So When Are We Taking Me Out?

The summer between my sophomore and junior year of college, I lived in Detroit, a city filled to the brim with pretty women who also happen to have a good attitude about pretty much anything. They’re tough, don’t get me wrong, but through the hard shell, they’re game for pretty much anything, and they’re not timid. They see what they want, they get it.

A perfect example of this is a girl a colleague at my internship set me up with. The girl, (whose name I still remember but won’t mention for the sake of privacy) had a child, was two years older than me, and did hair. (It should be noted here, if you live in Detroit for any time longer than a month, and you date in Detroit, you will date a woman who does hair. That’s just how it goes.) We went out on probably five dates, nothing terribly exciting, but there is one thing I remember about her, one thing that sticks out to me even after all these years, and I only think this is the case because since her I haven’t met many women who do this at all.  Here it is:

An Idea About Engagement

They say an idle mind is the devil’s playground. Well, I say an idle mind is where genius happens because the other day, as I was taking a shower, I came up with an idea that I not only find brilliant, but worthy of application.

When a man asks a woman’s hand in marriage, she gets a ring and he gets a what? A “yes” one would hope, but after that, what else does he get? What kind of symbolism does he get to show he is engaged? Traditionally, none. While a woman gets to go around and flaunt a ring, an engaged man does not receive anything to show he is engaged.

Will someone tell me how this is fair? Then will someone tell me why women for so long have allowed their fiancés to go walking around looking no different than the man who isn’t engaged at all?

These questions are rhetorical. Instead of attempting to answer them, I aim to implement an alternative tradition, one that I hope other men put into practice and women will be accepting of.

As reciprocity for asking my woman’s hand in marriage, I too would like a symbol of our engagement. Something specifically for me. Here it is:

Five Things A Woman Should Have At Her Place

“I got Alize at my house. I don’t drink Alize, but b*tches do.”– Katt Williams

All men have something at their place to help set the mood with the female company they entertain. Maybe it’s a bottle of Alize, like Katt Williams, or maybe it’s a copy of Clueless. Incense and candles are also common. The whole point of these things is to get a woman to feel comfortable enough to sleep with us.

Duh.

Women, on the other hand, never seem to have the comforts for men to enjoy.This is not to say I need certain things to get me in the mood. Trust me, the mere sight of the woman is going to be enough. But what a woman does need to provide for me is comfortable distractions.

Every time I want to leave a woman’s house, she wants to know why. Well, it’s not because I don’t like her. It’s because her place is boring as hell or it’s missing certain things I need.

Comfortable distractions can serve one of two purposes. For the women who invite me over for some platonic company, who don’t want to sleep with me, comfortable distractions are a great way to keep me focused on something other than her body. For the women who do invite me over to sleep with them, but would like me to stay for a while afterward, comfortable distractions will help me stay put. They won’t distract me from her, but they will distract me from what’s going on outside of her four walls.

Women, I’m sorry to say, are not enough sometimes. They, like me and my brethren, need to have the comforts too.

So ladies, consider this my Valentine’s Day gift to all of you. Five things you should have in your place to get a man to come over and stay a little while longer. Happy

Valentine’s Day.

On Laughing

Last night, as I was getting into my bed, from the kitchen, I heard my mom laugh. Then, right behind her, my step-dad laughed too. They weren’t guffaws, the kinds of laughs that come from the gut, they were chuckles, stuttered, and through the teeth. One might even say, they were audible smiles.

It made my night, to hear those laughs, because, I honestly can’t remember hearing my mom ever laugh like that with any man. Well, any man besides her son of course. One time, when I was in the fourth grade, one of my homework assignments was to use the week’s list of spelling words in a story. And I don’t remember the exact combination of words I used in this one sentence of the story, but I do remember telling my mom the sentence, while we were driving in the car. I remember thinking it was funny when I wrote it so I wanted to share it with her and sure enough it made her laugh. I mean laugh, like, wiping-tears-from-her-eyes laugh. And that made me feel so good, to make my mom laugh so hard and I think it was then I kind of understood how important it is to make any woman I care about laugh.

If I were to ask the women I dated to list the reasons why they liked me so much, let my ability to make them laugh be in all of their top three. It’s important to me, because laughter is the sound happy makes, and I don’t only want to do it in public for everyone else to see, but in private too. Especially in private. When it’s just me and her acting as audience to each other.

When a joke has hit my woman right, and got her laughing to the point where whatever she was doing would have to wait until her laughing ceased, I never forget those jokes. The funniest jokes we tell to one another are like the greatest sex we have with one another. We don’t ever forget, and when we go back to that place in our heads, they stir up nothing but good feelings.

Men who want to stare angrily at the other men staring at their woman act as though their intensity will make men back off. But nothing says “back off” like a man making his woman laugh. No man will touch such a moment.

Things I will tell my son or any young man who asks me about love will include: Always try to be the funniest man she ever dated, and I don’t care if one of her ex-boyfriends is named Chris Rock or Eddie Murphy. Crack her up. But be careful because once a funny man, always a funny man, and if she’s not laughing like she used to it isn’t because you’re any less funny. At some point in the relationship, she had the schtick down pat, could see the jokes coming from a mile away, and still she laughed. So why did she stop? Why is she now rolling her eyes when you make a funny instead of showing her teeth? There’s something else wrong and you need to figure out what that is before giving up and going out with your boys to meet new girls who will laugh at your old jokes.

Because there is nothing more addictive than the sound of a woman’s laugh, whether it’s from our mom, our partner or the woman checking us out at the grocery store. Good laughs are like the great songs I hear on the radio, or a great quote I hear from someone else’s mouth, they stick. I never forget the good ones, the ones like I heard last night from my mother and my step-dad. They were the sound of happy.

An Extremely Important Thing A Woman Must Do

I may seem like the type of guy who has a lot of demands. Certainly I have already gained some notoriety for listing an unreasonable list of things women do to turn me off and those who have been reading me or know me personally may think I am too picky for my own good.

But on the contrary, I feel I don’t demand much from a woman. As a matter of fact, there’s only one thing I ask of any woman I am dating or with whom I am in a committed relationship. It’s simple, but it means the world to me. It costs her nothing, only a little bit of her time and patience.

Here it is.

Read . My. Work.

Read the drafts.

Read the final.

That being said, click on the links below to read two of my latest pieces I wrote for The Root and The Wall Street Journal’s new culture blog, Speakeasy.

“Bill Cosby’s New Rap Album” – The Wall Street Journal

“Will Smith is No Frank Williams: An Interview with Michael Jai Parker aka Black Dynamite” - The Root

Remember that and enjoy those.

Many thanks.

Foodie Calls

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop on a lazy Sunday afternoon, when out of nowhere a female friend of mine hit me up on Instant Messenger.

Female Friend: Whatchu doing

Me: Writing

Female Friend: How long are you going to be?

Me: I don’t know. Why?

Female Friend: Me and my girl are making some crab legs with Mac n’ Cheese. If you’d like, you can come over.

Me: Hell yeah. What time?

Female Friend: Umm, we’re still cooking, everything should be ready in like two hours.

Me: Cool. I’ll be there.

Female Friend: See you then

My God, I thought. This is better than getting invited over for sex.

What I would like these days, more than a woman to invite me over for sex is a woman to invite me over for a good meal. One that she made. Just for me. Sort of like my friend did a few weeks ago.

I want to get a phone call, at like 6:00 p.m. Not 11:00 p.m. I want the person’s voice on the other end of the phone to be a woman. I want her to say, “Hey, what are you doing right now?” When I say, “Umm, nothing. Chilling. Watching SportsCenter.” I want her to say, “You hungry?”And when I say, “Yeah, I was actually about to eat right now.” I want her to say, “Don’t. Come over. I’m cooking dinner.”

Now that right there is sexy.

To be clear, I still covet the random, out-of-nowhere booty call. Love them, as a matter of fact. So this is not to say the booty calls should stop. They should keep coming.

I repeat. The booty calls should keep coming.

But a phone call to cook for me? A foodie call? If you ask me, women aren’t doing this enough.

There needs to be balance. If a woman is down to share her body with me, she should be down to share a  cooked meal with me. And forget that rhetoric about how cooking is something reserved for boyfriends. Technically, so is sex. So why can’t I have both?

Most men would still prefer the booty call over the foodie call, but for me, most booty calls I receive nowadays get the Ignore button. Why? Because I’m hungry. A foodie call on the other hand, will not only be picked up on the first ring, but before she hangs up, I will be sitting at her table, fork and knife in hand. We can have sex for dessert.

Women Should Always Carry Condoms. Always.

Women who don’t carry condoms get on my nerves and confuse me.

Let’s start with the woman’s point of view, which is they have no problems keeping a stash of rubbers at their place of residence, but if they go out, men should be strapped. This only makes sense if I know for a fact I’m going home with someone or to someone’s home at the end of the night. But if my night is filled with a bunch of ifs, ands, or maybes, I know from experience, carrying a condom on me is the anti-rabbit’s foot.

Women always seem more comfortable with me when I don’t have condoms than when I do. It’s as though I didn’t plan to have sex, which endears me to them, but  is also dead wrong. I don’t know when it’s in my plans not to have sex. I just figure when a woman’s ready to do it, she will be prepared. And if she doesn’t have condoms, it was in her plans not to have sex.

The only exception in which it is a man’s responsibility to have condoms is if the action is going down at his place, because all men should have a stash at home. But if he doesn’t know how his night’s going to end or it’s not going end on home turf, women should be prepared.

Unfortunately, women like to play coy even with themselves; acting like there’s no need for them to have a couple of condoms in their purse because nothing is going to happen, or, because it’s unbecoming of a lady to be so ready. The truth is, neither of those dogs hunt.

Women, like men, cannot predict the future, but they should always be prepared for it. We are living in a time when one-night-stands are considered a rights of passage into adulthood, and no woman should be unprepared for hers.

As for those who believe only loose women carry condoms in their purse with no intent on using them, what a mistake. Women who carry condoms just in case are not loose. They’re smart, or, maybe they’re smart, loose women.

Either way, you get my point: Women, whether loose or uptight, should always carry condoms, if they’re smart.

Things A Woman Should Do #2

ROOT FOR MY TEAM

Football season is here, which means it’s time for me to get religious on Sundays. Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you I am a huge Pittsburgh Steelers fan (though I’m not from Pittsburgh, my dad is), so whenever I’m dating a woman during football season, I make it very clear: Root against my team and consider us done. I’ll call you in the off-season.

To me, there is no bigger slap in the face than when a woman purposely roots against a man’s team. I’m perfectly fine with a woman having a team of her own, if she’s rooted for the team her whole life. But if she’s the type of woman who never really paid attention to my three favorite sports (football, basketball, and baseball), and never had a team, then she needs to be on my side.

Now, I have heard some women say it’s fun to root against their man’s team because if his team is losing they think it’s sexy when he gets all angry.

It isn’t.

Let’s say I’m watching a movie with my woman about a man in love with two women, one named Joan, the other named Jessie, and my woman is pulling for Jessie, wouldn’t I be an asshole if I was rooting for Joan? Even if I thought Joan had the better body, and the better face, and looked like she was better in bed, out of respect for my lady, I would still root for Jessie because I’m no dummy. The last thing I want to hear is my woman tell me, “Oh, well you can have Joan. As a matter of fact, call her right now, see if you can sleep her in bed tonight cause you’re not sleeping in mine.”

Consider this your warning, ladies: Men want our women to root for the team we’re rooting for. Period. And if you don’t, we just might go sleep in Joan’s bed. At least until the off-season.

Things A Woman Should Do #1

WEAR A DRESS SHIRT

Hey, ladies, do me a favor. Wear a dress shirt. And I don’t mean one of those women dress shirts they sell at the Gap. I mean one of mine. Not to work. Not to run an errand. Just around my place. It doesn’t have to be everyday either. Just a couple of times a month, preferably after sex.

I love this. Other men love this. Seriously. If you don’t believe me, just ask them right now. Go ahead. I’ll wait…

SEE?! I told you.