I joined the Princeton Association of Black Women, and one of our recurring conversations was about our dateability on campus. Mostly we were not in relationships, and this was not out of choice. We all knew that black women were much more likely to remain unmarried compared to white women. We all idolized Michelle Obama for being able to find her equal, even if she hadn’t met Barack until well after her undergraduate years. When I was a junior, I successfully “bickered” Cannon, one of Princeton’s eleven eating clubs, which was mostly populated by the university’s top athletes. Because the eating club system was the center of campus social life, and because I hadn’t previously been successful finding my place within it, I felt validated and aimed to take advantage of my new status by trying much harder at parties to be “seen” so that I could leave Princeton saying that I was in at least one relationship.
Although I attended Cannon’s parties every once in a while, downing vodka and tequila while wearing crop tops, my drunken confidence did not entice any guy to come my way. I realized just how unattractive I was when, one night while I was sitting in Cannon’s main living room lamenting to another black female Cannon member about my frustration at being single, one of the black football players sat down beside us. I considered him a friend. In fact, he was one of the reasons why I’d gotten into Cannon in the first place. But when he got comfortable on the sofa, he needed our help. He and the rest of his teammates were making a list of the most attractive black women at Princeton, and he then proceeded to list a Who’s Who of those in my class, asking me to fill in the blanks. I was not among them and I was too afraid to ask why. At that point, it didn’t matter. I was invisible to the men I wanted most to attract. I felt like I was an untouchable, at the bottom of our caste system, destined to be both unloved and unsexed.
It didn’t help that just weeks before this incident, I had been stood up by a black grad student in the Neuroscience Department, despite the fact that he’d pursued me on a crowded, poorly lit dance floor at a party and asked for my number. We’d hung out at the Woodrow Wilson “Woody Woo” fountain right in front of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and talked about music and our family lives. He wanted us to see a Broadway show together, and to break me out of my fear of watching scary movies. I wanted him to be mine. He was good-looking enough and talkative, and that seemed adequate.
Our seeing each other lasted two weeks. He never gave a reason for standing me up, only asked to reschedule, which we never did. I remember passing by him in the gym as he quickly averted his eyes. I had grown accustomed to situations like these that had no closure: there was the guy who’d wanted to get dinner in the dining hall, suggested we do it again sometime, then told me he was too busy because he had to work on study abroad applications, only for me to later find out that he wanted to party on a Saturday night with all the girls who were on my football player friend’s list. I began to wonder if something was intrinsically wrong with me, something less obvious than a deficit in looks, style, or personality. I thought that I was suffering from some kind of invisible disease and all the men knew it, which is why they quickly abandoned me. Whether it was the desperation oozing through my pores, or a lack of confidence that wore me better than my own clothes, I felt like less of a woman.
At Princeton, I spent a significant amount of my time outside of classrooms and libraries at weekly Bible study meetings, where the fear of being single for too long trickled in. Our coordinator did her best to calm our fears by reiterating that patience was a godly virtue and that, according to the book of Proverbs, we were supposed to be pursued and not vice versa. She’d enjoyed an incredibly harmonious and happy marriage since twenty-two, which is what I wanted, but I wasn’t sure that she knew of heartbreak like mine. I wanted to believe her. But I could not be passive. I have always been a driven, outspoken person, and I was known on campus for my fiery debating style and my provocative articles as an opinion columnist for the Daily Princetonian.
Suddenly, I started to wonder if this was the reason why I was undesirable: I talked too much, and didn’t know how to be docile. Most of the other black women who never seemed to have a shortage of men in pursuit were not as vocal as I was. They seemed less loud, more reserved, and more relaxed in party settings. But by the time I realized this, I was on the verge of graduating and it seemed too late. I had dreamed of marrying at twenty-two, but I had never imagined that I might leave college without ever having been in a relationship or having kissed someone throughout the duration of those four years.
At twenty-two, I was trying to have a monogamous relationship with a man named Bradley, a childhood friend and longtime admirer whom I hadn’t spoken to since senior year of high school. I thought I was in love, and I hoped to marry him someday.
He lived and studied thousands of miles away from me, but to my surprise and delight, about three months before graduation, I received a text from him. I thought that he was reaching out just to say hello, but then he invited me on an all-expenses-paid trip to Nevada so we could catch up with each other. I didn’t hesitate. I yearned for male attention, and I was afraid that my four-year dry spell at Princeton was steadily turning me cold, bitter, and emotionally mute. For the several weeks leading up to the trip, we spoke every evening. We spoke so often, I felt like he was right beside me. As I descended the escalator at McCarran Airport, I saw Bradley—now several inches taller and wider with muscle—standing there with a bouquet of roses. All of the years of loneliness and rejection melted away as we cruised down the highway in his silver Porsche. When we were children, I’d constantly rebuffed this man’s advances, but now that we were adults I was ready. Except that Bradley expected us to have sex, but much to his chagrin I said no because we were not in a committed relationship. It also helped that I got my period on my connecting flight to Nevada. To this day, I believe this buffer was an act of God, signaling to me that the time was not right and he was not it.