This piece is part of a 28-day series celebrating modern black love among millennials. It was created by Chuck Marcus and Michelle Nance, exclusively distributed by Blavity.
Her: Brittanie Boyd | 31 | VP Business Operations
Him: Ryan Boyd | 31 | Founder & CEO, Sports Consultant
Relationship Status: Married
“We ‘Dem Boyds” was the wedding theme for a love that was long in the making. Brittanie and Ryan were both interns at the Cowboys stadium in 2009 when they first met. The two exchanged contact info and began slowly as just friends. She jokingly calls it stalking, he begs to differ, but during their time at the stadium, he made it his business to escape the sales department to the operations floor, where Brittanie worked at the time, for a visit. That wasn’t quite enough facetime for Ryan, so the ultimate coincidence put him closer to Brittanie’s world. A distant cousin of his just so happened to be Brittanie’s roommate and through the rekindling of that relationship another one, a romantic one, began to grow.
Once Ryan landed a job in New York their relationship temporarily went long distance before he invited her to join him in the city. After eight years of love, three of them spent married, the two reside in Harlem with their baby girl, Carter Raye.
Q: What does Black love mean to the Black community?
Ryan: We didn’t see it growing up through media, you had to know someone. I knew that through my mother and my stepfather and my grandparents. Luckily I had a positive influence so I was able to attract that energy. Generally, we just didn’t see it enough in our everyday lives as young Black Americans. What we’re able to do now in showcasing how we feel about one another and how we affect our communities and families I think it’s the most powerful thing in the world.
Brittanie: Growing up I didn’t have a lot of examples of “good Black love”, but I think it’s super important because when I think about my mom’s side of the family there aren’t any examples that I would call out and say that is a good example of Black love. I think it’s important for the next generation to see Black people in a successful relationship, happily married and building families. I think a lot of the disparity between white families and Black families has to do with the family unit. When you don’t have successful black couples building families, buying homes, buying land, building businesses it just continues to perpetuate that disparity between black and white people.
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Q: How did you know that you were ready to commit to one person, particularly taking into consideration not having experienced or witnessed a strong relationship in your life?
Brittanie: From my mom’s experiences I knew exactly what I would not accept. From my dad’s experiences and who my dad was to me I knew what I wanted and needed and would accept and I saw a lot of those characteristics in Ryan. Also getting to know his family was a huge reason why I knew I was ready to commit. I knew how he was structured and his family unit and it all aligned.
Ryan: From the other perspective, because I did have the opportunity to see at a very close level what a successful Black marriage could look like, I saw power. I knew early on that it was just as much power and that we were just as large of a community as any other race. I knew the power of having a Black woman in your corner. My grandmother was my grandfather’s backbone. My stepfather stepped in and he didn’t treat me like a stepchild; I got to see what a man looked like at that point. For me personally, I saw that and that’s something that I’ve challenged myself to be everyday. And I saw characteristics in Brittanie that helped me reach that point. We’re all broken and we all need someone in our corner, so, she helped me see the things that I didn’t see. That’s when I realized that this is someone I want to be with for the rest of my life.
Q: What is the hardest part about being a millennial in a relationship in today’s climate?
Ryan: The reality is that three years in we’re still learning each other. The deeper that we get to know each other the more I don’t want to be in it [social media]. I don’t want to allow anything to interject, I have to protect this household, my wife, my daughter. I feel like we allow ourselves to allow negative things in through social media, social media is a powerful tool and it’s a matter of us protecting ourselves.
Brittanie: Our generation has so much going on. We have so many things pulling our time and attention away from our core. We are very driven in regards to careers. We also want to travel the world. We want to build relationships and build businesses and have our own platforms. There are so many directions that we’re being pulled in that you have to find the time to prioritize your relationship because it’s a lot of work. You have to give the time that’s required for it to cultivate. With everything that we have going on, sometimes you have to stop everything and focus on each other.
Ryan: I’m lucky enough to have a good group of guys around me, married and unmarried. One thing I would say about having a good relationship is to give it the time it deserves. You dictate what it means to you. If you think about people who are addicted to work they give work the time it deserves. I think that’s one thing we’ve both learned over the years being together because we’re both very career driven. But we understand what this relationship means to us and we have to look at it in the light and say are we giving it the time it deserves. If you do that you’re golden.
Brittanie: You have to be intentional.
Ryan: We have a lot of good people in our lives, I know good Black men my age between 28 and 40. And they will look at me and say, “hey you’re messing up.” I think that the perception is that we don’t have enough good men that are able to do that but we have to be able to discern who we’re letting into our lives because these people do exist. We have a lot of good Black people who can generally tell us where we are and where we need to go; they can show us the roadmap. I think that’s not what’s perpetuated in media.
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Q: How do you balance life with a new baby on board? Has she changed your dynamic?
Brittanie: I would say yes. We’re both super independent people, even when we got married we did a lot of combining finances but we’re both independent by nature. For the first time in our lives, we have truly needed each other. I can’t get this done without him and I don’t think he can get this done without me. So it’s like everything else we’ve accomplished together has been great but there’s never been that need. We literally depend on each other more now than ever. I think that we’ve become a stronger team because of Carter. We’ve learned how to work together and even more of the whole strengths versus weaknesses we’ve learned how to strengthen each other where we can.
Ryan: Brittanie is a beast at what she does and at 31 she’s a VP of a huge company. The fact that she can hold it together, be a mother and keep this household together is huge. I decided to leave my comfortable job at the NBA last December and she’s also taken on that, to be married to an entrepreneur. Me starting my own company has added a new level of stress. I have seen a new strength in her and I appreciate the fact that she’s decided to support me. I couldn’t get to where I am without that. Carter has brought a new level of love into it all. It exposed things that we didn’t know about ourselves that we weren’t ready to expose. My OG told me that a baby will expose everything, the good and the bad.
Brittanie: Balance is not a word you can use. Because when you think balance you think equal, equal time and that’s not possible. Anytime you’re succeeding and killing it in one place you’re neglecting another place and you have to get comfortable with that and find peace in yourself and know what you’re doing is impactful.
Ryan: The funny thing is in today’s society we feel like we’re going to do things when we have it all together and having a kid changed all of it, we have nothing together. But she’s good, she’s flourishing, she’s the best thing we’ve ever had. There’s a level of accepting yourself too, Brittanie comes to me and says “am I the perfect mother?” And I say she doesn’t have to be, she’s going to make mistakes. The level of transparency you have to have now is totally different.
Brittanie: It’s a new level of vulnerability. With everything we have gone through one of us has been the expert. With her, we’re literally learning and growing together everyday. It’s a whole new level of development.
Q: How do you continue to build a love that lasts?
Ryan: Empathy. For me, that’s the key word. One of the things that’s changed in me over the past eight years is being able to understand that she has my best interest and see where she’s coming from. Empathy is just different, for the first time I’m able to see through her eyes and see where she’s coming from. That’s probably been the biggest piece.
Brittanie: Intention. I think that keeping our love alive, everything has to be intentional. It’s a choice to love, it’s a choice to be happy, you choose your mood every morning, you choose how you perceive things. You want to always assume positive intent. You choose to forgive.
Q: If you could describe love in one word, what would it be and why?
Ryan: Life. I think it’s hard to be able to live a good life without love. I think that love is a learned behavior. What is crazy about what we’re going through in our time period is that love is portrayed a certain way and that in reality to be able to love someone is a very offline conversation. Accepting flaws, and allowing something to change you is not something we do naturally and definitely don’t do in public.
Brittanie: Intentional. I would say it’s a verb, it is an action and something you have to do and it’s work. People think of it as a noun and that love is a thing that you aspire to be in and in reality, it’s something you have to do and practice daily. It’s not going to be just like, here’s our love! This is how I show him love, and how he shows me love this way. How we choose to love; it’s very intentional and it’s an action. It’s not this thing you strive to achieve, it’s not a goal, it’s daily.
Ryan: When you give the action of love, life exists. The things that you nurture grow and I think love is in that.
