What's wrong with being a fool in love? - For Brothers Only - Brief Article

THE disappointment surely showed on my lace the other day as I sat behind a teenage Brother and his date at a college basketball game. Oblivious to his surroundings, he was completely focused on her, while she was obviously taking joy in the fact that he was so eager to eat out off the palm of her hand. "Stop all that giggling, man," I cringed as I thought to myself. "Why you all up on her like that? Brother, will you please let go of her hand? Do it for me. Do it for the guys on the court. Do it for the Brothers all over the world trying to represent. Play it cool, man. Look bored. Look hard. Look around, man. Look at that other Sister over there checking you out."

Don't get me wrong, the Sister he was with was cute and seemed to have a good personality, but this Brother's nose was so wide open that he had no idea how whipped he looked. I watched intently as he lost one cool point after another. He obviously didn't know that he wasn't supposed to show too much emotion too soon. He obviously didn't know not to be too compassionate, too understanding, too good-hearted, too much of gentleman too soon in a relationship. He obviously didn't know that it was a wrong move to seem like he was too into her. Didn't he know that a relationship is no fun to a Sister if the Brother's already got his act together, if he's already acting right? Didn't his daddy (or at least his buddies) school him?

I initially thought he would redeem himself. Maybe he would act a fool at halftime, or diss the Sister hard during a timeout. But as the game's final buzzer sounded, and he tripped all over himself getting her coat for her, I realized the Brother was too far gone.

Watching them walk away, I wished I could slip him a tough-stuff pill. I wished I could pull him aside and give him a big cup of "manly man" juice or something. "Here quick, drink this," I would say as I stuffed a dating manual into his back pocket for the next Sister he takes out on a date. That's right--the next Sister. Although he didn't know it, and perhaps she didn't know it, his relationship with this Sister was already over. He had done too much, revealed too much, opened up too much for a relationship with her to ever work out.

You see, I have been down the road this young Brother is traveling enough times to know what many Sisters want and what they don't want. I had been there enough to know what buttons to push and what buttons to avoid. I've learned from my past triumphs and heartbreaks, conquers and defeats. I've learned the hard way. And through my tears came wisdom. My years of experience with Sisters have taught me what to do and what not to do, and--perhaps most importantly--when to do it.

I couldn't even enjoy the game because I was thinking about how, in about a month or so, this sweet, innocent looking young Sister was going to give him a swift kick to the curb in favor of a bad boy, a Brother she can work on, like a science project. And there he'll sit, curbside, with all the other Brothers who either didn't know, didn't show or didn't care about the rules of the new dating game.

But the more I thought about the Brother's behavior at the basketball game, the more I realized that maybe I had been sucked into the popular notion that Brothers are supposed to act a certain way toward Sisters. Many Brothers looking back on their teenage years will often say they wish they knew then what they know now when it comes to relationships with Sisters. But if we know so much now, then why do we continue to have so many problems in our relationships? If older Brothers know as much as they think they do about the opposite sex, then why do we have so much trouble pleasing Sisters?

Maybe we would come out better if we wished that we didn't know anymore now than we did then, back when we young bucks experiencing a bad case of puppy love. Maybe when it comes to relationships, ignorance is bliss. Maybe if more of us were fools in love, wide-eyed Brothers who enter relationships without preconceived notions, a list of dos and don'ts, we'd be much better off. Instead of listening to a little voice in our heads that tell us not to be too accommodating, too loving, not to make her too happy, maybe we would be better off if we were just nice and considerate and caring and concerned and giggly.

Oh sure, we would open ourselves up to getting a swift kick to the curb by a confused Sister looking for a "project to work on" more than a relationship to enjoy. But indeed, there are worse things than opening yourself up to a woman. Not the least of which is being so distant, so much of a manly man, that we never allow ourselves to truly fall in love. When we think we know it all, we come into relationships with so much baggage it prevents us from ever becoming close to a Sister. We smother our true feelings with unfounded concerns and far-out fears, with paralyzing anxiety about what our buddies are going to think if we reveal our "soft" side.

More of us need to realize that with every step forward we take in a relationship, some type of dating rule is probably going to be broken, there's going to be something we're going to do that, if our buddies found out, we would never live down. But it's only when you break those rules, break out of the stereotypes that bind us into acting a certain way toward Sisters, that we give our relationships the unencumbered freedom they need to grow.