In a piece for Ebony, Josie Pickens takes on the “relationship expert”-backed theory that we don’t truly desire and pursue platonic friendships that don’t lead to romance.
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I couldn’t agree more with Jamilah Lemieux’s argument against the growing number of male “relationship experts” and “romance coaches” who gear their services toward single Black women who are really, truly looking for love and companionship. ..
Recently, the idiocy of one “expert” found its way to my Twitter timeline through mocking retweets. This “coach” recently tweeted, essentially, that men can never be raped by women because they’d be happy getting sex without the usual “work.” I won’t even go into how awful that commentary is, but this is the kind of random, sometimes dangerous, musings that come from his Twitter feed. Imagine my surprise when I eventually found myself initiating a conversation with his tweets as the foundation. Who knew.
Anyway, he was tweeting us unmarried women folk about how we have to stop believing that men really want to be our friends. He went on to say that friendship takes investment, and no man will invest in a woman he’s not interested in getting something from, whether that “thing” be sex or marriage. He even said that if you look at the women men call friends, they’re going to always be women that those men find attractive, because their intentions are always romantic and never platonic.
Read Josie Pickens’ entire piece at Ebony.com.
The Root aims to foster and advance conversations about issues relevant to the black Diaspora by presenting a variety of opinions from all perspectives, whether or not those opinions are shared by our editorial staff.
Josie Pickens is an educator, culture critic and griot whose work focuses primarily on race and gender. Follow her musings on Twitter.
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