Shine (22 page)

I can’t tell you how long each stage should last—God knows I was on warp speed with Al—but I do know that each stage is separate and distinct and provides a snapshot of the relationship’s future. This is the way Al and I figured it should be broken down.

The introduction stage:
This is the getting-to-know-each-other part. Where are you from, what is your background, who raised you, how were you raised, what’s your profession—all this comes out in the introductory stage.

The acquaintance stage:
Now you find out what you have in common. Do you both like sports (is it basketball, tennis, or football—be specific!), or do you both adore theater? Do you share a faith—is it important to you—or not? Do you both like to talk for hours on the phone, or do you avoid the phone like the plague? This vital stage allows you to disclose your habits, likes, dislikes, and strong beliefs with the other. Do you mesh, do you match? This is the time when you discover if you really enjoy the other enough to spend a whole lot of time with him.

The friendship stage:
Hitting this phase of the relationship means you’re really starting to cook with gas. This is the time you find out if you can depend on each other; do you have each other’s backs? How do you feel about loyalty and friendships and family? Can you share emotionally? Do you have a similar life plan? Do you reallyreallyreallyreallyreally like/love the other? This was my favorite stage with Al, during which he became my best friend and confidant. That’s why, when we finally became intimate, the sexuality was born of hopes, dreams, and love in addition to desire.

Finally, the intimacy stage:
Joining your bodies along with your hearts. If you’ve completed each stage, you have no doubt of who the
person
is inside the body you’re joining. Your heart, mind, and soul are already one with his. Once I really understood that, I couldn’t argue with the whole concept of stages.

I couldn’t stop thinking of a sermon I once heard years and years ago that stuck with me. Every time a woman shares her body with a man, the pastor had said, the man literally leaves part of himself. If you share your body in an irresponsible way, there will come a time when you are filled with others—and there’s no room for you. There’s no room for you.

I always thought about that. I didn’t want to get to that point where I no longer had room for me.

Flash backward: I should tell you that when I started preparing myself for meeting the man God wanted me to have, I’d independently decided to cleanse myself emotionally and physically of every other man. First, I’d stopped comparing every man I met to other men. I never talked about whether another guy was good or wasn’t good to me (as in “my ex-boyfriend used to…”). No new relationship, I decided, needed to have the baggage of an old relationship weighing it down.

Then, I wanted also to cleanse myself physically of every other man. Although I didn’t yet know the man of my dreams was close, I still, all by myself, had determined to start a period of celibacy—temporary abstinence. I was in the process of losing a significant amount of weight, and I wasn’t even in the mood for sex. I was trying to take care of me, physically. The thought had come to me: maybe, just maybe the next person I get involved with was going to be the one. I wanted to be clean and new for him.

Soon after, there he was—Al. I have to be honest: at once, I felt tremendously passionate, wildly attracted to him. We didn’t sleep together the first night, but he stayed all night, and we talked about that scene from
Waiting to Exhale
where Wesley Snipes and Angela Bassett ended up sleeping on top of the covers in their clothes. It was a very romantic and sexy—though celibate—scene. I wondered out loud, that first night with Al, if there would ever be a guy I’d feel so connected to in that way. He didn’t answer.

After our date in church that Sunday, he and I each went away to be with our families for Thanksgiving. And then, we came home.

Wow. I can hardly think of that next week without shaking. Out the window went my temporary abstinence. I was wildly, madly, passionately in love.

We went out dirty dancing—we call it slow dragging—four nights in a row. That’s when the music makes your body gyrate, and you just want to be in each other’s arms. It was all so intense and lusty, and the first time ever he held me in his arms sexually, it was so urgent and almost frightening for both of us because we knew our erotic interest in each other could take over every other single thing.

So, we had an intimate, intoxicatingly sexual connection the first two months of our relationship. We traveled to Jamaica together, and I had someone who wanted to be there just for me. With Al, I walked on the beach for the first time in my adult life without getting winded. We walked a mile, and we talked and talked seriously about marriage, just by ourselves and then, even with other people. We talked about what it meant—that commitment—and we made the decision that because we knew this was all moving too quickly, we wanted to bring a spiritual adviser into the relationship.

It wasn’t an easy decision. We both knew the first thing he’d say was, “To test this relationship and be obedient, you must be celibate until marriage.”

But before we walked into that meeting with Pastor Bernard, we ourselves decided that Jamaica would be the last time we were sexually intimate with each other until the night of our wedding.

So the pastor said…

“The first thing you have to do to test this relationship,” said Pastor Bernard, “is to be obedient and celibate until marriage.” He told us that this period be
fore our marriage should be a time of abstinence and fidelity for us because it would, in many ways, insure our ability to be faithful after marriage.

“Things are going to come up,” said our pastor, “that are going to test your ability for fidelity. If you can’t be faithful to a six-month vow of abstinence, what are you going to do if something really intense happens in your marriage? This is a time to find out if you want him, not just his body, if you want her, not just her body.”

His words reverberated with us. We knew what they meant. We knew we had to be ready. If you just want a lover, you don’t have to be so ready, but if you want a husband and not just a lover—and I did—you have to begin the relationship the way you want it to be forever. I wanted a man who would respect my being obedient to my own values. I wanted a man who would be strong in character and faith. I wanted someone who would look at me and feel immense attraction but have the strength of character to contain it at the appropriate time. God forbid I should be disabled or have a toxic pregnancy or for some other reason not be able to have sex. Would my husband still want me, would he be able to stay faithful during trying times?

We talked for hours and hours, and vowed that we did want to be faithful throughout our marriage in mind, body, and spirit. We kind of looked at it as a challenge. We would see if we could break boundaries and old patterns of behavior and not use sexuality as the only means of connection. In my old life, when it was too hard to talk, too hard to explain, too hard to fight, sometimes I’d used my body as a means to communicate. I wanted to find other ways beyond sex to communicate. We both wanted to build up the tenderness that is sometimes lost in the actual sex act.

We took the vow.

Here’s the fascinating part. Right after our pastor offered us that call to arms, we started getting intensely personal, mean-spirited media attention—attacks on our character, on our sexuality, on everything—nasty, vicious attacks clearly designed to hurt our relationship. Why? I have no idea. Maybe it was because I was truly obnoxious as I publicly talked about how happy I was during this time. I was in the throes of a love that I’d never before experienced. I was becoming physically fit for the first time. My spirit was soaring with a new dedication to Christ. Life was good.

For some, it must have sounded too good, even like bragging, because, in all honesty, people we didn’t even know spent months of their lives trying to ruin ours. I don’t really know why certain people are so mean. All I know is that their terrible wrath was hurting our hearts.

There’s an old Chinese proverb that does not speak to my Christian values but still gave me some comfort during those times: “I sit by the bank of the river and wait for the body of my enemy to float by.” I knew that if I just waited, all these mean people, these radio shock jocks and mean-spirited gossip mavens would get theirs—they always do. Still, the attacks were so relentless. I had trouble just sitting by the bank of the river waiting; I’m an action person. But I had Al—and I had our growing connection.

I swear an oath that I couldn’t have gotten through that terrible period of time had Al and I not had learned the many other ways of comforting each other that we had to learn when we took a vow to be temporarily abstinent. We would not be married today.

Desire doesn’t go away when you take a vow of temporary abstinence. That’s why, in order for it to work, you absolutely need other outlets to satisfy your sexual appetite. Al and I often used dancing as that outlet. We would play our favorite albums—
Kemistry
or
The Diary of Alicia Keys
—or we would listen to the soul singer Anthony Hamilton. We’d find songs and give them as gifts to each other, and listen as we held hands. We’d read poetry out loud. When I say to you that this was far more intense lovemaking than any “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” could ever be, I mean it. We’d learned that we could talk and those talks would be comforting. We learned how to whisper silliness in each other’s ears, go out to dinner with our heads held high, write each other poems, spend hours in a card shop to find the exact right card that would get the other through the emotional meanness to which we were being subjected. We couldn’t rely on sex because we’d taken that vow. So, we learned how to have everything else. You know what we did? We learned how to make love without having sexual intercourse. It would hold us for a while.

And we were so very intimate within the bonds of our vow. Because we were in love and very sexual and had already experienced intercourse, we wanted to keep that level of intimacy without breaking our vow. We learned things that some couples married thirty years don’t know—how to dedicate ourselves to
each other so nothing in the outside world could ever pierce that. No one could get into our smallest, inner circle.

Our close friends, staff, and colleagues protected us—they were that second circle of people who also knew of our vow of obedience. But every single day, television programs still had something nasty to say; we were in the gossip columns of newspapers and magazines every single week. The Internet was particularly brutal.

We once did a segment on
The View
with teenagers who had been harassed on the Internet. Their classmates had spent months tormenting them with such vicious, made-up, horribly untrue gossip on the Net, they needed professional help to get through it. After the segment, I spoke privately with the teens and told them I knew what they were feeling because I’d also experienced that same kind of relentless name-calling. I wanted them to know that if this forty-something woman felt her spirit crushed by such bullying, these kids had to be devastated.

By the way, bullying often doesn’t stop when you graduate from high school. Sometimes the bullies follow you right into your adult life, and their purpose remains identical to their eleventh-grade agenda: they want you to feel as bad about yourself as they feel about themselves, and so they try to rob you of your joy in life. I told these young teens not to falter: their greatest revenge would be to live well and be happy.

I have to admit it: I was having trouble handling the viciousness. I guess my armor was pierced deeper than I wanted anyone to know, but Al knew, and in the midst of it all, he put his foot down and said, “We will
not
have any negative coming into our home; no one may bring mean magazines or newspapers into this cherished place.”

I told the teens the story of how we dealt with it, and I’ll tell you.

If there was something mean or nasty that we had to deal with publicly (and there was a lot of it), we’d go to a restaurant, discuss it, decide on a game plan, execute the plan, and then close it off from the rest of our lives. It was the only way we remained sane.

Again—I have to say it twice—I would not be married today had I not made up my mind that my physical and emotional connection to Al was so much more long term than those six months in which we were to be sexually celibate together.

Temporary abstinence can be kind of a quiet, resting state, a temporary fast that forces you to find other emotional outlets. Eventually, it makes you even hungrier for sexual intercourse, but hungrier for a full meal, not fast food.

The first two months we were celibate, it was kind of whimsical for us—like, “Ooooh—look at this, we’re doin’ it.” I mean, Al is a beautiful man. He’s got the legs of a stallion. He’d be a perfect Ralph Lauren model—you take something off the rack, put it on that body, and it’s going to look dreamy. When you’re a young brown-skinned girl growing up in the South, you dream of marrying the light-skinned black boy with the curly hair, and he’s Prince Charming from when you were like seven years old. And I’d chosen to be celibate with this man! Whoaaaa.

But we both probably had the hardest time during the next two months because we were traveling a lot and it became very intense, and we were far from home and family. There were days we were both emotionally drained—no, I was more like depressed and sad, but intense prayer and our ability to communicate on other levels than just through intercourse moved us through this period. Still, we were convinced more than ever that we wanted a four-course gourmet dinner, not a McDonald’s burger, so we stuck with it. The last two months of our temporary fast, we grew even closer together than I’d ever dreamed possible. We set a template for talking about almost everything—which is essential in any marriage. We had the time to do it.