back the curtains.
You must make the rest of your life
The best of your life
If you hope to have any life at all.
So, remember this woman
the next time you fall.
Yesterday, I met a woman
On a bridge.
On a ledge.
On the edge.
Of love and light.
Of day and night.
Of life.
And she asked me for advice.
And I told her,
Heavy is the head of a woman who carries her crown.
And when love leaves you in unfamiliar territory,
It is much easier to drown.
But the same courage that you used to fall in love,
You must find after.
I’m no preacher or pastor,
But I do know
that only God can put a smile where a frown was.
So, if you still do decide to jump,
I pray that God catches you
Before the ground does.
This year, an estimated one hundred thousand women will contemplate suicide because of a “boyfriend.” Seven thousand will be successful. One is too many.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
1-800-273-8255
To the Good Men
First and foremost, I’m not the enemy. I know a lot of what I write seems a little bit “one-sided,” and it also may seem a little bit woman-centered, but I do it because I think that women are probably the most underappreciated asset on earth. I apologize if you feel like I haven’t fed you enough. I know that I haven’t, and I don’t anticipate things being like this forever. But what you have to understand is that there are some women in some serious danger. And some of them don’t even know it. When I first started this journey, there weren’t too many people out here to help them. I come from a history of personally helping women starting with my mother, and then it just ballooned to the world. And now, after seeing its success, I have to take flight with it. I want you to know that I think about you with every word that I write. I am one of you. While I don’t always write to you, I most certainly write for you.
To the Others
I feel like through no fault of our own as individual men, the playing field has become too one-sided in our favor. So as a man, I have two options. I can either accept that, or I can do something to possibly level the playing field. I have chosen option B: to make it my purpose to be a vessel to save women. Sometimes it’s to save them from themselves; sometimes it’s to save them from some of us.
Unfortunately, to some men, that has come across as me “not giving good men credit” or me “uplifting women at the expense of men.” If you feel that way, then I apologize. But at the end of the day, I don’t think I’ve ever said anything that specifically targeted men as a whole. I feel like I do target a certain type of man, though, I’ll admit that. I am hard on the type of man who doesn’t necessarily value women as much as I do, which in turn makes them feel a certain kind of way. To them, the ones who take issue with what I do simply because it raises a woman’s bar to some new height, women who may subsequently remove these men from their lives? To those men, my response is, “Sorry. Not sorry.”
Nothing makes me happier as an artist and as a man than seeing the looks on women’s faces when they read my poems, when they read my posts, and when they tell me that what I wrote was the reason they “got better.”
It makes them happy, it makes me happy, and we’re not bothering you.
To the World
I know what it feels like to be alone. I also know what it feels like to be with someone and still feel like you’re alone. Only one of those “alones” makes you strong. This is especially true when that “somebody” was the person you thought you didn’t have to worry about—the person you thought you were safe with, only for them to turn out to be the person you worry about the most.
I know what it’s like to put everything you have into one person and then for them to wake up one day and tell you that they don’t want you anymore—even when you didn’t do anything but be you the entire time. I know what it feels like for somebody to tell you that “you” wasn’t enough.
I know what it feels like to be scared about your future, about your happiness, because your whole life you thought happiness meant one thing, but more importantly, you thought you had to go to one place to get it. So, before we continue, I want you to know it gets better. I am proof that it gets better.
Lastly, I want you to think about what love is. I want you to think about what happiness is. And I want you to ask yourself, at its core, at its bare minimum, how many people does it take for you to have it, to have both love and happiness? Hopefully the answer is “one” and that one person is you. But if for some reason that’s not your answer, and you feel like you have to be with somebody else to make you feel good, to make you feel loved, or to make you feel happy, then I want you to put as much effort into finding that person as you do into making it work with that person.
Welcome to The Boyfriend Book.
To the Couples
I am a fan of love more than anything else. Couples are the reason why I may not have wanted to write this book before, because the last thing most relationships want is to have people from the outside attempting to affect what’s happening on the inside. But I can’t deny what’s on my heart. I can’t tell myself that I’ll feel okay if I don’t let people know how I feel about a certain subject, and right now, that subject just happens to be boyfriends.
What I don’t want this book to do is make two people question a bond that didn’t otherwise have any issues before somebody decided to read it. I don’t want this book to break up happy homes, because it takes so much to make a home, and the people in it, happy. So hopefully, my book will make strong bonds stronger, not weaker.
To the other couples, the ones who might be struggling, but are sticking around because of comfort or convenience? To those people, I say, please read this book carefully. Read to understand, not just to comprehend.
Sometimes people are put in your life for certain reasons, but not the reasons you thought. Maybe this book will help you sort out some things with some people. If that sorting leads to separation, then I pray that you find peace on the other side.
If You Have a Woman
Who’s
