When Joelle entered my office, she was in hysterics. She was screaming about getting lost on her way to my office, not being able to find a parking space nearby, and various other problems that I knew had nothing to do with her visit to me. As she calmed down, the real issues began to unfold. "I keep getting things wrong," she said to me. "I keep screwing up the most important stuff in my life."

Joelle had married just six months earlier, and on the day after the wedding, she and her new husband had had a horrible fight. "I was depressed for weeks after this fight, wondering what on earth I had gotten myself into with this marriage," she said. "It is so clear to me now that I had made a terrible mistake."

As Joelle looked back on the events leading up to the marriage, she said that several questions came to her: "Was I scared that with so few available black men I wouldn't get another chance at marriage?" "Was I too desperate to find a daddy for my son so that he wouldn't grow up fatherless like so many other black men?" But her biggest question was one she posed to me: "What's wrong with me? This is my second time around at marriage and I still don't know how to keep a man."

This last question, or some variation of it, came up constantly when I toured the country to promote my last book, Seven Attitude Adjustments for Finding a Loving Man. At a book signing in St. Louis, two women came up to me and one asked, "We're hooked up, but how do you keep them after you find them?" Fair question, I thought to myself.

It seems that, contrary to common perceptions, many black men and women are finding love. These are the men and women who have triumphed over commitment phobia and opened themselves to what they call meaningful relationships. The problem is that many have no idea how to keep love once they find it. Many of these folks end up in the same place -- in conflicted relationships, without knowing what to do to keep the love and commitment alive.

This kind of bewilderment about what it takes, other than love and sex, to make a relationship last is more common than one would imagine. In my practice, I have noticed a striking increase in the number of newly married as well as single men and women coming in for relationship counseling. These clients all want the same thing: a relationship with enough substance to last more than a few weeks or months. The questions I get most often -- "Can this relationship make it over the long haul?" or "Should I stay in this relationship and keep trying to make it work when it's so much trouble?" -- suggest how truly lacking many black men and women are when it comes to developing unions with the potential for permanency and fulfillment. My client increase is even more surprising given that African Americans are generally reluctant to seek professional help to solve intimate problems like romantic struggles. For so many to be willing to seek me out, both in my office and on my radio show that reaches listeners from New Jersey to Virginia, it is an indication to me that black men and women are desperate to get some answers about why they have so much difficulty connecting intimately with each other.

That black men and women in this country are at war with each other is without question. The battles have gone on for years, but few participants have been willing to discuss them. Only now, with the statistics on the breakdown of the black family too atrocious to ignore, are some experts willing to discuss a once-forbidden topic. Statistics show that 47 percent of black first marriages dissolve within ten years compared with 34 percent for Latinos, 32 percent for whites, and 20 percent for Asians. Also, more than 60 percent of black children are born to single mothers. In some age groups, the number of never-married black women is twice that among white women.

The Setup

While I have not conducted a national survey on how black men and women really feel about each other, I know anecdotally that through the decades each has learned to approach the other with extreme suspicion and mistrust. The setup starts early in life. Black women are taught by the female elders in their families and the community to expect little from black men -- that the male is often shifty and virtually worthless. Psychologist A. L. Reynolds suggests that "black women hate black men because they have been hurt, abused physically and sexually, abandoned, left pregnant, left to raise the babies alone, helpless and homeless, by men who refuse to accept responsibility for their marriages or relationships." On the other hand, young black males are taught that they should use every trick in the book to resist female domination and control.

Many young black men and women also grew up witnessing abusive, neglectful relations between the men and women in their respective families. This developmental process breeds mistrust and disdain, and builds a virtual defensive wall between black men and women once they reach adulthood. Without a way to challenge these negative messages and rewrite the internal scripts, relations between black men and women would be doomed along with the future of the black family.

The love game is particularly hard on black women. It's as though they have been victims of a cruel hoax. Like most women, they want to connect with a man, have a family, and build the traditional "picket fence" reality for themselves. Yet, as black women, they have been raised to be independent of men and distrustful of any intimate connections with the opposite sex. The truth is that black women must exist in a social scene virtually controlled by black men. Because black women outnumber them, black men know that they are in demand. As a result, they feel free to simply look for superficial connections with women that fulfill momentary needs. The man may need a date for a job function, or simply a booty call, but he doesn't want obligations, financial or emotional. In fact, among many black men there is what I call marriage resistance -- an notion that marriage is an outdated way of relating.

Many black men tell me they are so consumed with stress and survival struggles that merging lives with another would be just another hassle. And still others are convinced that black women don't need them -- that the women are so successful personally and professionally on their own that a man would be just another trophy. Few black men feel the push to marry because they can enjoy many benefits of marriage with the many women available to them without ever making any formal or legal commitment. This reality puts black women in an awful spot. And the fallout can be ugly.

Through years of working with both men and women, familiar patterns emerge. Sessions in my office can be quite explosive, producing remarks like these:

• "When I tell her what I'm really thinking, she withdraws to punish me. What's a brother to do?"

• "I'm tired of him always putting me down."

• "I don't feel like checking in with her all the time. She's not my mother."

• "He thinks he knows everything. I have a college education. I don't need him telling me what to do."


Reprinted with permission from 'Getting Good Loving: Seven Ways to Find Love and Make it Last' by Audrey B. Chapman (Agate, 2005). All rights reserved.