The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (16 page)

“
Tu parles Français
?” I tried.

He told me he was from France by way of Martinique and was in the country for a stage, or a paid internship, working for a food service/supply company. Yup, he could get it. We exchanged numbers and I marveled at my luck. What were the odds of my meeting another cute French guy? At the very least, I’d have a new opportunity to practice the language.

Martin and I kept it casual, going on a couple of dates here and there. I was still talking to Taz, from Pittsburgh by way of France, every night, when he decided to make another trip to see me in Palo
Alto. By this time, we had switched to our third manager at The Counter, a man who started off nice enough but then transformed into a merciless tyrant, in an attempt to assert his power. Taz’s visit meant I had to ask for time off during the weekend, our busiest time. Because I knew the manager would never approve of me taking days off because “a friend was in town,” I decided to lie about my circumstances. In a prophetic lie I’d come to regret for the rest of my life, I told him I had to go help my aunt in Oakland, who was sick. In any case, it worked, and Taz and I spent the entire weekend together, acting like a couple and . . . fighting like one. While we had a great, fiery chemistry, that weekend only solidified for me that I could not be in a relationship with him. Consequently, I never allowed my feelings for Taz to develop simply because when I pictured our future, I saw a vulnerable me. Call me a coward, but that just wouldn’t do. Taz made me realize what I
don’t
want in a relationship. I don’t ever want to be at the mercy of my emotions—that’s fun and adventurous for some people, but not me.

When Martin asked me to be his girlfriend, I accepted. Taz flipped out when I told him, frustrated that I wouldn’t give us a chance. I told him I didn’t trust him enough to be in a committed relationship with him, and he stopped talking to me for over six months. In the meantime, I got to know Martin more. We spoke only in French, and he was one of the most affectionate guys I’d ever been with, which he could sense. Prior to making our relationship official, we were friends with benefits. Or so I thought.

One night he called me to ask if he could come over and hang out. I told him I was on my period. He got silent and asked, “What does that have to do with anything?” Embarrassed, I said, “Oh, I just thought you should know. But come anyway.” When he came, we sat on my bed watching movies and he asked me again, “Why
did you tell me you were on your period?” Truthfully, it was because I expected our “quality time” to be centered only around sex. I told him otherwise.

“Just in case I was moody, I didn’t want you to be offended.”

He nodded, and I thought he bought it, but he didn’t. One day, a couple of weeks later, he asked me if he could come over and talk. I had no idea what he wanted to talk to me about. That evening, he walked in the door, looking more somber than I had ever seen him.

“I don’t think you like me very much,” he started.

“What? What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Oftentimes, I will call you and you won’t call me back. Or when I come over to spend time with you, you’ll just go to sleep. And then that period thing. What are we doing?”

As I listened to him go on about what he wasn’t getting from me in our “relationship,” I grew confused—what was this?

I opted for the truth. “Honestly, I thought we were just . . .”
Shit
—what were the French words for “friends with benefits”?

“What did you think we were ‘just’?” he insisted.

I scrambled to put words together without sounding vulgar. It was the first language-barrier issue we’d encountered. I kept repeating the words in English, hoping he’d understand what “benefits” meant, but the more and more I said it, the dumber I felt. Frustrated, he proposed a solution. “I think we should stop seeing each other, since you don’t like me.”

I was shocked. I had never been broken up with before, much less from someone with whom I didn’t even know I was in a relationship. But if this was what he wanted, then who was I to stop him? Not his girlfriend, apparently. I nodded. “If that’s what you think is best.” As I walked him to the door, I found myself starting to get emotional. It had been two months of seeing each other, after
all, and the thought of not seeing him or spending any time with him actually made me sad. As I opened the door for him, he turned around to hug me but stopped when he saw tears in my eyes.

“Are you actually sad?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

This sign of emotion was apparently enough for him to reconsider his decision. He kissed me, picked me up off the floor like I weighed thirty pounds, and we made up. An hour later, Martin asked me one more time to explain what a “friend with benefits” was. When I did, he told me, “We don’t do that in France.” Then he asked me to be his girlfriend.

As our relationship progressed and Martin and I started practically living together, he introduced the topic of meeting my friends.

“Why haven’t you introduced me to your friends? Are you ashamed of me?”

I laughed. “Of course not. I hadn’t really thought about it.”

But the truth was, I had. My friends were pressing me about meeting him, calling him my “secret lover.” The problem was, Martin had this cornrow/braid combo situation going on that I hated. It was 2006, and men with braids after the age of twenty-one were either thugs or painfully out of touch. I didn’t want to tell him to cut it, because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I didn’t want to appear shallow, but I had never introduced a boyfriend to my college friends before and I wanted the presentation to be perfect.

The day he casually mentioned that he felt like cutting all his hair off, my enthusiasm was on eleven. “Yes! Absolutely! Try something new! Go for it!”

As soon as he unveiled his new look, a freshly cut fade with a neatly trimmed five-o’clock shadow, I was in love. Was I that su
perficial? I guess. His haircut timing happened to coincide with a Winter Comedy event, thrown by Megan’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. This would be the perfect opportunity to unveil him to my friends. I invited him out, waiting a few days so as not to seem obvious about my sudden interest in showing him off.

“Hey, do you want to go to this comedy show? You can meet my friends.”

He smiled, seeing right through me. “So, it was the hair.”

The comedy show was a great time, and my friends approved of him. I was so relieved to have that out of the way.

Martin and I were getting closer, but his internship deadline, which had already been extended, was rapidly approaching. This meant he’d be going back to France, relegating our closeness to long distance. While my feelings for him were strong, this fact was hovering over my heart and my head. I started wondering if I was really ready to try to make it work with him while he was so far away. I was only twenty-one, and after many awkward years, I was just starting to enjoy guys being into me.

Plus, Martin had a trait that drove me nuts: he loved to argue, in an often condescending manner. At twenty-five, he was four years older than me, though he acted as if it were more like ten. Like many people, I don’t like being told what to do, nor do I like to be made to feel inferior under any circumstances.

In one particular incident, I had just started to gear up for “StanFunk,” a show put on during homecoming weekend for alumni and undergraduates alike. I had been asked to direct the show and was honored to be a part of it. Martin had decided to drop me off at rehearsals that night, as he was planning on spending the night. We were early, so we parked in front of the rehearsal space. I had to get some paperwork ready and started filling it out in the car, but the
pen I was using had no ink, so I threw it out the window. Martin turned to me from the driver’s seat.

“Go pick that up.”

Maybe it was his tone, or his stern look, or the imperative “
va
” in French that triggered my anger, but I snapped. My anger at all the times he’d talked down to me had accumulated and it burst forth at once. He was going to hear all of my grievances in his car that night, very loudly.

His eyes widened in surprise when I started, and when I was done, he sat silently, looking ahead. As I calmed down, my anger slowly subsiding, I started to think about his command and my response. Had he simply said, “Come on, don’t do that” in a tone that appealed to my typical environmental sensitivity, things would have been fine. But there was an edge to his demand and the way he condescended to me that I knew I could never tolerate. Despite that, I regretted my temper and my harsh words, and when I got out of the car to go to rehearsal, I picked up the pen. When I handed him the pen through his open window, he turned his face to me and said, “I would have had more respect for you if you’d just left it there.”
Really, asshole?

While his words gut-punched my ego, I retorted, “I didn’t do it for you.” Still, my relationship escape route was clearly etched in my mind from that day forward. I had one for every relationship, influenced negatively by my parents’ divorce. So when my cousin Aida called me one day, out of the blue, and asked if she could give her friend Louis my number, I found myself open.

“He saw your pictures and he keeps asking me about you,” she said, with a hint of irritation.

“Really?” I was surprised. Louis was gorgeous: tall, with the
athletic build of a football player and Blasian features, on account of his Senegalese and Vietnamese background. During the summer, I had seen his picture on Hi5, an international MySpace I used from time to time to keep up with my cousins and friends, before they caught on to Facebook. My cousin Amadou, Aida’s brother, was also friends with him, and so I added him, thinking nothing of it. I was pleasantly surprised, then, when Louis sent me a message: “hi there . . .” We engaged in a few two-sentence messages back and forth, but he never really asked me about myself, and so the conversation quickly died. Now, nearly four months later, he had emerged and asked for my number through my younger cousin.
Why didn’t he just ask me?
I shrugged. Whatever, he was fine.

Martin and I were walking around a Safeway grocery store, shopping for dinner, when Louis first called me. I ignored the call because I didn’t recognize the number. When I listened to his voicemail, my stomach churned with butterflies of excitement. I told Martin I was going to go look for some vegetables in another aisle and escaped to listen to the message again. I called Louis back and got his voice mail. I quickly left a message, saying I was happy he’d called and that I’d try him back another time. I skipped over to Martin in the pasta aisle and we resumed shopping.

The night I drove home for Christmas break, I called Louis . . . from a blocked number. He answered but I hung up. What the hell was wrong with me? I couldn’t ignore the memories of my previous dating disappointments. He had seen my pictures, he had already asked for my number; why was this an issue? I practiced my “sexy phone voice” and then dialed, with my number visible. He answered.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” I started with a tone that screamed phone sex operator.
I shook my head and cleared my throat. I didn’t have to do this. I could be myself. I continued in my normal voice.

“Sorry, allergies. Hi, it’s great to finally talk to you.”

As corny as it sounds, from the very first five-hour conversation Louis and I had, I knew he was the one for me; that he would be the one I’d end up with, the one I wanted.

The night before Martin went back to France, we had the worst sex ever. It was so selfish that I’m still bitter about it to this day. Maybe I deserved it. No matter what, I knew that despite the promises we’d made to try to make it work long distance, our relationship was officially over.

I don’t know whether or not Louis and I will be together forever, but I know that I genuinely love him and that he has made me a better person, which is more than I’ve gotten out of any other relationship.

With him, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that my parents’ relationship doesn’t have to inform my own. I’ve taken off the safety.

ABG Guide: Black Women & Asian Men

B
lack women and Asian men are at the bottom of the dating totem pole in the United States. Yes, it’s true. After many discussions and several observations over the years, I’ve decided that this is the case, and said as much as early as 2010.

If dating were an assortment of Halloween candy, black women and Asian men would be the Tootsie Rolls and candy corn—the last to be eaten, if even at all (if you like Tootsie Rolls and candy corn, it is a FACT that you have dated/would date an Asian man/black woman
6
). Why is this? Why will over 45 percent of educated black women never get married? Why are Asian men so high in supply but so low in demand? I can offer a few explanations and guesses, based on snippets of conversation, credible news outlets, and Steve Harvey.

Educated black women are too high maintenance, high strung, and independent—they don’t need men. There is a widening gap between the education of black women and men, which doesn’t leave very many “suitable” suitors. Unfortunately, the higher one’s degree, as a black woman, the lower your chances are of getting married. Add to the con pile the stereotypes of being loud, complicated, and difficult. Black women, your reputation sucks.

Asian men are also overburdened with racial stereotypes that don’t really work in their favor. Why wouldn’t women want to marry and reproduce with men who are classified as intelligent hard workers? Maybe because Asian men are frequently emasculated in the media, or presented as sexless props, for comedic relief. Oh, if only they could absorb the burden of black male stereotypes (genitalia exaggerations included), maybe their demand would increase. Maybe that would make all the difference. Instead, the plight of Asian men is nearly the same as that of black women, except for the fact that their women tend to marry white or “other” far more often. In fact, Asian Americans have the highest rate of intermarriage. Asian men, your reputation sucks too.