I see trends where I work, and patterns. They aren’t always good ones. I see so many women reading books that actually make their lives worse. The library is full of good books that can help them make their lives better.

But, it is kind of like a buffet. There are a lot of choices. Not everybody makes the healthy ones. Sadly, the unhealthy choices just perpetuate the holes that they are in.

I see so many black women reading “Urban erotic fiction” and they are all single mothers. They haven’t caught the connection.

Oprah says “What you focus on expands.” If you put garbage into yourself, that is all you’ll get.

If you read “romance” novels where the guy treats you like a piece of meat and leaves you, you’ll imprint that pattern on yourself as “normal”. It isn’t normal, and it isn’t healthy. So when you finally get your “baller” or your “thug” – just new words for “bad boy” – and you get hurt by him, why are you surprised?

He beats you and insults you. You have sex with him to appease him or to get him to stay with you. Then you get pregnant and he leaves you. And all of that matched the pattern in the books you’ve been reading. This is what you have come to expect, and this is what you have been seeking.

Then you are left trying to raise a child by yourself, stuck in poverty. You both are at the bottom of the pile.

But then again, it isn’t just black women. I’ve noticed that the most common thing that obese, single white women read is “romance” novels. They get an idea of the “perfect” man who is going to sweep them off their feet and take them away to a better life.

Real men never match up to the men in the books that these women read. They are never ruggedly handsome, or dukes, or princes. They are average, and have faults, and are human.

So when these women do get involved in a relationship with a real man they get let down. He isn’t awesome or wonderful. He farts. He curses a bit. He has a temper. His parents are jerks. So they leave, because he isn’t up to their ideal picture they have stuffed inside their heads.

And their lives continue to be miserable.

It is just like with food. If a person eats artificial food, jacked up on extra sugar and fake flavors, they won’t know what real food looks like. They will think that real food tastes terrible when they come across it. They will get sick from all the chemicals they have been eating, but they will continue to eat them because they have ruined their taste buds for what is normal and healthy.

It is time to stop checking out romance novels.
It is time to start checking out reality.