The Concept of Marriage… Men Have it Right

I remember when my close friend Jason told me he got engaged, but first let me describe the closeness of our relationship. We go back to the 5th grade, playing basketball at recess. We’ve debated everything under the sun twice; from the existence of God to what rap label had the best hot streak (it was No Limit Records, don’t debate this). I know his parents and he knows mine. I’ve eaten dinner at his parents’ house countless times to the point that his father started cooking with me in mind. His little sister calls me her big brother. I was best man at his and his brother’s weddings. His daughter plays with my daughter. Yeah we’re that close, but like I was saying I remember when he told me he got engaged. He was in Delaware, where his now wife was living at the time, looking around in a jewelry store killing time and just like that he saw the ring he was going to propose with. See just in that moment he realized the girl that he was dating should be his wife. Just in that instant he recognized the need to be with her forever. Prior to that conversation we had never spoken about marriage.

We ascend to marriage naturally...
Wait I’m not saying that the way women go about marriage is unnatural, but that shit is peculiar as fuck. The current model of marriage for most women goes something like this…
A. Set dinner renovations for 2.
B. Show up to the restaurant alone.
C. Wait and hope someone joins you that meets your preset requirements.
I’m pretty decent with words and as convoluted as that premise may seem, that’s about as accurate as I can get (it literally took me 30 minutes to come with that 22 word analogy). Now, we men folk, take a much different route to marriage. We live our lives, chase a few dreams, accomplish a few goals and in-between it all that we date some. Out of that dating we might find love and out of that love we might decide to make the trip to Jared and marry that woman. Unlike our women counterparts the ideal of being married and being someone’s husband isn’t drummed into our heads. There is nothing taboo about being an unmarried 45 year old man (excluding being the old guy in the club, don’t be that guy). Marriage doesn’t exist to us until we have somebody we want to marry and not before.

Wanting to be married over wanting to get married...
Men don’t hold any preference in the pageantry of the ceremony or the engagement. We won’t be plastering IG with pictures of the diamond we got for you. Our tux is a rental along with the shoes and the cufflinks. When this day is over our wedding socks and boxer briefs will go into the laundry pile just like everything else and will soon be forgotten. All the spectacles on the path to saying “I do” is all for the women. We just want to be married and it doesn’t matter that much on how it all comes to be. There are no dream weddings for us. “Always a groomsman never a groom” – said no man ever in the history of matrimony. On the flipside, I know single women, and not that “if you’re not married you’re single” bullshit, but legitimately single women who spent the weekend cuddling up with Netflix and Talenti gelato that already selected songs to walk down the aisle too.

Marriage is a goal for women...
It’s hard wired into women that marriage is a goal. “Get my master’s by 25. Have my career off the ground by 26, 27 at the latest. Be a home owner by 28. Engaged by 29 and married by 31. First kid by 33 and second kid by 35; 1st a boy and then a girl. Visit Paris before turning 40.” A woman will look you in the eyes then lay down a timeline similar to that of her life goals and be dead fucking serious. How Sway? Trust me she doesn’t have the answers. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times women have told me “I expected to be married by now”. There is no mathematically equation or statistical analysis that leads them here. Nope. Women have been sold an imperfect and dated logic; the fairy tale of marriage. All the fairy tale movies Walt Disney has been dishing out, making little girls dream of being princesses and waiting around for Prince Charming to come and save them. Mothers giving daughters tip on how to be good wives. Even reality TV pushes the image of  marriage. Little boys don’t want to be princes they want to be wrestlers. Fathers and other male role models don’t push the idea of being a potentially good husband, they might tell you how to pick up some girls and promote condom use.

In your dreams of marriage does your groom have a face?
Jean DeGrate has spoken

When I decided to Hate Jay-Z...

So I’m siting at my desk reading this Complex article titled “Why Does Everybody Hate Jay-Z?”. If you follow Complex on Twitter or Facebook you already know 90% of their articles aren’t worth the energy used to click to open. Sorry Marc Ecko but your bullshit content over there is on 1000. I legitimately believe they spend more time cooking up click friendly titles than they do on the story following it. Fuck you Complex; unless ya’ll niggas hiring, because I can come up with some dope ass click friendly titles followed by 500 words of bullshit too. Fortunately this individual article wasn’t a steaming pile of shit that made me want to throw my cell phone down an open elevator shaft. Look at God. OK. Anyway even a garbage can gets a steak.

See Hov has been doing shit that has gotten under my skin for years but he’s like that homie you go way back with, so when he starts acting funny you just let that shit slide because you have history. I let it slide that the last time he did dope music was American Gangster in 2007. I let it slide that Kanye dogged him on Watch the Throne. I let it slide that the Blue Print 3 tour was ass. I was letting shit slide all over the place because that’s my man and you don’t turn your back on your folks like that.

Half way into the article it hits me like a bolt of lightning. I know exactly when I decided to hate Shawn Corey Carter, like down to the fucking second, well maybe not the second, but it was April 11th 2013. That’s when Jay-Z dropped the “Open Letter” song to respond about his controversial Cuba trip. Opening bar “I done turned Havana to Atlanta” and I just smacked my forehead saying “Nigga Please” out loud. Who the fuck does this Negro think he is? This wasn’t a 4.0 to 4.6 Range Rover comparison. How are you making rap songs about illegal vacations but danced around your committed relationship with your wife for fucking years nigga? It wasn’t even full-fledged hate it yet it was soft-core hate in the way people Mondays; it had a lot of growing to do and had to be fed to flourish.

Boy oh boy did Shawn feed it. 3 months later he dropped Magna Carta Holy Grail and it had me all hype doing the Birdman Hand rub as I illegally downloaded it from the Share Beast. This was that new exclusive Samsung hotness. Corporate America already gave this man 5 million without even a single. Nope nigga, you let me down again; more Shawn telling us how rich he was but this time he didn’t have Kanye to save him like he did on Watch the Throne. Then to add insult to injury the dopest track on the entire album was Beach is Better and it’s was 56 seconds long. Really Shawn? To this date I still can’t find the correlation between wearing Tom Ford and not using MDMA (Molly). Then the Barney’s shit followed up as soon as the summer ended only to see you Euro Step the controversy to get your Jay-Z Collection on their shelves. That was 2 years ago and you’re still feeding the hate today. Like when you took to twitter with the hash tag #TidalForAll to calm the negative press around your pointless streaming company, when Baltimore was literally on fire and we were just trying to get Justice for All. For a dude that rarely ever tweets you picked the best time to go on a Twitter rant. I understand you’re a business man and you’re about your business but you be on some other shit.

Yep the hate is real.
Jean DeGrate has spoken