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There is a photograph that exists in almost every Black family in America.
You may not have it framed on the wall. You may have it tucked in a shoebox in a closet, or folded inside a Bible, or saved on someone’s phone from the day somebody scanned the old ones before they faded completely. But it exists. And in it, there are two people — young, almost startlingly young — standing together with the particular posture of people who have decided something. Not people who have arrived somewhere. People who have decided something.
They don’t look finished. They look determined. There is a difference.
Maybe it’s your grandparents on their wedding day, standing in front of a church that the congregation built with their own hands. Maybe it’s a great-aunt and great-uncle at some long-ago gathering, her hand in the crook of his arm in the way that meant something permanent. Maybe the photo is more recent — your parents in the early years, before the house, before the children, before the life they built became the life you inherited.
Look at what they had when that photograph was taken. Really look.
They didn’t have much. In most cases, they had almost nothing by the metrics we currently use to determine whether someone is ready for love. No investment portfolio. No fully furnished apartment. No five-year plan is documented in a shared Google Drive. What they had was a decision. A direction. A set of values they were willing to bet their lives on. And each other.
And from that — from almost nothing by our current standards — they built everything.
That is not a fairy tale. That is the historical record of Black love. And we are at risk of abandoning it not for something better, but for something that only feels safer because it keeps us from having to be brave.
Let me talk about what loving with intent actually means, because I think the phrase is worth unpacking carefully. Because it is not the same as loving without wisdom. It is not a call to abandon discernment, ignore red flags, or stay in situations that are genuinely harmful. Loving with intent is not naivety with better branding.
Loving with intent means entering a relationship with your eyes open and your heart open at the same time. It means choosing someone not because they have already built the life you want, but because you share the values, the vision, and the willingness to build it together. It means having the conversation — the real one, not the first-date interview, but the genuine, vulnerable, sometimes uncomfortable conversation — about who you are, what you believe, where you are going, and what you are willing to do to get there.
It means treating a relationship as a living thing that requires tending, not a transaction that requires auditing.
It means choosing the journey over the destination — not blindly, not without standards, but with the deep understanding that the journey is where love actually happens. The destination is just the address.
Let’s talk about money, because we have been dancing around it, and it deserves a direct conversation.
Financial compatibility matters. I am not going to pretend otherwise or dress it up in so much poetry that the practical reality gets lost. Two people building a life together need to be able to talk about money honestly — about debt, about spending habits, about financial goals, about what security means to each of them and how they plan to build it. Those conversations are not unromantic. They are responsible. They are, in fact, a form of intimacy — the particular intimacy of letting someone see not just your dreams but your balance sheet, not just your aspirations but your current reality.
But there is a profound difference between financial compatibility and financial prerequisite.
Financial compatibility asks: Do we share values around money? Can we talk about it honestly? Do we have a direction we can move in together?
Financial prerequisite asks: have you already arrived at a destination I have pre-determined, and if not, this conversation is over.
One is building. The other is auditing. One is a partnership conversation. The other is a job application. And the problem with treating love like a job application is that the most qualified candidate on paper is not always — is often not the person best suited to build a life with you.
The couples who built generational wealth in this community — and they exist, in numbers larger than the narrative suggests — most of them did not start with wealth. They started with alignment. Shared values around saving, around sacrifice, around what they were building and why. They argued about money, almost certainly. They had lean years, almost certainly. They made financial decisions they later regretted, almost certainly. But they made them together. And together is the operative word.
There is something the faith tradition has always understood about this that the self-help industrial complex keeps trying to rediscover and repackage.
The concept of covenant.
Not contract — covenant. The difference is everything. A contract is conditional. It says: I will do this if you do that. It has exit clauses. It is fundamentally transactional. It protects individual interests in the event of failure.
A covenant is different. A covenant says: I am choosing you not because you have met a set of predetermined conditions, but because I have decided that your flourishing is bound up with mine. That what happens to you happens to me. That we are, in the most meaningful sense, in this together.
Most of the great love stories in Black history — the ones that actually lasted, that actually built something, that actually produced the families and communities we are the inheritors of — were covenants. They were not perfect. They were not without struggle. They were not the sanitized, Instagram-ready version of love that the algorithm rewards. They were real, which means they were hard, which means they required the kind of daily, unglamorous, non-negotiable commitment that our culture increasingly does not know how to honor.
But they lasted. And what they built is still standing.
I want to talk about growth for a moment — not as an abstraction but as a practice. Because growing together requires something specific that most people don’t talk about enough.
It requires the willingness to be witnessed in your incompleteness.
Not performed incompleteness — not the strategic vulnerability of sharing just enough struggle to seem relatable while keeping the real stuff safely hidden. Genuine incompleteness. The places where you are still figuring it out. The fears you haven’t fully named. The patterns you recognize in yourself and are actively working to change. The dreams that feel too large to say out loud because what if they don’t happen.
To love with intent is to offer that — the unfinished parts, the in-progress parts, the I-don’t-know-yet parts — to another person and trust that what you are building together is larger than what either of you could build alone.
That is terrifying. It is also the only way it actually works.
Because the version of you that only shows up polished and finished and fully assembled does not need a partner. It needs an audience. And an audience will applaud you, but it will not grow with you. It will not hold you accountable in love. It will not sit with you in the hard seasons and remind you of who you are when you have temporarily forgotten. It will not build anything with you because building requires showing the parts that aren’t finished yet.
A partner — a real one, chosen with intent — does all of those things. And you cannot access that kind of partnership from behind the armor of arrival.
Let me speak directly to the beauty of what is possible here — because this editorial has spent a lot of time naming what is broken, and I want to end this point by naming what is available. What is real? What is waiting on the other side of the fear?
When two people choose each other with intent — when they come to the table not with finished products but with genuine selves, shared values, and a willingness to build — something happens that cannot be manufactured any other way. There is a particular kind of intimacy that only exists between people who have seen each other in the becoming. Who were there for the hard chapter, not just the highlight reel. Who chose each other not once, at the beginning, but repeatedly — in the ordinary moments, in the difficult seasons, in the years when the dream was still just a dream, and the only thing that made it real was that you both kept believing in it together.
That intimacy is not available for purchase. It cannot be fast-tracked. It cannot be found by screening for arrival. It is built — slowly, imperfectly, gloriously — by two people who decided that growing together was worth more than arriving separately.
That is the beauty of Black love at its finest. Not the performance of it. Not the aesthetic of it. The actual, lived, daily practice of two people choosing each other in the becoming and building of something that neither of them could have built alone.
Your grandparents knew this. The photograph knows this.
And somewhere underneath all the noise and the lists and the armor and the exhaustion — you know this too.
The question I want to leave you with — the one worth carrying all the way into your next honest conversation, with someone else or with yourself:
What would you be willing to build, if you were willing to begin before you were finished?
And the companion question, the one that might matter even more:
Who might be willing to build it with you — if you gave them the chance to see not the finished version of you, but the real one?
That is where love lives. Not at the destination. In the building. In the becoming. In the daily, unglamorous, magnificent choice to grow together rather than wait to arrive alone.
That is the beauty of Black love.
And it is still available to us.
If we are brave enough to choose it.
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