Our Facebook fan page has been on FIRE lately, what with all the new “Happy Couple Photos” we’re posting. We get a flood of notes every day, one of which came from a man named Brian Forbes. He sent me his “Happy Couple Photo,” along with this…

“We are Brian And Kim Forbes.On August 31st we will celebrate 21 years of Marriage. We have Raised three wonderful and productive children. Best friends would be a great description for us. We enjoy assisting other couples through difficult times and encouraging the newer generations to marry using old school values applied in today’s world. We make the best of whatever we have whenever we have it through thick thin and otherwise….and It usually great”

Now usually our Happy Couple Photos are of people who are interracially married, but something about Brian made me want to ask him about what he thought about black women seeking love in all colors. I’m glad I did. He was very candid about how he felt when one of his daughters brought home a white boy, and gave some advice to our audience that I wanted to be sure I shared here. So many of us in the BC haven’t had the benefit of the guidance of a loving father, so I KNOW this is needed. I also want many of you to REALIZE that not every black man is your enemy. I have observed an alarming trend in some black women’s IR fan pages that seem to be little more than dens of hate. I have even been denounced and accused for “cheer leading for those who hate me” (meaning ALL black men) by one particularly vitriolic blogger when I began to post a VERY SMALL AMOUNT of BM/non-black women couples WHO SUPPORT BLACK WOMEN SWIRLING TOO on my page. If these women have *truly* moved on, then it puzzles me that they have such a visceral reaction to seeing black men exercise their dating options, which I have ALWAYS maintained they have every right to do, just as black women are.

But enough of that. Take a look at what Mr. Forbes had to say:

Don’t be apprehensive is my first piece of advice. The world is a very large place which reaches far beyond the usually very small portions of world we choose to frequent. This means that the man for any woman of any color may very well not even be on the same continent that she currently resides let alone the same neighborhood. One of my Two daughters currently dates a Caucasian man which I have to admit that I was not In complete favor of initially. It was her wish to date him. His background is not what I considered culturally correct due to the region he was reared and his age because he is 14 years her senior.. They met at her job where he was a supervisor.

I gave him a severe verbal lashing on sight, but his mind and my daughters minds were made up. He stood strong in the face of a father with a clear objective, should slip up even a little bit. They have been together now for over 3 years and I could not ask for a better “MAN” regardless of his ethnicity for my daughter. He worships the ground she walks on and loves her like a MAN should. They are great together and I have nothing but respect for him. He could be blue with poke-a-dots I could now care less at this point. Through my own reservations due to my upbringing I can easily say that I would welcome him into my Family, he is a great guy. They say there will be no Marriage til she is done with her advanced education. With all of that said, If a man is capable of giving a woman the love she wants/needs, then I say it doesn’t matter ,particularly at this stage in society, what his color is.

My advise; dont accept “any man”, no matter what color, who is not a good, sound, “MAN”…. Period. His race is irrelevant. If a woman doesn’t know what she needs or wants she will always settle for what she gets rather than what she wants. Many women/men these days have little to no examples of what a relationship of substance and value looks like so even knowing what is good for us is often a mystery. It is difficult to be a good woman to any man when she is not aware and honest of herself and the realities of who she is or knowing her potential to be in continuous growth and be better as an individual woman before accepting any man with the value she seeks.
Water seeks its own level. If a woman continues to attract the same men , she is as guilty as the men she attracts for not being what she wants. Options come with growth.