The first time I heard my friend say, “…Like Shorty always says (that is her mothers nickname), You don’t have to follow a bad idea all the way through”, I knew it was a classic. No truer words have been spoken and I don’t know why more people don’t realize that there is always another option. Just because a situation is playing out a certain way doesn’t mean you have to see it through until its disastrous end and there has been no better example of this than the recent domestic violence arrest of Chad formerly “Ochocinco” Johnson and his wife, BasketBall Wives “star”, Evelyn Lozada.
The union of these two people ended before it began and if you ever watched any of the show, Basketball Wives, then you know that this relationship was a classic example of “You don’t have to follow a bad idea all the way through,” so when I read this morning that he had been arrested for head-butting Evelyn, I was not at all shocked. Not to say that I thought he would abuse her but I knew that there would be some public incident that would lead to this kind of drama.
When you look back on all of the signs that pointed to the only ending possible, you can count the amount of “bad ideas” that were visible to everyone, including them, that were blatantly ignored. There was the “bad idea” to appear on national television in lingerie and intimate that you had sex on the first date, it was a bad idea to get engaged to someone you didn’t know and then lambast your friend because she didn’t agree with the situation you put yourself in, it was a bad idea to have a threesome and then make it public knowledge and it was a bad idea to believe that after having set no real boundaries in your relationship, you believed that he would honor you as his wife when you played the role of his ho, for lack of a better word.
A woman, cannot get upset with a man for actions that were previously overlooked and therefore deemed acceptable and then expect him to change just because he married you, it doesn’t work that way. Whatever you accepted before you became man and wife will continue and there is no one to blame but yourself. Evelyn didn’t deserve to get hurt, although some might argue that there is a direct correlation between her actions on Basketball Wives and the situation she finds herself in now, however, she set herself up and convinced herself that what she (and we) saw while they were dating wasn’t going to cross-over into her marriage.
It has always bothered me when women play themselves and allow themselves to be treated any other way than with respect. I have been guilty of allowing a man to get away with a certain amount of disrespect but it didn’t take me long to realize that I wasn’t going to live like that non-sense was normal for the rest of my life and if for no one else, I had an obligation to make sure that for the sake of my daughter, I didn’t allow her to become accustomed to being mistreated by anyone be they man or woman.
Finding receipts for condoms, which is what has been reported, would upset any woman but at some point, knowing the kind of man he told you he was on national t.v., can you really be shocked and upset when this is how the relationship was set up from the start? When you made a conscious decision to ignore every sign that told you to run the other direction, the only person you can honestly blame is yourself. If you had taken the time to sit back and assess whether or not it would be a bad idea to get involved with someone who is a self-described narcissist, then maybe you wouldn’t have made the decision to follow the idea all the way through.
