Dating Below Your Class
Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women is one of my fav blogs. I read this blog, and while the originations are from the POV of an African woman, (I am African by the way, keep the booty scratcher comments to a minimum please), I feel it is very relevant to buppie women. Would you date below your class?
Dating Below Your Class
My new favourite blog is ‘Mind of Malaka’ and its not because its written by my BFFFL (Best Friend for Freakin Life) and co-blogger for Adventures. Mind of Malaka is my new fav blog because the writing is excellent, the author’s frankness/humour shines through and the issues she chooses to deal with are the realities she encounters.
Her latest post dealt with an issue that comes up from time to time where women and relationships are concerned – ‘dating below your class’. Now what does that mean? Dating below your class simply means dating a man who is not your equal – not your equal in terms of social status, not your equal in terms of educational/work achievements, not your equal in regards to anything…I always felt that it was only Ghanaian women (does this apply to women from other African countries?) living abroad who ended up dating below their class. Why? For the same tired old reasons – the black men abroad choose to date white women, mixed race women and any other woman rather than the women who originate from their own countries. In a way I don’t blame the men – suddenly the average African man travels to the west (when I say abroad I tend to mean the west) and he’s exoticised/eroticised as a handsome black hunk with above average sized male appendages…
Now let me not loose my train of thought. What is the issue with dating below your class? This issue came up time and time again on Home Affairs, Joy 99.7 (a Ghanaian radio show/station) that the author Boakyewaa Glover and I were recently invited on to share our perspectives on why so many accomplished women are single – I guess we were both the poster ‘women’ for single accomplished women.
Now I wish I could put my hand on my heart and say class doesn’t matter. I wish I could put my hand on my heart and say I could meet a guy from Bukom tomorrow who is a carpenter with no education past JSS and as long as I loved him nothing anyone says matters. My truth though is that is does matter. It does matter whether the man I’m attracted to is capable of eating in a restaurant without embarrassing me (note: he does not need to know how to use all the umpteen cutlery but he does need to know that the warmed towel brought round is not to wipe your face). I don’t mind dating people who are purposely counter-cultural, in fact I am usually attracted to men who choose to shun conventions, who choose to pursue their passions, who choose to grow their hair long but in my local context (Ghana) I find that those with the freedom to make those choices are still from ‘my social class’. We went to the same kind of schools; we have the same sort of friends…some people just choose to break the rules.
One of my biggest concerns with dating outside your class is that it only adds to the issues that men have. Most men have been socialized to have an expectation of superiority to the women they date. In my experience when men date above their social class (in this instance social class also means a woman who earns more/is better educated/has greater social mobility for e.g.) his insecurities are magnified and nothing you the woman does is going to make him feel better. In the long run his insecurities drive you away or he leaves you for a woman who makes him feel secure (one who is in his social class or even below his social class). I feel that for a man dating below your social class is not as big a deal as it is for women. Am I wrong?
What are your general thoughts on social class and dating?
I’m Nigerian, but I grew up here in U.S. I think that we need to remove the stigma of dating below our class. There are a lot of good men who just never caught a break or are happier doing something that doesn’t pay much. We should demand our men to do something that they don’t love just so we can say we have a baller. I know there is the issue of well can we relate to each other if he doesn’t understand the stock market or how to diversify his assets, etc. But some of these men are willing to learn. Of course it’s not always our fault. A lot of these men don’t want to be de-masculanized by women who are trying to change them.
I guess that’s why that Tyler Perry movie “Daddy’s Little Girls” is so unrealistic. What are the chances of a lawyer type that looks like Gabrielle Union settling for a mechanic? Or what about that movie “Something new” about a high powered Black business woman settling for a gardener…who’s white!!! LOL Those movies are really entertaining, but I think they are just supposed to make us think. They are to help us picture a world where class doesn’t matter and all we need is love.
If only reality were so simple.
watch random movies…
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