Dangerously in Love

The first of two parts, written a few months ago, when I began questioning my views on love and autonomy within desire.

Let me set the scene. It’s a Saturday evening, you’re in the grocery store getting some last minute dinner items, bopping along to what’s playing on the store speaker.

This is where I found myself, singing along to the Beyonce playlist the grocery’s employee had decided would soundtrack their evening. I am not immune to Beyonce’s discography so as Single Ladies faded into Dangerously In Love faded to Halo, I’m increasingly getting into my karaoke persona and lyrics start to pour out of me, from whichever cavern of memory they were stored in. Historically, I am someone who refuses to sing lyrics I fundamentally do not agree with. I was incredibly annoying in the club at 19 because I would fully stand up whenever Cater 2 U came on, I wouldn’t even give the song a curtesy sway, and I stand by that to this day. So as I’m jamming to Halo, I belt out the next lyric in the song

“You’re everything I need and more….🎶”

The words stopped me in my tracks and blocked the next line from leaving my throat and I thought, “Girl, how could you possibly know what you need, you started dating that man at 18.” Which got me thinking, why are we shaping our ideas of love around the experiences of victims? Why are we allowing these victims to distort our views on relationships?

Music and movies sway public perception of romance and relationships constantly. What kind of partners we desire.

I already had the idea in my late teens. My friends and I were beginning to date as adults and we were constantly having conversations around what kind of love we wanted, what we didn’t and everything in between. I remember telling friends that I hated Cater 2 U because the men around us were already so entitled, the last thing I desired was to cater to any of them. Some of my friends who were in their mid to late 20s at the time would tell me, once I grew up a little and had more life experience, I’d also want to get married and cater to a man, if it was the right one. There was always a disconnect between what I thought I wanted in a relationship and what I felt I was constantly being told I should want.

We take our ideas of love from the movies we watch and the music we listen to, in addition to the relationships we see around us. Maybe we idolize our parents or grandparents love. Maybe we saw a couple growing up that just seems to weather every storm together, the golden standard of relationships. A power couple!

Which brings me right back to Madame Beyonce and that man. They met and their relationship began, conveniently and allegedly, when she was 18 and he was 30. Although, according to the Daily Mail and several other news outlets, there are photos of the couple having met when she was as young as 16. In addition to those damning photos, that man stated in a 2007 interview with Charlie Rose that he had know Beyonce for 10 years at that point and that “however long she’s been recording, that’s when [he] met her.”

Now I am not a mathematician, but the numbers were looking a little dicey so I did the math. Miss Knowles was born in 1981 and in 2007 that man said he had known her for 10 years, which would mean they met in 1997. In 1997 Miss Knowles was 16 … and that man was 28. Sure, they both publicly claim to have only met and started dating when she was 18 but one, that’s still weird as hell and two, it’s a lie that he couldn’t even keep straight.

In the midst of all these calculations, when you step back at the whole picture, you start to realize that this woman never had a fighting chance. How could she when he snatched her up the second he legally could?

Unfortunately, Beyonce is one of many examples that can be used in this situation. Recently Kiki Palmer had Demi Lovato on her podcast, where Demi discussed the effects of their life as a child star and where their life is now. In one of the viral clips from the interview they both spoke of their experiences with men way older than them when they were teenagers. Demi famously dated Wilmer Valderrama when they were 17, despite him being 29 years old at the time.

Kiki also speaks on having a 20 year old boyfriend when she was only 15. She detailed how being the breadwinner of her family at such a young age understandably made her feel more mature than other boys her age. I would even argue that it did make her more mature than boys her age, but no amount of life experience makes a 15 year old not 15 I fear.

This dynamic of older man preying on “young, vulnerable, naive” teenager is not new and there is no shortage of attention paid to those in these dynamics.

While there is no shortage of attention, I rarely see a focus on what someone is truly missing out on when they are in a long term relationship with someone much older than them for their entire adult life. And the proof is right there in the lyrics that stopped me in the middle of the aisle. OF COURSE you think think that man is “everything you need and more”, you haven’t had the experience of being an adult without him. The best and worst part about growing up is having all these different experiences that inform how we move through the world. You date different people to find out what personality traits you like and which you absolutely loathe. You live and you learn and you (hopefully) do a little better each time. Now juxtapose that experience with someone who is dating someone 10+ years their senior at 18. You’ve JUST barely tasted adulthood and you’re already wrapped up in someone else’s much more developed idea of what love should look like because THEY had the time to date around and find what they like,

and as it turns out, they like “young, vulnerable, naive teenagers”

The Music:

Believe it or not, this essay is not about the disgusting circumstances that inspired eight studio albums, including Lemonade :) . With all this background information, my question is, why are we hailing music written and performed by a VICTIM as the standard by which we judge our love?

Why do we look at Crazy In Love and not see it and the rest of her discography for what it really is, an account of “love” from the perspective of someone who never got to explore love as an adult.

I think back to me standing cross armed in the club at 19 while Cater 2 U played, girls my age crooning along to “Let me feed you” and “I’m here to serve you” and while at the time I did not have the vocabulary to really explain why I refused to sing along, part of me knew that the song was about a future I did not want for my friends or myself. The idea of being this useful tool for a man did not and still does not appeal to me. This desire to be the one who gets to cook, clean and cater to a man, any man, the fictional man my friends at the time envisioned when they sang, was one that at 19 my soul thoroughly rejected.

I think of other singers, with comparable situations, that we revere for their love ballads. Adele being 23 when she met that man she has a child with is not exactly the same, but I do wonder, what about an early 20s woman is appealing to a man who was approaching 40?

In light of all this, I know there will be someone who started dating their then 33 year old partner at 19 who believes whole heartedly that teenagers are in fact NOT children, and can make the informed decision to engage in a relationship with someone much older than them. To which my response is… no ❤️ This same person will try to convince me that I have to be wrong because they knew what they were doing when they entered their relationship and look at how great it turned out for them. To which my response is, you could not have known what you were engaging with because a teenager simply does not have the capacity or life experience to know what they do not know. The irony of knowledge is that we always think we know everything there is to know, until we learn more. There is no 19 year old alive that can really conceptualize what it is to be 23, 29 or 33 years old, simply because they have not experienced it yet. Finally, in a last ditch attempt to save the sinking ship that is their argument, this person will try to tell me that with the way teenagers act or dress now, it should be understandable why grown men will eye them, to which my final response is actually a quote from a reel I saw many months ago,

“There is no child fast enough to catch a man who isn’t looking at children.”

When we look at the music and how it’s shaped our understanding and view of relationships and love, I wonder what we’re doing to our youth when we tell them this is what love is, what it looks and feels like. What happens when we continue to admire depictions of love that are rooted in manipulation?

This question is not to discredit the artistry and sentiment in Beyonce’s lyrics, I’m sure she means every word she sings. The question is why we're constantly using victim’s accounts of love as instructions, and what it means to finally let people imagine love beyond what grooming taught its victims to call romance.