An older black couple. © bst2012 - Fotolia.com

From MadameNoire.com: Newsweek once claimed that a single woman over 40 years old had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than she did of getting married. 20 years later they retracted this story.

Elated is the only word to accurately describe the emotion that came over me when my very vibrant and fabulous 50+ year old aunt announced to our family that she would be getting married for the first time in her life this fall. While some looked at her skeptically as if she had certainly lost her mind, I couldn’t keep from smiling. It was the outward reflection of my heart, which I was sure was doing back flips and leaping for joy inside of my chest. My grandmother gave birth to nine children, so I’ve been blessed with a host of loving, motherly and nurturing aunts. However, this aunt in particular devoted most of her life to being the backbone of our family and helping those in the community. Prison ministries, local shelter programs, implementing programs for New York’s elderly, and so on. She cared for my grandmother throughout much of the latter part of her life, practically moved in when my mom was diagnosed with colon cancer back in 2007, and has been nothing short of a second mother to my cousins, as well as my brother and I our entire lives. I’d always wondered how a person could devote so much of their life to others. This is why I was particularly over the moon when I learned of her engagement. She’d been single most of her life, but deep down inside, even when I was the chatty and opinionated little girl that she dressed up in poofy dresses, white lace stockings with frilly white socks and dragged to Sunday school each week, I always secretly wished she would find a love of her own.

Read the rest of this essay on MadameNoire.com.