Clutch magazine's Danielle C. Belton begins to explore the other side of the ubiquitous statistics about black marriage.
A lot of fuss is made about black women and why we collectively (per society and possibly the Washington Post) can't find a man. It's a heavily skewed statistic/topic/news story that usually enrages (or terrifies) more than it informs.
But it's always implied that somehow – for some reason – black women aren't marriageable, ignoring the other side that black men aren't exactly rolling in brides either. (The most quoted stat – that's not a made up one is that 42 percent of black women between ages 25 and 34 are single, but black men in the same age range are single as well at 43 percent) …
According to these days, most black men (and women) aren't getting married until they're at least 30, on average. I have a friend who is black and a man and is very unmarried, never married in fact. Statistically, he is part of that group of black men who, at a rate of approximately 20 percent, have never married and are in their 40s.
So I – after nailing him down from a bit of incessant squirming – got him to speak frankly about why, at 40, he was still indifferent over when there would ever be a "Mrs. Indifferent."
For him, it all boiled down to "marriage sounds nice, but it's not necessary."
Read more at Clutch magazine.
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