The Morning After Valentines Day

It’s Sunday. The day after Valentine’s Day 2026.

I’m standing in front of my mirror, oiling my scalp slowly because it feels good. Old R&B is playing — love songs from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. The kind of music that reminds you that Black people have always known how to sing about love. How to long for it. How to fight for it. How to survive through it.

Yesterday was roses and reservations. Promotions and pressure. Soft launches and hard expectations. The annual performance of romance in a country that has mastered the art of commercializing love.

And this morning, I was sitting with the aftermath.

Because Valentine’s Day — as we celebrate it — didn’t start with us. Its popular form grew out of European Christian traditions and expanded through Western capitalism until love became a product category. Cards. Candy. Lingerie. Limited-time offers.

And yet, Black people — whether brought here through slavery or arriving through migration — have shaped the emotional, cultural, and economic fabric of this country in ways that rarely get named. We built industries from basements. We created innovation in underground markets. We contributed to sectors that were stigmatized, criminalized, and unregulated.

Including sexual health.

So as I was greasing my scalp and letting the music move through me, I truly wrestled with how to begin this conversation.

Pleasure without protection is incomplete.
Celebration without education is hollow.
Love — REAL LOVE — requires responsibility.

We are living in a time when immigration is politicized, weaponized, and misunderstood. Yet the very foundation of American industry — even in spaces people don’t talk about openly — has been shaped by immigrants and descendants of enslaved people who refused to be erased.

Boundaries & Betrayal: Understanding Consent and Predation

I love to talk about pleasure — desire, sensuality, freedom, connection. But pleasure cannot exist without safety.

Our ability to trust, to relax into intimacy, to feel our bodies as our own — all of that depends on a foundation that too many of us never received: protection.

For Black communities especially, silence has been a survival strategy. We keep family business inside the family. We protect the people we love from systems that were never built to protect us. We bury the truth so deep that sometimes we even forget it happened.

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But silence has a cost. It protects the wrong people. It leaves harm unchecked. And it teaches generations that betrayal is something you must learn to endure.

We don’t talk enough about the adults who deliberately cross boundaries — the ones who exploit youth, trust, and vulnerability. We tiptoe around the uncle who “gets too friendly,” the coach who lingers too long, the older boyfriend who preys on insecurity. We defend them as “family” or “just being supportive.” Meanwhile, children and the young are left to protect themselves.