He makes less than I do. . . .

Keisha, an attractive single lawyer, seems to have everything a young woman could want. At 29, she earns a great salary, owns her own condominium, vacations twice a year, and has a close and loving relationship with a man she loves.

Though friends and co-workers admire Kiesha's lifestyle, she is frustrated and unhappy. Recently, her boyfriend, a sanitation worker, proposed, and although she wants to say yes, she fears her family and upwardly mobile friends will find her choice of a man unsuitable. "Tyrone is a constant reminder of where I came from," explains Kiesha. "My parents worked hard to send me to school so I could be something better. They expect me to marry well. Now, Tyrone wants to get married and I haven't even told them we're dating. I don't want to lose him, but I don't want to hurt my family either."

For the past nine months, Sharonda, 24, a business owner, has been having an affair with Derion, 27, a house painter. Like Keisha, Sharonda is attractive and successful -- and torn about her choice of a man. "Derion is everything I've always wanted in a man -- handsome, honest, caring -- so you'd think I'd be happy, right? Wrong. I know this sounds snobby but I'm afraid of telling my friends and family. What will I say when people ask me what he does? `Oh, he paints houses when the weather is good.' I mean he spends his time putting paint on a wall."

Everywhere you turn today, you see white-collar Black women like Keisha and Sharonda in love with blue-collar men. Far from uncommon, these relationships are burgeoning as the number of women attending college and employed in professional occupations in Newark continues to outdistance men. Kiesha and Sharonda are just two stories in the increasing number of educated, well-employed women stuck in the problem of the White Collar Woman with the Blue Collar Man.

Even though "it sounds so stuck-up," according to several women I spoke with, the problems such a relationship can spawn range from the superficial (her entire wardrobe is made up of designer clothes and jewelry; he doesn't own a suit) to the important (her friends, family and business associates see the relationship as "a step down," thus making it the source of private frustration and public embarrassment).

Howard University family therapist Audrey B. Chapman has counseled blue-collar/white-collar couples and explains how a difference in professional standing can affect the emotional equilibrium between a man and a woman. "Men really need to feel that a woman isn't going to trade them in for someone `better'," says Ms. Chapman. "When you start throwing around jobs and titles, you're sending the wrong message about what is important to you. If it's going to work, both people have to be very secure about who they are and what they mean to each other. I know one couple where the woman is a Ph.D. and her husband only finished high school, but they're very compatible because she doesn't shove under his nose who she is and how much money she makes. She relates to him as a person, not a job title, and he can feel the sincerity of that."

Talisha Williams, 43, an equal employment specialist for the state government who has been married to her husband, J. W., a Newark police officer, for 22 years, agrees with Chapman that it is the man, not his job, that counts. "The difference in our jobs was never a problem for us," she says, "because unlike a lot of men who can be intimidated by a woman's success, J. W. always encouraged me to be all I could be. He understood that the more money I made, the better lifestyle that meant for us both."

Women like these professionals are having successful relationships with blue-collar men because they believe, that while their job title may carry more status, their man is their equal. Problems can arise, however, when others fail to give their partners equal respect. How do they keep such attitudes from straining their relationship? According to them, the credit must go to her husband, "He is so secure with himself that he understands it's their problem, not his."

Experts agree, that whether or not such partnerships will work depends on the values the couple considers important. If a woman needs a lot of external status symbols to be happy, or if she measures her self-worth by the opinions of others, the relationship is doomed to fail. If shared values and human qualities are of primary importance, the relationship can prosper.

"If you had told me five years ago that I would marry a man who climbs ladders and fights fires, I would have told you that you were crazy," says Cherily, owner of an office personnel services who is married to firefighter. "I have a message for all those professional women who don't want to date blue-collar men: Ladies, you are missing the boat. Opportunity doesn't always come in neat packages that wear three-piece suits and carry a briefcase."
Or, as another white collar woman married to a blue collar guy says, "Never place too much emphasis on a person's job so that you forget what's important is what a person is, not what he does."

Mind you, I am not talking about the get-over artists that are just looking to live off of a woman, who conveniently "forgets" thier wallets on every date, who expects you to foot the bill if you are going to go out and do anything, and whom you drive around because their car was impounded (if they ever could afford to own one). That is another topic, The YAPpie, one of the Dirty Seven I will discuss in more detail later.