An Excerpt from the book Death of Courtship.

Consider a chemical engineer I know who was earning $350,000 a year when he was laid off. His marriage was already broken, and the couple was headed toward divorce. But losing his job changed the mathematics of leaving.

He ended up living in the family’s basement while his soon-to-be ex-wife and their son and daughter occupied the floors above him. Think about what that means.

He wasn’t staying because the marriage had suddenly been repaired. He wasn’t living in the basement because he had discovered a new appreciation for marital harmony.He was there because his economic circumstances had dramatically reduced his options.

His situation illustrates something that divorce statistics cannot easily measure: the difference between wanting to leave and being financially capable of leaving.

A person with a six-figure income can look economically secure until that income disappears. A homeowner can become housing-insecure after a job loss. A spouse who could previously afford an apartment, attorney and separate household may suddenly find that leaving would mean bankruptcy, moving in with relatives or dramatically lowering the family’s standard of living.

Financial problems are frequently cited as a major contributor to divorce. A survey of Certified Divorce Financial Analyst professionals ranked money issues among the three leading causes of divorce, behind basic incompatibility and infidelity. 

The connection becomes even more striking when we consider how frequently couples fight about money. Research published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships notes that people who reported frequent arguments about money were nearly three times as likely to divorce as those who argued about money less frequently. 

Another study found that financial conflicts, while not necessarily the most frequent marital disagreements, were more stressful, threatening and difficult to resolve than many other forms of conflict.

There is another side to the equation that divorce statistics rarely capture.

You can want to leave a marriage and still be unable to afford leaving it.

Divorce is expensive. Two households must be created from the resources that previously supported one. There may be attorneys’ fees, housing costs, child-care expenses, insurance, transportation, division of assets, debt obligations and, in some cases, alimony or child support. A couple that could comfortably maintain one household on their combined income may discover that neither spouse can independently maintain the lifestyle they had while married.

This creates an uncomfortable economic reality: some marriages survive not because the relationship is healthy, but because separation is financially impossible.

We often talk about marriage as though it were purely an emotional institution. It isn’t. Marriage is also an economic partnership. Two incomes can support one household. Two people can share a mortgage, utilities, insurance, transportation, child-care costs and other expenses that become substantially more expensive when duplicated across two households.

The economics of staying together therefore matter just as much as the emotions of wanting to separate.

As economic uncertainty persists, that calculation may become increasingly important. Layoffs, stagnant wages, housing costs, consumer debt and the high cost of maintaining separate households can create a peculiar situation in which couples are emotionally divorced long before they are legally divorced.

They may sleep in separate rooms. They may stop having sex. They may live largely independent lives. They may even consider themselves finished with one another emotionally.

But they remain married because the math doesn’t work.

This is the part of modern marriage that is easy to overlook. We tend to interpret a couple’s continued existence as a marriage as evidence that they have chosen one another. Sometimes they have. Sometimes they may simply have chosen the least financially painful alternative.

Love may bring two people together.

Resentment may push them apart.

This passage raises an interesting question: can positive attention based on appearance still reduce someone to a stereotype or aesthetic ideal, rather than recognizing them as a complete person.  Respond on 'X' 

"How much does the whole question of skin color, hair texture and body type play into this desire to seek out the exotic? In America, we put a premium on certain looks. But we don't ask women who have those "exotic" looks — in this case interracial or biracial women — how it feels to be objectified like that. Do they feel exploited?

I have a friend who's multiracial. She's Creole, from Louisiana. She and I like to talk about what it's like being full-figured — I mean, me being full-figured. We talk about what it's like being brown-skinned and what it's like being light-skinned.

From her perspective, being exoticized is not something that should necessarily be viewed as desirable. If you look at what's advertised in many Black magazines, it's often pedestalized being Creole or being multiracial. Isn't that not still objectification.

I think my friend is cognizant of the extra attention men in our community bestow on women like her. If you look like Halle Berry, or if you appear to be multiracial, are you really being seen beyond your hair texture or skin color? 

Are you being seen as a whole person? Or, is there a dehumanizing factor involved.

Dion Thompson has only had one serious relationship. It started when she was 14, and she ended up getting marrying when she was 22.

“I couldn’t do anything without him,” she admits. “I looked to him for approval for everything. My mother made the comment one time, ‘why are you so attached to him. You probably look at him as a father-figure.’ I was like ‘no, that’s not true.’ But once we separated and divorced and I had to deal with all of that, I thought about what she had said. It was true.

“I looked to him for everything that I didn’t get from my father. I think that’s probably what damaged our relationship, our marriage. It was rocky before we got married. Then, it was good for a little while but got rocky again. I had issues of my own that I didn’t deal with growing up. He was there, and he helped me through a lot of things. I learned from that, being with him and breaking up with him and going through and learning how to deal with things on my own after we split.

Twenty-six years after her divorce, Dion says she hasn’t been in another relationship. She says she fears the void left by her father and ex-husband make her too needy and that this weight will crush any serious relationship she tries to start.

After her separation, Dion, now 48, went to counseling for five months. She says she learned a lot from her marriage, but it was the break up that really helped, forcing her to deal with long-festering emotions head-on.

“After I broke up with my husband, I was just out there doing everything, partying, sleeping around. Just doing anything to make myself feel good and to get over all the hurt and pain and everything that I went through with my ex-husband. I never really did all those things that you do as a teenager because my life was just focused on him.

“I guess I felt I had to get it out of my system. It’s been about four or five years now that I’ve just focused on work, my kids and my house and just doing other things to build myself up.”

Dion’s teen son and daughter live with their father in the next county. They have been with him for 10 years and stay at Dion’s house once in a while, over weekends and on holidays. Dion’s ex-husband has remarried. He has a son with his wife and a daughter from another relationship. She says the four kids have a good relationship with him.

“Sometimes, it’s shaky for me and I kind of regret allowing them to go out there. I struggled with it for the first three years that they were there because their father and I don’t have a good relationship now at all. We hardly talk to each other so that made it even harder.”

Dion says she feels he is mostly responsible for her rocky relationship with her kids, but she says she’s glad her relationship with her son has improved over the last couple of years.

“One of the main reasons I decided to let them go was so that they could have a father in their life because I didn’t want them to grow up without one the way I did. I’m missing out on a lot, but I think I’m better with it now.

Dion Thompson has only one good memory of her father. It was when, after years away from the family, he returned and gave her a party for her 13th birthday.

“We had a good time,” says Dion, now 44. “It was a house party, and everyone from the neighborhood was there. He did the music, and we just had fun, partied.

When she was six, Dion emigrated from Trinidad with her family. Shortly after, her mother moved Dion and her siblings from New York City to Baltimore to escape Dion’s physically abusive dad.

“My mother talked to him a lot, off and on, and we kept in contact with my grandmother, his mother,” Dion says. “Always, he knew where we were. He would get stories through my grandmother about how we were doing and everything like that, but he never really called us or talked to us. He never really checked up on us like I thought he should have, as a father.”

That was mostly because Dion’s father had started, and was raising, another family. Dion’s mother has six children. She had four kids, three boys and Dion, with Dion’s father. From what Dion has pieced together, her father has nine children. She and her brothers were mixed in between half-siblings. Dion is the same age as a half-sister, and one of Dion’s brothers is the same age as another half-sister.

“I have a younger sister; I think my father married her mother,” she says. “She’s 35, 34 years old now. I can’t tell you exactly when or how old I was when we found out he had his other family, but he has always been with other women.”

Regardless, Dion says her mother never spoke badly about her father.

“She just said, ‘you guys need to talk to your father. You guys need to learn to forgive him for everything,’” Dion recalls. “That’s what she always says, even today.”

Dion says her mother practices what she preaches. She was working at Johns Hopkins when he went to the hospital one night and hit her so hard in the hallway that he knocked her out.

“Until this day, I will say to my mother ‘he used to beat you.’ And she will say, ‘he never beat me; he just hit me one good time.’ You know, he would always only hit her one good time.”

Dion says her mother must be a walking angel because she has forgiven her father for all of his transgressions over the years: all the beatings and cheating, all the hurtful language and all the neglect of their kids and the sexual abuse of Dion.

“I told her, and she said that she never knew exactly what he did,” Dion recalls of their phone conversation nine years ago. “I said ‘why did you need to know the details?’ And she said ‘you never really told me anything; what exactly did he do?’ So when I was telling her all this stuff, she just got really, really quiet and she just said ‘okay, I’ll talk to you later.’”

But her mother once again has become a co-conspirator in the latest episode of parental betrayal, taking Dion’s dad back two years ago. Dion says she has absolved herself of the pain of their reconciliation, although she says she still worries, as the couple plans to move to Atlanta.

“He can change at any time and do anything to her and we’re not around. When I picked my mother and him up from the bus station, I had no emotion whatsoever after I saw him after all these years. It was like ‘oh well, he’s here.’ Watching him and my mother interact was really sickening a little bit. My biggest concern is about her being with him again.”

Another concern, Dion admits, is that sooner or later she will have to have dealings with her father.

“Just a week ago, I had a discussion with my mother. I was like ‘you know, after all these years he hasn’t been here. He has been in jail for seven years, and he came out and all you guys have been doing is talking about each other. What about a relationship with us? Is he really trying to have a relationship with us or is it just about you two.’ When he had the opportunity to sit and talk with me at the kitchen table, he didn’t.”

This impending confrontation with her father will be a judgment day of sorts, with a replaying of all past sins and feelings, forcing her to confront how her father’s transgressions have affected her to this very day.

And that is a common trend these days. High expectations for men, nothing for women. Take a woman to an inexpensive restaurant. He’Take a woman to an inexpensive restaurant. He’s they’re they’re all there are all kinds of rules for men. We don’

Narratives

Elizabeth Thomas, 36, blames her misaligned love picker on an “iffy” relationship with her dad, proclaiming he was never a good model of how a man is suppose to treat a woman.

“I used to say that I wanted someone that was not like my father, wasn’t like this person, but, at the same time, I was subconsciously picking those types of people.”

Often, daughters with distant dads make desperate moves toward men who lack strong social values or those who can’t maintain enough economic and emotional stability to carry a family. In instances where some find a man with whom they develop a bond strong enough to survive the fragility of courtship and the difficulty of early spousal years, an unsteady aim as a result of blurred male imagery perception often causes them to miss the mark and sabotage what could be a good thing.

“I used to think, ‘oh, I’m going to meet my soulmate,’” Elizabeth continues. “Now, there is no soulmate, and you get who you get and you have to work from there. And if you’re ready to accept their flaws and realize that’s the person you want to be with, then so be it. If you realize you can’t accept their flaws, that you can’t accept them for who they are and you can’t grow together, then you need to keep pushing on.”

"In the book, there is also a passage that reminds us that freedom is achieved by conquest; it can't be given," she continues. "It is something that is not found outside of yourself, and it is something that must be sought-after constantly."

Even though he may have been proud of her, Rosaline's father never told her.

"If I could go back and have a conversation with little Roz of seven or eight, I would tell her that you're good enough," Rosaline laments. "One issue that I recognize now is that I was constantly trying to please my dad; I spent a lot of time trying to be good enough. Even though I knew my father was proud of me, he never said that. He never let me know; that was something that I always wanted him to say. There was a point when I had to realize that he's not going to say it. You have to go on and live your life, not for him, not for anyone, but for yourself.

Diabetes is rampant in United States because America has one of the highest obesity rates in the Western world. Within the African-American community, 69% of all African-American women over the age of 20 are in fact obese. Obesity means that your body mass index (BMI), if you are woman, is greater than 25. Normal women have a BMI of 25 or less, meaning that 25% of their gross weight is actually body fat. Man are different. The average BMI for men is 18. Men have more muscle mass to fat ratio naturally. So when you look at the fact that so many African-American women are obese, it impacts the health care outcome because death from stroke, kidney failure, heart attack when you have diabetes.

In epidemiology, we call this being comorbid, meaning you have more than one chronic illness which compounds and amplifies your chances of a premature death. The way that some of this connects to dating is that when you have diabetes there is a physiological effect on your circulation. Your circulation is impaired. In order for people to be aroused or have a clitoral erection via sexual stimulation, your circulation has to be intact. So one of the things we have to consider is that many of our obese African-American women who are suffering from Type 2 diabetes may not be aroused properly because they are physiologically incapable of such. And clearly this would have an impact on your self-esteem and on your viability as a potential mate. Many women get their self-esteem externally so they look toward others others for their validation. So if you find that you are not functioning physiologically - you can’t get around - you may not understand that it’s your diabetes. You may be able to get better aroused if the doctor changed your medication, if you loss weight.

In my case, I suffer from type two diabetes. I decided to have one of the bariatric surgeries. The one that I had was called the lap ban. In laparoscopic banding, your stomach pouch is reduced by slipping a ring over your stomach. Within 48 hour, I was taken off all my diabetes medications except one. And I can tell you that the circulation patterns in my hands and feet and face, where I had been experiencing numbness, begin to feel more warm and tingling. I felt more normal, attractive and quite frankly my libido seems to have rebounded. So I know firsthand that the impact of diabetes on your circulation can impact the way did that you feel sexually. It impacts the way that you process eroticism. And if you don’t see yourself as erotic then you’re not able to function as a sexual partner.

When Cherie Ann Turpin was 15, she would ride her bike to the local library, in Bedford, Ohio. She was a bookworm, but my mother had no idea what she was checking out in the adult section of the library. 

“I discovered over the summer a book called Fear of Flying by Erica Jong,” she recalls her discovery of exotic literature, a exploration that would shape her lifelong views of female sexuality. 

“There’s a scene in this novel where you have a man and a woman who encounter each other on a train and have sex with each other, have this mutual orgasm and then go their separate ways, riding off into the sunset.” 

The novel was a breakthrough. 

Although, at the time it was published, in 1973, it was controversy because American society didn’t want to think of authors like Nancy Friday and others writing about sex in such a frank manner. 

“By the time Erica Jong finished writing through that particular cycle of [protagonist] Isadora Wing’s journey, we find that Isadora Wing has decided that maybe the ‘zipless fuck’ isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

And American women have been grappling with the question of whether women can enjoy sex without being tied to marriage or a long-term relationship ever since.

“Today, I think it’s possible to be a progressive feminist and talk about the erotic and to interact with each other. I’m speaking personally within a heterosexual context, but whether you are heterosexual, bisexual, gay or lesbian, I think that you want to be able to enjoy your own body. You want to be in a position as the subject. You want to be able to have that control, that agency over your own body. You want to celebrate that.” 

For Deidre Hamm, the sun rose and set with her father. He was the linchpin for Deidre, her mom and brother. He was charismatic, involved.

Born into a large family with meager means, he gained a successful career so that his kids didn’t have to wear worn-out shoes to school or eat from a sparse dinner table. Deidre and her brother had a swimming pool at home and a vacation house on the lake.

“When you talk to people who knew my dad, their opinion is the same as mine; I don’t think I’m creating anything that’s bigger than life,” says Deidre, a project manager at a drug testing company. “I think he did a lot to compensate for what he didn’t have as he was growing up. He enjoyed having a good time; he liked to party and to have friends over. He was just a fun guy to be around.”

Although Deidra’s father died when she was 12, she says she only felt the brunt of his absence when she went away to college. Up until then, her family had done a good job of keeping her occupied with her studies, after-school activities and sports.

“I think that’s when I begin to really feel him not being there. When you have that boyfriend that’s being a jerk or something that you’re questioning, you really want a strong male figure to be like ‘what’s up with this loser?’ and I didn’t have anyone whose opinion was great enough for me to consider.”

Her dad’s passing during the most influential period of her life canonized him, projecting an unfair standard her unsuspecting soon-to-be-ex-husband has been expected to follow, with little patience, acceptance and tolerance from her end.

“From college until now, I have been looking for that type of person who can fill the shoes of my dad, to be that type of person,” says Deidre, now 47. “That’s extremely challenging, because no one can live up to that level of a man. At least, I haven’t found them yet. I feel like I’m settling if I accept anything less, and I don’t necessarily want to do that.”

Often, our dreams and wishes place us in a more favorable position then reality. What we imagine a deceased relative would do or say in a particular situation turns out to be more heroic, clever, and the outcome much more successful, than what probably would have been the case had that person actually been there.

“I had to kiss 1,000 frogs before I got to where I thought this particular prince was,” she confesses. “My marriage, I looked at it as a business. I really did have a checklist. Everything was checked, but the shoes were too big for him to fill.”

When a girl doesn’t see her father’s failings in daily interactions, it’s easy to attach a fantastic image of him, helped along the way by cultural fairy tales and societal strong-male imaginary. Anyone who comes after ‘these mystical dads’ better hit the ground running or get dropped from the roster.

“I don’t think he had any ideal as to what I meant with the things that were on my checklist. So, was it his fault the marriage didn’t work? I’m not here to necessarily place blame. I just think it wasn’t a good fit. He’s a great guy, just not a good fit.”

In a way, Deidre’s loss and confusion could be even worse. At least she had an active dad, even with his life was cut short. Deidre’s life decisions have always been piloted by what she thinks her father would have thought and advised; thus, a level of fatherhood was established and, in a way, maintained throughout the years.

Imagine a woman with little to no influence from her father and what grandiose expectations she is able to conjure about manhood and what a father is suppose to be.