Last week, writer Angela Stanley wrote a piece for the New York Times about how the widely known and widely negative statistic that 70% of black women never marry is simply not true. The majority of them do marry. Eventually. Maybe when they’re 30, 40, or 50. And their eggs are shriveled into dust balls. Yes, they marry, right around the time when Greg, Leroy or Ray-Ray laid claim to the very last freak train and is now the joke of the club. Now that he has realized his mortality and faces the very real possibility that someone just might need to change his diapers one day, he’ll marry long-suffering Keisha or Boon Qui Qui along with her brood of out-of-wedlock children. Or if she’s childless, all the better for her to play step-mama to his 50-11 kids.

But what Stanley leaves out is that 70% of black women in PRIME BABY-MAKING MODE–25-29–are single. But hey! There’s good news, black ladies. You’re bound to have snagged a husband by the time you qualify for membership with AARP. So…everything’s fine. Nothing to see here. No problems at all.

Is anyone else getting sick and tired of all the excuse making and gaslighting being undertaken in all this? It’s not just me. Bunny77, the resident BB&W statistician takes a stab at this *cough* jubilant news *cough*:

Stanley is correct in “correcting” the false statement that 70 percent of black women will never marry. The problem though, is that no legitimate source has ever made that claim. If any black woman is saying that “statistics show” that 70 percent of black women won’t marry, then she either has misread or misunderstood the actual statistic (that 70 percent of black women are currently unmarried) or listened to an uninformed source.

But the bigger issue is with Stanley’s statements that “eventually, most black women do marry” and “There are logical reasons for black women to marry in their late 30s through their 40s, compared with women of other races who are more likely to marry in their late 20s and early 30s.”

This “black women will marry sometime before they die” meme seems to be the new supposed morale boosting statement in all of these single black women articles. Don’t worry black women if you aren’t married during your prime childbearing, family forming and wealth-creating years – you’ll marry eventually! Marrying for the first time at 50 is just as good as marrying for the first time at 30!

Really? And what exactly are those “logical reasons” Stanley believes are the reasons black women wait longer for marriage than others? She says “Significantly more black women than black men are earning college degrees. That means significantly fewer black men are on college campuses, and thus in their 20s are not in the same arenas physically, educationally or professionally, making it more difficult to find black partners of equal footing.”

So in other words, black women who want only black men as husbands will likely have to wait – however long – for black men to “catch up.” That seems like an awful amount of power and agency over one’s own life that black women are supposed to surrender… while other women are proceeding with their relational lives and building something with their husbands, black women wait… and wait… and see multiple opportunities to shape their lives the way they’d like simply slip away.

There’s a reason Census data focuses on the age of first marriage for women. It’s generally understood that the 20s and 30s (usually early 30s) are the prime periods for many of the significant relational milestones to take place. Although marriage ages are going up for men and women of all ages, the average age of marriage in the United States is still in the late 20s, NOT the late 30s or early 40s. Focusing on the fact that most black women “eventually” marry completely misses the bigger picture of what is lost when black women don’t tie the knot during those crucial years.

In all this one has to ask, who benefits from black women not marrying until they’re senior citizens? I don’t know…could it be their male counterparts who get the best end of the deal, what with promise of impotence forgiveness and diaper changing in their futures? Just a guess.