End of My Relationship
The Brooklyn Museum is fancy. You might not know that if your frame of reference for New York museums are MoMA and the Met. But situated adjacent to the botanical gardens, the Brooklyn Museum in Prospect Heights is an imposing structure with a grand ivory staircase, fountains, and an all-glass, high-rated restaurant in front. This very restaurant was the site of a dinner that changed the course of my life forever.
Jazmine Hughes is not my little sister, even though I still tell people online that she is. In addition to being black and having the same surname, she’s a wunderkind; an editor for the New York Times Magazine, she has bylines all over town and is also beautiful and younger than me. Am I jealous? Who isn’t? But this particular night she was profiling the Michelin-starred restaurant Saul for New York Mag, and I was her guest. Up until that night, in my New York tenure the fanciest thing I’d eaten was brunch in Williamsburg, which is basically just overpriced eggs, toast with nuts, oats, and more debris in it, and a side salad covered in oil and balsamic instead of ranch. This was going to be an experience.
I cannot recommend highly enough befriending someone with access to Michelin-starred restaurants that *checks Yelp* no longer exist but had high ratings from tourists and locals in their lifetime. The chef will do everything to impress you even when you come in wearing your Target best (which is all I can assume I was wearing because what other clothes did I have?).
“I’m meeting Darn’s family over Thanksgiving,” I nervously began. “I’m going to be in Nebraska with a white family I don’t know for five days. No, he’s never had a black girlfriend before.”
Jazmine took a long sip of her first free cocktail that night. She wasn’t stalling so much as preparing.
“Well, I’ve been with Steve for five years, so we’ve crossed that bridge, but here’s what you should expect.”
“Oh god,” I said with a mixture of equal parts nervousness and intrigue. I took out my phone.
“This is off the record!”
“I’m not scooping you, I’m just taking notes! Damn, how bad is it?”
“Okay, we’re back on.”
As the first course of many was brought to the table, she began.
“The good news is the novelty will wear off after about an hour. But that first hour is crucial. They’ll ask you a bunch of questions and try desperately to relate. Throw them a bone here.”
“How?”
“Tell them you like Elton John or the Beatles. That’ll give them the assurance that there’s any common ground.”
“Really?”
“Ha, no.”
Two more presumably free rounds of drinks, please. We’re going to be here awhile.
The truth is the only other time I’d met a boyfriend’s parents, they were visiting Disney World (where their son and I worked) and were far less concerned with liking me than with talking to every cast member in Epcot about what their home countries were actually like. We hadn’t been dating as long as they had been planning their vacation and wouldn’t put this encounter on much of a pedestal. This, conversely, would be five days of unrelenting hangout in Omaha (white), Nebraska (whiter), with a family that was invested in familial tradition. Had I taken Darn to meet my mother in Kentucky, she likely would have picked us up at the airport, taken us to dinner, and then expected us to spend most of our time at the mall or a variety of chain restaurants’ happy hours without her. Darn’s family went camping together every summer. My family went on all of one vacation together when I was in high school. We didn’t play Munchkin with all of the expansion decks. We played Spades once a decade and inevitably I’d renege and be banned from ruining my uncle’s chances again.
This isn’t to say that one of us had it better than the other. Truthfully, I like that my family eats together and then scuttles away to the far corners of the house for peaceful, independent reflection. The idea of a family that is all up in one another’s business for days at a time is incredibly cinematic and romantic. It just wasn’t what I was used to and appeared to take more energy than I like to spend on anything that isn’t going to make me more attractive or wealthier.
Back at dinner, Jazmine and I were cracking up as the waiter brought us a sampling of charred octopus (a sea creature I respected too much/was too broke to ever attempt to digest), foie gras, and a beet salad. Zero of these ingredients had ever been on one of my grocery lists, but when in Brooklyn, I suppose . . .
“Honestly, we should make some sort of guide for white guys dating black girls for the first time.” Jazmine’s epiphany hit hard in the quiet of the dining room.
“Oh my god, this should be a YouTube video!”
And there it was. The idea was simple: instead of trying to glean something from Jazmine’s experience, we’d proactively craft some basic rules for my boyfriend and his family. After all, it wasn’t my first time spending time with white people, I just actually needed these white people to like me and make me comfortable lest I have to leave their home under the cover of night and find the closest Holiday Inn Express with an in-room microwave in which to have a turkey TV dinner alone.
“So what are you worried about?” Jazmine asked, half rhetorically. It’s not like she didn’t already know the myriad cultural differences that could be assumed. Still, some things bother some people more than they bother other people.
“The bonnet situation.* If I use the bathroom at night, I don’t want them to say anything.”
This made Jazmine laugh. It’s not like we could control his family’s actual reactions to me, but also what a specific fear.
“It’s just that I haven’t really even worn it around Darn,” I pointed out.
“Wait, but what about your hair? You just let it tangle? ’Cause I know he doesn’t have silk pillowcases.”
True.
She continued, “Well, the video should definitely show you in your bonnet, but you know white people sleep in full Berenstain Bear hats and gowns,* right?”
Around this time in our laughter, dinner arrived. Scallops, skate (a fish, not a rollerblade), brick-oven chicken, and aged rib eye on the biggest and whitest plates I’d ever seen required the server to drag another small table over to accommodate the feast. We reached over each other to try all of the savory dishes.
“I guess I just don’t want them to talk to me about Twelve Years a Slave. Actually, it’s probably best if we don’t talk about slavery at all. Do you think they’ll talk about slavery?” I asked.
“I don’t think they’re going to talk about slavery. They might talk about Shonda Rhimes.”
“Oh my god, what are they gonna say about Shonda?” I panicked.
“They like Shonda, don’t worry.”
I was definitely tipsy by this point. “Okay okay okay, but is it worse if they are, like, self-congratulatory about our relationship? Like, ‘We’re good parents because our son is dating a black girl!’”
“Wait, what does he look like?”
I showed her a picture of us on my phone. Friends always want to see who you’re dating. If I have any (good) dating advice, it’s get a presentable picture together ASAP, or suffer scrolling through his (probably terrible) Instagram account for one where he looks clean, competent, and confident.
“Yeah,” she began, illuminated by the blue light from my phone mixed with the dim candlelight, “his family should thank you for giving him a chance.” Shade.
Darn once told me that his mom saw a picture of us together and told him, “I’m so proud of you, you’re dating a woman.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, fearing that perhaps he would be my second boyfriend to reveal he was gay after months of investment.
“Oh, just that I kinda always dated immature girls and you’re, like, an actual adult woman,” he said, which was funny because I was living with three roommates from Craigslist on a floor-bound mattress. Darn was also a YouTuber, but he found success at seventeen and lived alone, in a one-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg at the height of its popularity (Girls was still on HBO, for context). I thought he was living the dream. He’d already transcended YouTube and was hosting a TV show on cable. A car was dispatched to take him to work every morning, where he’d sit in a makeup chair beside Alexa Chung. I didn’t just love him, I envied him. Still, I believed that I was going to find that kind of success one day and we could succeed together.
Jazmine and I discussed the loathsome task of teaching Darn’s family slang, should it come up.
“No, that’s not what ‘nappy’ means. No, that’s not what ‘ratchet’ means. Don’t say ‘ratchet,’ please.” The video script wrote itself.
The owner approached the table while we were laughing and seemed relaxed. Food writers have a reputation for being uptight and hard to please, and here we were with nearly cleaned plates, polishing off our drinks and smiling all the same.
The week before Thanksgiving, Darn dumped me. Harshly. I had already paid for the flight to Nebraska and it was nonrefundable. One thing that’s worse than being alienated by your boyfriend’s family and seeking refuge at a Holiday Inn Express in Omaha, Nebraska, where you’ll enjoy a turkey microwave dinner by your lonesome is spending Thanksgiving alone in your apartment in Brooklyn, eating a turkey TV dinner knowing that your ex-boyfriend gets to be with his family and you get to be with your too-small TV and the cast of Sesame Street on the Macy’s Parade broadcast.
I was furious. In the heat of it, I broke into his apartment with a credit card (I knew he wouldn’t be back for a few days—we’d booked our plane tickets together) and retrieved all of my belongings before stealing all of his light bulbs. He’d return from the airport at night with none of the lights in his apartment working. Was it juvenile? Yes. Was it badass? Yes.
The following weekend I met up with Tim, a mutual friend of Darn’s, to shoot a video titled “Meet Your First Black Girlfriend.” We shot all over Williamsburg, and it went live a couple days later. After writing a short description, I linked to the video on my blog and went to the bathroom.
When I returned to my room, the video already had over a thousand reposts. This was virality. Within hours it had over ten thousand reposts. I called my mom.
“Mom, this is the big one.”
“What, Kilah?”
“GO TO MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL!”
After a totally normal amount of time to wait for a page to load, I listened to my mom breathe as she watched my video. When it ended, she laughed.
“You’re so goofy.”
And that was that. My first real taste of “success.”
When I walked into work the next morning at the social media agency, everyone regarded me a little differently. Sure, I wasn’t the most famous person on earth, but there was something about multiple news and pop culture outlets organically picking up on the success of my video that elevated me in an office where our only real job was to beg news outlets to cover whatever our clients were doing. Suddenly the entry-level girl whose main job was deleting comments on the Princess Diana Facebook page that referred to her (accidentally or otherwise) as the Princess of Whales was a rising star in her own right. No one asked me to take the notes for the meeting that day.
By the next weekend, Tim and I were already hard at work on our next project. A scathing video called “Christmas Cookies for Singles” in which I’d improvised a lament over my loneliness while cracking eggs into a bowl of powdered ingredients. En route to Tim’s apartment, a person brushed past me to cross the street. I looked up to see Darn, looking back angrily. We didn’t exchange words, but his face said it all. Not only was he, too, sad about the state of things, but he’d seen the video along with millions of other people.
That was all the resolution for the relationship that I needed. I’d had plenty of good ideas for YouTube videos, and Darn would convince me that the ideas weren’t good, or that I shouldn’t spend my time doing things without him. It had been six years since he found viral success on YouTube, and while I was thinking he was so great and had outgrown the platform, the truth was he had peaked. In a major way. As a teenager. He’d been projecting his own fear of failure onto my creative outlet, and I bought in. And why wouldn’t I? He was the one with everything I thought I wanted. He must know better than me what I should do, right?
Wrong. So wrong. Oh my god, so wrong.
Another couple of days of editing and “Christmas Cookies for Singles” was published and it, too, went viral. Back-to-back viral videos. Maybe I had just gotten lucky, or maybe it was within me all along. All I knew was that having a boyfriend was good, but having a certifiable talent felt better. I spent the next year making videos for every major outlet—MTV, Oxygen, the Huffington Post, Essence, Cosmo—and collabs with John Green and other YouTubers with large followings. But I also spent that year feeling angry. Why hadn’t Darn seen my potential? It was there the whole time, but he made me think it was silly or simply not enough. Now I’m removed enough to realize that I had to go through dating him to get to where I am today (yes, it’s not just something Oprah would say, it’s actually true). My relationship with Darn made me realize that my self-worth can never depend on how much someone else believes in me. There’s nothing worse than being introduced by your significant other as a social media manager, or some other job title that completely misses the point of who you are and what you’re capable of. Sure, I want to be in love, but not at the cost of what I’ve built. No fucking way.