When men choose partners for the wrong reason, without first examining their own emotional baggage, they end up in relationships in which they claim their needs aren’t being met. They meet a woman and she’s attractive and they have this urge to have her to prove to themselves that they can get her. She represents something that they want, if that’s the appearance of power, sex appeal, machismo, what have you. Once they are in the relationship, the problems arise. They realize they can’t live up to the image that they projected to get the woman. It takes work, hard work, to maintain a relationship and most men are too selfish and immature to even comprehend what it takes to keep a relationship strong, let alone the steps needed to accomplish that. Once they get the woman that they want, the thrill is in finding a new woman. All of these reasons lead men to cheat and then justify it by saying that the woman wasn’t making him happy.
If men continue to think in terms of sex being the foundation of a relationship, they will cheat. If men don’t work on being better partners in a relationship, cheating is the easy way to make sure that the relationship is going to fail. FAR, far too many men don’t know how to end a relationship in a healthy way, LONG BEFORE it gets to the fighting and the cheating. Rather than man up and say, “Hey, this isn’t working,” or, “we need to work on how this relationship can better suit both our needs,” they cheat. They run to the arms of another woman rather than face the music at home. Rather than try to build something long lasting and permanent with their partner, they sabotage their relationship by bringing another woman, or women, into their lives and betraying the partner at home. It’s like a bad fucking broken record but if Black men were more emotionally mature, they wouldn’t be so apt to cheat because they would be choosing partners based on their insecurities and unresolved parental issues.
Justifying cheating is a pathology in and of itself. It’s one thing to cheat. It’s a whole nutha ballgame to say that it’s not cheating because he was wearing a condom when he was getting head. That’s insanity. That’s taking the objectification of women to such an extreme, that he doesn’t even see women as human beings, just objects to give him pleasure and nothing more. He can’t possibly form a healthy relationship at all, let alone a committed one. It’s unfortunate that our society reinforces to men that cheating is what makes them a man, that it’s their role as men to go out and get as much pussy as they can. And the sad part is that they believe it. They will say that it’s biological, it’s nature, it’s genetic, it’s part of the animal kingdom. Killing your own food is the way of the jungle but I don’t see any men out chopping off a chicken’s head for supper. We are human beings, not animals. We are evolved past animals. We have the ability to feel and reason and speak and emote. We aren’t lead by some rules of the animal kingdom, we are SUPPOSED to be more evolved. We can’t claim to be intelligent, thinking, reasoned human beings and then justify cheating by saying it’s a law of nature. Then you really are nothing more than an animal.
On the day when men stop viewing women as conquests, when they stop trying to find comfort from their hurts with sex, when they face up to the idea that building a strong partnership is a sign of manhood, not fucking anything with a hole, then Black relationships will continue to fail. Until Black women stop coddling cheating men, forgiving them by saying it’s a man’s nature, until they stop tolerating married men and men in relationships coming on to them as some sort of sign of attractiveness, until women stop thinking that once they get a wedding ring on their finger that makes them better than single women and thus, willing to overlook their cheating husbands, the cycle will continue.
