How Young is too young for a relationship?

On last night’s Real Housewives of Atlanta episode, Kim revealed that Brielle was not home because she was at her boyfriend’s family home. I was a little taken aback by this comment for a second, but then I realized...Brielle is 14. My friend Dee wrote a comment in disbelief that Brielle had a boyfriend in which I counter-commented because I do not believe Brielle is too young for a boyfriend. I mean I may be a little bias in the situation but my first boyfriend was when I was 14 years old and he has been in my life ever since (not necessarily as my boyfriend but as a friend). I started out young, and yes a lot of people had their opinions, but I turned out fine. I didn’t get pregnant, I practiced safe sex and I didn’t catch a STD. I was super smart. I knew that although I was young and curious I had goals that I wanted to attain. If my daughter ever came up to me at 14 saying she had a boyfriend I wouldn’t lock her up in her room and tell her to stay there until she’s 30 because that was not done to me. I was able to confide in my mother when it came to my teenage boyfriend and she trusted me enough to know that I would make the right decisions. My boyfriend at 14 was able to come in my room and hang out with me (with the doors open of course) and even though we found clever ways to sneak around I will raise my daughter to have enough sense to know what’s right and wrong. I don’t want to be a overprotective mother, I want to be an understanding mother and it would be ignorant of me to believe that If I told my 14 year old she couldn’t have a boyfriend that she wouldn’t go behind my back and court him anyway. At 22, looking back at 14 I can’t say I was too young because it was with the right guy. My first boyfriend was everything to me and I was everything to him. Had I been with a low-life loser whose intentions was only to get in my pants then maybe I wouldn’t have such a liberal perspective but between the ages of 14,15,16 everyone is dating and everyone is experimenting with their first boyfriends/girlfriends, you would be a fool to assume otherwise. 

The Numbers Game

“Numbers don’t define me and I’m not going to let them define a woman” –Jozen Cummings

One of the age old questions that have the tendency to haunt females but roll off the shoulders of many males tend to be:

“How many partners have you been with?” 

“How many people did you have sex with?”

 “What’s your number?”

As I sit down on my bed on this beautiful Sunday Afternoon reading my Febuary issue of Essence magazine I can’t help but to contemplate the importance of knowing this information. In my younger days around the time when I was 17 or 18 this was a question I prided myself on asking guys I was considering courting because to me, it defined the character of a guy. I thought it was unattractive if a guy had a smaller number than me. Since we are keeping it real, I thought they were super LAME! ::currently cringing at my impaired thought process and immaturity:: When I was 18 I met a guy who told me his number was in the 70s and instead of being turned off by such a disgusting image I will never forget sitting on my terrace on a beautiful summer night listening to him gloat and thinking “Wow he’s experienced…this may be fun.” Now you have to understand I was by no means experienced sexually during this time but I believed the higher the number the more amazing in bed you were and boy is that theory flawed. Let’s just say Mr. 70 plus partners was a complete snooze fest and I am ever so happy that I have overcome that stage in my life.Now I ask the “What’s your number” question not to place any judgment on any man in my life but just out of curiosity. The number thing isn’t one of the first things I ask a guy now and it definitely doesn’t skew the perspective I have on a guy.
Conversely when I am asked my number a majority of the time I tell the truth…It just depends on how much I really like the guy. I never lie to the point of exaggeration; I may knock off one or two encounters because mentally I don’t want to remember that experience but for the most part I try to keep it accurate.

I feel like men who would pass up on dating a girl because of her number has not reached a level of maturity where something like that wouldn’t matter. I have developed the repertoire with my ex boyfriend where we feel compelled to ask each other our numbers and while mine has stayed pretty much in the same ball park for the last couple of years his has changed drastically and I do admit it kind of rubs me slightly the wrong way. However I will never forget about 2 years ago when my ex was thinking about taking a girl seriously he revealed that he can’t take this particular girl seriously because she was on her 9^th partner and she was only 18. The way he reasoned it was that she started having sex at 16 and in 2 years she accumulated 9 partners, which automatically made her a little suspect. I don’t know what stunned me more, the fact that her sexual independence made her a whore or that guys actually paid attention to this. I mean does it really matter how much sex someone had before meeting someone new? I totally see where my ex and a lot of other guys are coming from. When you are thinking about dating a new girl you want the sanity of knowing that someone’s hypersexual ways won’t lead to the demise of your relationship together and you want the security of knowing that you can bring this girl or guy around your friends without someone having it over your head that they already had him/her. But I can also look at it on another level in that everyone deserves a chance and a clean slate especially in a new relationship. Judging someone by their past and not giving them the chance for change is obstructive.  How many people someone had sex with doesn’t define a person. As long as you keep it healthy, safe and wrap it up the amount of people someone has been with in their past should be left in their past. 

Friends and Friends Lost

After I started my first job after college I began to burn many bridges in the sense of not being able to manage a successful social life in such a high pressured job situation. I notice that I have and may continue to do things by myself because my friends and I have outgrown each other. The older we get, the more our identities are being shaped. What inevitably is happening is that we are forgetting that thing, whatever it was that brought us together in the first place. It's disheartening that the same people I once called my bffs are now just mere casual acquaintances. As I look around my room filled with photographs of the good times, I can't help but to think that I am part to blame. At one point I did believe that going to events alone was empowering and in many senses I still do but while at these events I see people in two's, three's and fours and suddenly my single self just isn't enough.