Why I Stopped Dating Black American Men When I Decided I Was Ready For Marriage

I haven’t dated an American in over 6 years. That says less about American men and more about my dating preferences than anything else. Now full disclosure, I only date within my race. My nationality, however, is a whole different story but this wasn’t always the case. A couple of years ago after a string of failed relationships, I took some time to reevaluate my whole damn life. I knew what I wanted, or at least what I was supposed to want, and I thought I was clear with my intentions when it came to dating. Yet the vision I had for myself didn’t seem to be coming together. No matter how different the guy appeared on the surface, the results were consistently too similar for it to be a matter of happenstance. Something about my dating habits and my dating goals wasn’t adding up, so I set out to remove any obvious obstacles from my mission.

Of course, I did all the self-reflective stuff, ate, prayed, loved. Started seeing a therapist on a weekly basis, I mean I was the quintessential Black Woman on her journey to self-rediscovery. After about a year of “doing the work” as Ms. Iyanla would say, my therapist and I agreed it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get back into the dating scene. Sure, I had developed some great communication skills, learned a lot about compromise and partnership, and even more about realistic partner expectations. And in being realistic about my partner's expectations, I had to acknowledge that my dating pool needed a major revamp. I had exclusively dated…