Relationship goals.
How often do we hear people in Black community talk about certain couples as “relationship goals”? These “goal” couples are almost always straight, almost always wealthy, almost always thin and conventionally attractive, always romantic and monogamous, and pretty much never disabled. These are the relationships we are supposed to aspire to. They represent Black success and Black triumph over white supremacy.
White supremacy worked so hard to destroy Black family and these relationships are our way of restoring what has been so violently taken from us.
But is it?
Are we really restoring what was taken from us, or adopting white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal norms and calling them our own?
“There’s a reason only 20 percent of y’all are married even black men are starting to realize how mediocre you guys are.”
This was one of a series of emails I received over the past weekend from a white man who was apparently angry at my…existence. This was the entirety of this particular email, as if he felt that was all that needed to be said to make a devastating point.
I get emails, DMs and comments like this quite often. Many are from white men, but in all honesty, they come from any man of any race or ethnicity who thinks I’m just a little too opinionated for my own good. This is absolutely the death blow, they think, to point out how unmarryable I am (it doesn’t actually matter to them that I am married because I don’t exist to them as a real person). And with two kids - TWO KIDS - of course I must be single and bitter and desperate for a man to love me and save me from the ghetto that they imagine I must be languishing in.
For most of my adult life I have been a single parent, now married since 2022. To be a Black single mother with two kids with two different dads - wooh, the insults seem to write themselves. I remember when I became pregnant with my first child at 19, everyone told me that my life was over. People mourned me like I was being laid into the ground. My life would only know struggle from thereon out, they were sure. Even now, people will tell me, “I can only imagine how hard your life is, to do what you do as a single parent.”
When I was in my early twenties I was in relationships primarily with cis, straight men. By my thirties I was mostly done with all that. Now in my forties I think I would rather eat my own foot than be in a relationship with a straight, cis man again.
But for the majority of my adult life I have been single. I have been dating, in brief relationships, had sex, all that. Between the age of 21 and 38, I had only one romantic relationship that lasted longer than four months.
For this, people felt sorry for me, and tried to make me feel sorry for myself. I was seen as sad and assumed to be lonely, often by the very people who were also loving me, spending time with me, and forming some of the most important relationships of my life.
The truth is, I have been so fortunate in love, even though I’m only just now in my forties in a long-term romantic partnership. I have been blessed with my relationships my entire adult life.
People have lamented how difficult it must have been to raise my boys. Raising kids is difficult, no matter what. But I did not raise them alone. I raised them how I wanted to raise them. I raised my boys in a feminist, pro-Black household. And I raised my boys with the support of my community and my family.
I remember when I decided to leave my first marriage at 21. It was abusive and controlling. I was told that this was better than being a single parent. But I remember working two jobs and going to school full-time and taking care of an infant and being told by my husband that I wasn’t giving him enough attention and that now that I was back in school I thought I was better than him. I remember finally relenting to the pressure and leaving school, even as my professors begged me not to. And then I remember one day looking down at my beautiful baby and realizing that I could do anything in the world that I set my mind to while mothering him, but I wouldn’t be able to accomplish much of anything if I stayed married.
Almost every accomplishment that I have been able to achieve these last twenty years has been aided immensely by being in healthy relationship with community, and by not being in romantic relationships - especially the unhealthy ownership-based relationships promoted by white supremacy.
We are a communal people. That is how we have survived. The most sustaining relationships in many of our lives are non-traditional and often non-romantic. I deeply believe that we are not “nuclear family” people, meant to wall ourselves and our children off from the rest of the world in our overly-large houses; depending on our partners for all of our physical, emotional, social, and financial needs. This doesn’t mean that I’m against straight relationships or families, or that I think that people who aspire to those relationships are misguided. But I do think that just as the ideas of gender and sexuality that we had before white supremacy have been purposely stripped from us and replaced with those that serve white supremacist capitalism, ideas of relationship and family that we have long known have been stripped from us as well.
We love each other, we care for each other, we provide for each other across our community. We have always done this. And for hundreds of years we have been told that it doesn’t count, that it isn’t real. Because it doesn’t fit into white supremacist, capitalist ideas of ownership and individualism. Can you really love someone if they aren’t “yours”? Can you really have a family if you don’t share blood? Can you really be a good parent if your community helps you parent, instead of a partner?
If we want our relationships to truly be liberating, we have to investigate how our relationship goals have been shaped by white supremacist patriarchal capitalism, and we have to learn how to appreciate the relationships that have been sustaining us - all of the relationships, romantic or not.
So let’s talk about “relationship goals” and what they could be when we shed the definitions of relationship that have been forced upon us. From a collective liberation mindset, what would be “relationship goals” to you?
Thank you to Erika Hart for this wonderful conversation. You can find more of her amazing work here:
Ericka Hart: website | Instagram | podcast
Where you can find more Until All Of Us Are Free
Ijeoma Oluo: website | Instagram | Behind the Book | Be A Revolution
This project is created and hosted by Ijeoma Oluo
Video and podcast produced by Isabel Khalili
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