Role Playing: You Be The Woman, I'll Be The Man
By Mybrotha.COM Relationship Editor

The assignment of traditional male/female roles help create structure within relationships and ultimately, in marriage. In its simplest observation, men were always taught responsibility, leadership, and providing for family. That meant working a job to supply money for food, clothing, and healthcare.

In today's workforce, men still command higher salaries than women who hold the same, and sometimes higher positions. This disparity originated through learned behavior which designated men as breadwinners and made them responsible for family stability.

Women were usually schooled on how to nurture and raise children, and how to create and maintain a comfortable living space. This usually meant playing the role of teacher, tending to household chores, and providing affection to both husband and children.

In recent years however, women no longer need sustained financial support from men, and men no longer feel obligated to play their role in traditional two parent households.

Decades of social adjustment have obviously steered women more towards self-sufficiency, and less towards waiting on men to provide life's bare necessities. The troubling question is: Is this social adjustment a direct result of inadequate, under-performing men? Or, has a generation of liberalism influenced Black women to jump across traditional role designations?

The answer isn't very clear. But what is evident in many Black relationships today, is the abandonment of well-defined roles. Whether it's cleaning the house, or paying the bills -- the line continues to disappear, leaving more and more couples grasping for their own identities.

The assignment of particular masculine and feminine roles may be too rigid for today's relationships. But what cannot continue, and what could ultimately become the disintegration of the Black family -- is the notion that women should independently play more roles while men play less and less.