The Boyfriend Book. Micheal E. Reid
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level the playing field. I have chosen option B: to make it my purpose to be a vessel to save women. Sometimes it’s to save them from themselves; sometimes it’s to save them from some of us.
Unfortunately, to some men, that has come across as me “not giving good men credit” or me “uplifting women at the expense of men.” If you feel that way, then I apologize. But at the end of the day, I don’t think I’ve ever said anything that specifically targeted men as a whole. I feel like I do target a certain type of man, though, I’ll admit that. I am hard on the type of man who doesn’t necessarily value women as much as I do, which in turn makes them feel a certain kind of way. To them, the ones who take issue with what I do simply because it raises a woman’s bar to some new height, women who may subsequently remove these men from their lives? To those men, my response is, “Sorry. Not sorry.”
Nothing makes me happier as an artist and as a man than seeing the looks on women’s faces when they read my poems, when they read my posts, and when they tell me that what I wrote was the reason they “got better.”
It makes them happy, it makes me happy, and we’re not bothering you.
To the World
I know what it feels like to be alone. I also know what it feels like to be with someone and still feel like you’re alone. Only one of those “alones” makes you strong. This is especially true when that “somebody” was the person you thought you didn’t have to worry about—the person you thought you were safe with, only for them to turn out to be the person you worry about the most.
I know what it’s like to put everything you have into one person and then for them to wake up one day and tell you that they don’t want you anymore—even when you didn’t do anything but be you the entire time. I know what it feels like for somebody to tell you that “you” wasn’t enough.
I know what it feels like to be scared about your future, about your happiness, because your whole life you thought happiness meant one thing, but more importantly, you thought you had to go to one place to get it. So, before we continue, I want you to know it gets better. I am proof that it gets better.
Lastly, I want you to think about what love is. I want you to think about what happiness is. And I want you to ask yourself, at its core, at its bare minimum, how many people does it take for you to have it, to have both love and happiness? Hopefully the answer is “one” and that one person is you. But if for some reason that’s not your answer, and you feel like you have to be with somebody else to make you feel good, to make you feel loved, or to make you feel happy, then I want you to put as much effort into finding that person as you do into making it work with that person.
Welcome to The Boyfriend Book.
To the Couples
I am a fan of love more than anything else. Couples are the reason why I may not have wanted to write this book before, because the last thing most relationships want is to have people from the outside attempting to affect what’s happening on the inside. But I can’t deny what’s on my heart. I can’t tell myself that I’ll feel okay if I don’t let people know how I feel about a certain subject, and right now, that subject just happens to be boyfriends.
What I don’t want this book to do is make two people question a bond that didn’t otherwise have any issues before somebody decided to read it. I don’t want this book to break up happy homes, because it takes so much to make a home, and the people in it, happy. So hopefully, my book will make strong bonds stronger, not weaker.
To the other couples, the ones who might be struggling, but are sticking around because of comfort or convenience? To those people, I say, please read this book carefully. Read to understand, not just to comprehend.
Sometimes people are put in your life for certain reasons, but not the reasons you thought. Maybe this book will help you sort out some things with some people. If that sorting leads to separation, then I pray that you find peace on the other side.
If You Have a Woman
Who’s strong enough to be alone,
But soft enough to still allow
a place in her heart for you,
Take her by the hand.
And if you’re not man enough
To lead her through the darkness yet,
At least be brave enough
to not let her stand in it alone.
Appreciate her flaws.
Because, sometimes, the same reasons
why the world tells her
She’s not good enough…
Are the same reasons she may appreciate you
For loving her anyway.
If you have a woman
Who’s woman enough to lie in an empty bed
for the rest of her life
Because she refuses to lie
next to a man who loves her body
More than her mind,
And she gives you the pleasure of having her
however you please:
Make love to her like the world is on fire.
Like every argument you ever had
will be forgotten.
Like the cure for her insecurities
Is your fingertips
Playing piano with the parts of her body
That she has yet to fall in love with
To the point where the gates
of her own personal heaven
Have no choice but to pour
onto the bedroom comforter.
Comfort her with your presence.
Drown yourself in her sea of serenity.
Because the more often she comes,
The less likely she’ll go elsewhere.
The only thing worse than a woman
Who is too scared to love
Is the man
Who is too scared to love her back.
June 1, 2016
This book was the hardest one yet to write, hard because I finally had to sit down and think about one subject. I pride myself in having a lot to say. I pride myself even more on my diversity and freedom. So when you put me in a box, when I put me in a box, my first reaction is to escape. Unfortunately, sometimes when you’re running, it isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes you can be running from yourself, from your purpose, from what you were put here to do.
And for the last year, that’s what I’ve been doing.
There has been a lot of pressure on me since Dear Woman, and most of it has been self-inflicted. I never expected that book to sell as much as it did, to reach as many people as it did, or to be as influential as it was to women. I wrote that book in eighteen hours, three days before it was released. All I had was a notepad full of topics, my heart, and God. It subsequently singlehandedly changed my life. It put me in a place where I realized that my purpose was to be a voice to speak to women—of honesty, encouragement, support, and hope. In the process, I realized that my work has truly only just begun. Dear Woman did a lot of good for both me and the world. It gave me freedom; it gave the people who read it validation, insight, and a little humor. Another thing I realized it did was that it raised some women’s bar. It changed what they stood for, who they stood for. It let them know that they weren’t crazy.