Understanding black beauty
Our beauty is complicated. It’s real, it’s awesome but in a world where European standards of beauty still reign supreme; shattering that false notion of a singular loveliness means your self-love and self-worth has to be enforced on all fronts.
You can’t claim to love yourself if you can’t recognize your self with a pound of makeup, three pounds of hair, fake eyes, fake nose, fake nails and a fake spirit.
Our beauty is real and as he sees it, feels, it and drinks it in he will begin to learn and understand what makes you more than just a skinny waist, a big ole booty and a weave down to your butt. He will see the woman who makes him smile, makes him love and makes him want you.
Forgiving himself
He may have loved your weave or your hair in a straight style but as you come out of your shell and become the natural woman you are meant to be you may need to forgive yourself for not loving the true you.
He needs to do the same because if he loves you and he sees how skewed his perception of beauty is or was it may take a while for him to realize he’s been bamboozled like the rest of us. Hey, if you hate it took you this long to love your natural hair how do you think he will feel when he realizes he’s been loving false ideals of beauty?
This institutionalized racism that many claim does not exist has been fed into our psyches for decades. Swallowing someone eles’s notion of acceptable pride is not easy to shake.
Unfortunately, when you do see the error of your ways, the shame that follows can be damning. Don’t allow it to define you. Release it and move on with a newer and healthier perception of who you are and who he is.
You don’t have to harp on what you may have thought or liked in the past. It’s not who you are today so forgive your past and forgive his. You are both wiser and more in tune to your reality now.
Loving the natural you
He can and will love the natural you if he’s a real man, I’m sorry, but it’s true. A real man loves you for you and not just the physical you. He can get over your choice to become natural if he is not a fan and he will become a stronger person for doing so just like you will.
Don’t take on a shame for wanting to go natural if others do not see your choice as a good one and don’t allow his shame to define who you are. Real love is more than hair…it’s a living, breathing realness that needs to be nurtured.
Christy Alex says
Hubby embraced my natural hair journey. I still laugh when he first asked me why did I still have to wear a satin bonnet. After explaining he’s good. He still says that I look beautiful and is happy that my hair always looks nice.
Thanks for this article.
fruitbowlk says
Your hair journey is your and no one else. I don’t need approval to wear my hear the way I see fit. A man should not have a say so over what GOD gave you to take care of.
Jules DeLaRosa says
Natural hair especially if it’s short will make you less popular with most men. There. I said it. You can ignore that and assert your rights as a woman to have control over your body, including your hair, which is the ideal wai it should be, but nothing comes of sticking ones head in the sand Nd ignoring some basic truths. I didn’t say ALL men, but a great many more than I personally would be comfortable with. I teach High School boys, and it’s. Dry disheartening to hear the ignorance, it’s as if no progress has been made in the last 50 years….