I briefly broke my committment to the 30-Day Mental Detox as part of the group exercise we’re doing in the best-selling Pink Pill course to watch the apology of a reality show, Love After Lockup, a show that follows couples who met while one was in prison. The show doesn’t just focus on black community dysfunction, in which this practice is commonplace, so…there’s that. But because I am a black woman and can best identify with other black women, I’m going to laser my focus on Andrea, a single mother of three about to push her kids on a man they have never met, and force them to call him “papa.”

Here’s the info:

ANDREA & LAMAR, Lehi, UT

Coming from very different backgrounds; Andrea is a Mormon and single mother of 3 kids, while Lamar is a former up-and-coming rapper who is finishing up an 18 year stint in the big house. Andrea has not shared Lamar’s past with her Mormon community for fear of being scrutinized. Will she be able to introduce Lamar into her strict religious community, while Lamar attempts to pick up his rap career where he left off 18 years ago?

Andrea is an easy mark for Lamar. She’s overweight and desperate for a father figure for her son and two daughters. She’s Morman, and ultra religious. She’s begging God to “give her a sign” that Lamar is her soulmate, and she’s working hard to make the square fit into the circle.

As a Morman, she has a specific set of rules she needs to follow to stay in good standing. That means that Lamar cannot smoke, drink alcohol or even coffee, or do drugs of any kind. Mormans also believe in no sex before marriage, which probably means she will rush the courtship outside of prison to hasten the wedding despite clear reservations from her children, who are not warming to Lamar that way she wants them to.

“I’m a Mormon girl that’s bringing a criminal around my kids…because of love,” she says. “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

Watching Episode 2, there’s more red flags than a Nascar race. Still she presses on, because Andrea NEEDS this to work. And so she will buy him a car, move her children from Utah to California and force them to call him dad, and expose her teenage daughter to potential sexual abuse by a man who might like the thinner, younger version of the woman who is putting him up. The rates of sexual abuse in these situaitons are unbelievably high in the black community, and often covered up or denied by the women who wish to protect these animals.

But we have to address the psychological issues related to why women like this pick men like Lamar. I have a dear friend who married a felon who served six years for armed robbery. They are still married, but there have been many years of unhappiness. Cheating, STI’s, clash of class and culture, and spotty employment on his part. My friend has been so stressed by this that she gained a ton of weight, has been under constant stress, begging God for relief.

When I asked her why she picked the man that she did, despite better men of all races who wanted to court her, she basically told me that she felt like she needed to pick a man who would feel “lucky” to be with her so he wouldn’t leave.

This race to the bottom to chase relationships with men beneath them constantly has black women losing. This is coming from generations of conditioning from the black community to work to redeem the black man, at any cost.

I for one, think that cost is outside of our price range.

What say all of you?

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