longer afraid to hold each other accountable and walk worthy of the love, care and affirmation of our partners. We have to—because the long-term survival and care of the women in our lives and the women who fill theirs requires it.
Solomon Missouri, Mdiv/MBA, is Pastor at Kyles Temple A.M.E Zion in Durham, NC. When not performing his pastoral duties, you can find him on Twitter at @SolomonMissouri discussing issues of faith, love, the fullness of Blackness, and pop culture.
