How Boomer Boys Dated

Dating didn’t used to start with a swipe. John sits on his patio in South Florida and rewinds to the 1970s, when Baby Boomer boys learned courtship through awkward hallway moments, back-channel notes, and long phone calls that ran late into the night. The goal wasn’t just a good time, it often felt like a slow audition for marriage, meeting the parents, and building a life before you even knew who you were. 

We talk through the unspoken rules of pre-digital dating: how a strict Catholic upbringing left attraction and sex mostly undiscussed, why middle school “girlfriend/boyfriend” could be more label than relationship, and how high school turned into a crash course in jealousy, showing off, and going exclusive. John shares blunt personal stories that capture the era’s intensity, including heartbreak, reputations that spread fast in tight communities, and how “doing the right thing” could mean planning a wedding the moment a pregnancy scare hit. 

Then the timeline jumps forward and the rulebook breaks. Later-life dating brings new dynamics, new expectations, and a Millennial partner who refuses to be managed. John reflects on what it taught him about respect, control, and how men treated women in his generation. The story lands somewhere deeper than nostalgia when marriage collides with a stage four cancer diagnosis and love becomes daily caregiving. 

If you’ve ever wondered what dating across generations reveals about commitment, gender roles, and what we owe each other, listen through and share your take. Subscribe, leave a review, and send this to someone who’d argue with you about whether modern dating is better or worse.

Transcript

Patio Thoughts On 70s Dating

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey, it's me, John, Baby Boomers, the Strangest Generation. Back out on my patio. Beautiful night in South Florida. It's been like 94, 95 every day, but tonight there's a nice breeze, a little ocean breeze, no rain, no bugs. Got a bud light going. Eh, you know, once in a while. Bud light. And I'm sitting here and I'm thinking about how did we baby boomer boys date in the 70s? How did we go about meeting girls? Dating girls, courting girls. And how different is it today? And I come to it with the perspective that I have no idea what it's like today for these XYZs, how they date or if they date. I know swipe left, swipe right. I think it's a lot more about hooking up. But with us, it was a lot more about when you're 1920 and 1978, 79, you were looking for a wife. Yeah, you're having fun, and you were meeting girls, but you were kind of pre-interviewing them as they were you, because you were looking to settle down in most cases. I can't speak for everybody, I can't speak for every ethnicity, every race, every part of the country. But I can speak to the issue that courtship in the 70s was really, really different. And the main goal when you weren't just out to have fun and you know have sex, which didn't happen that often, at least for me. The main goal was you were kind of looking for somebody to have babies and buy a house with and I think that is really, really different nowadays, especially with the social media.

First Crush And Catholic Silence

SPEAKER_01 2:47

So it starts in adolescence. I remember the first time, honestly I remember this, is I was maybe in second or third grade in a Catholic school, and we lined up to go to the water fountain or whatever, and there was girls and boys on one line, girls, the other line, boys, and I remember this little girl walked by, and I looked at her from behind, and as a six-year-old kid, I said to myself, That looks cool. I didn't know what that meant to me. I didn't know that this was the burgeoning bud of my sexuality. I just knew it looked kind of cool. Like a hot wheel car Mustang could have looked cool, but just the way she walked looked cool. No, I thought that as a sick year old kid. I as a grown man, I'm not thinking like that, you know, about little girls, just so you know, you know, I'm not getting me too or anything. As a little boy, at one point I saw a little girl and I was interested. But I don't know if this is true for everybody uh my age, all you guys my age, but I grew up in a really religious household where stuff like that wasn't talked about at all. Attraction between genders and sex, God help us. You know, I had to learn about sex from kids on the street, nobody had the birds and the bees talk with me or anything like that. We just pretended that sex didn't exist. We were Catholic, as you might guess, you know. So then it progresses.

Notes Friends And Middle School Girlfriends

SPEAKER_01 4:53

Say you're a kid in second third, now you get to junior high middle school, whatever they call it now, and uh now you're getting interested in women. Females, girls, I should be you know accurate. Girls. And they're interested in boys. So the way it worked back then was at least in my world, you didn't directly approach the girl. A lot of girls that you talked to at that age were kind of like your guy friends. You made friends with them. You talked to them, maybe you were kind of like your bodies and stuff, and then you know, school ends, and these little girls come back, and they're half-formed females with figures and bumps growing and shapes and things like that. So you come back to school, and now you're looking even closer. I remember I had this one friend of my girlfriend that uh in a romantic way. I was maybe uh 12, 13, and she was a good friend of mine that we talked all the time. She was real quiet, and uh she came back to school after a summer and just sprouted, just became like a half a woman. And when I saw her, I was like, holy cow. And that little girl never talked to me again. She became she went up to a different level, right? I mean, I saw her at a friggin' uh 7-Eleven in a neighborhood, and the girl refused to even look at me. Even though I had known her for three school years and talked to her, she sat in front of me and but she knew boys, older boys, they're taking interest. You, you're just a friend. Me, I'm uh kind of hot little thing that's only gonna get hotter, and I remember being confused by it that she wouldn't talk to me. I knew I liked looking at her. I didn't change, and I didn't know why she wouldn't talk to me anymore, but it was kind of b because she was getting interest thrown at her from other grown-up or more grown boys, hopefully not men, but boys. And so, you know, she just kind of drifted away. But the way in adolescents in middle school middle school, the way it's it really started is if you saw a girl and you were attracted to her, you would send a message. Like it wouldn't be like direct. You wouldn't just walk up to the girl and say, hey man, that's you know, I like you. Nothing like that. It'd have to go through a friend of a friend to a note, to a this, to a that, to that. And then when you finally met up with the girl, it'd be in the freaking hallway in school, right? And it wasn't like anything was gonna happen, and you'd say, Well, okay, I guess, you know, you're my girlfriend, and she'd say, Yeah, you're my boyfriend, but that's about as far as it's going. We're not gonna do anything or get together. I I'm not going to your house or meeting your parents. I just know that I like girls and you like boys, and I think you're cute, and apparently you think I'm cute, and when we walk by the each other in the hallway, we'll say hello, and we never officially broke up. Honestly, God, if breaking up was a real official thing back in middle school, technically I have like seven girlfriends still. Cause I never broke up with any of them, because I never did anything with them. You know. So you're hanging with your friends. There's girls in the neighborhood, girls around, you're kind of getting interested, attracted, so you start to bug them, you start to annoy them. You don't know how to express this attraction that you have, so you irritate them. For some reason, I don't know why that was, but you irritated them. You'd go by their house, you would pick on their I remember the one girl I liked, I would pick on her brother to get to her. And she had to come to me and say, hey man, laugh my brother. Why are you picking on him? And I really didn't understand why I was picking on him, but I know now as a grown man, I was picking on her brother to get to her. And I wound up getting to her. Just kissing and stuff like that. So now we start moving into the phase where girls are boys and boys are starting to get together in groups. And we're all thinking the same thing. You know, I want to kiss this girl. I want to touch this girl. And I don't know what girls were thinking, but I imagine they were s thinking pretty much the same thing, but I don't know if their hormones were quite as loud as mine were. But I wanted to get in situations where I could have some personal, intimate space with a little 13-year-old girl that this little 13-year-old boy liked. It's natural. It's alright. I'm not a pedophile. I'm just telling you the way it was. And I hope it's still like that. I don't know. The world has changed so damn much, man. Anyway. So now you get to a point where you're in high school.

High School Moves And Going Exclusive

SPEAKER_01 12:06

Now it's out in the open. Girls like boys, boys like girls. I don't care how pent up you are with Catholicism and uh inability to talk about sex or gender or anything. You're just raging. You want a girl and you're gonna get one. Oh, I feel so friggin' restricted. Because when I say you're gonna get one, in this day and age it makes me sound like I'm a stalker or a pervert or something. No, what I'm saying is that I was a young boy, as ninety percent of you guys that are listening to me were young boys that were interested in girls and wanted to get with one. And so you gotta start showing out, you gotta start doing stuff, you gotta come up with a routine, a uh a hook. You gotta figure out how to get one, how to reel one in, how to get close. And you flap around like a fish that just got caught from the ocean, got thrown in a boat out of the water. You flap around, you make stupid jokes, you do stupid shit, you ride your bike into friggin' walls to get attention. You try to show off, you try to learn how to dance, you do anything just to get a little attention. But things are moving along, things are going nice. I'm getting a little attention. I'm getting attention once in a while when I don't even ask for it. Sometimes girls would come to me. That's the 70s, so you know it's a sexual revolution or whatever, and girls are speaking their mind. Hey man, you want to dance? Hey man, you want to skate around a roller rink with me? So, inevitably, you match up, you pair up, you find one. You're in high school now, you're sixteen, seventeen. And you find a girl. Somehow, through back alley notes and espionage and trying to get your friends to talk to her, somehow you wind up with a girl. She likes you. You're a teenager, you're mobile, you got a little money in your pocket. Now you can actually go somewhere with this girl. You can do something with this girl. And here's where I think things change for boomers is compared to this current generation of young would-be hopeful daters of the opposite sex. Or in this day of the same sex. I don't care, you know. So, you find a girl, you decide that you and her are gonna be a couple. That's where it's weird, that's where it changes. Because I look at the young kids that I know that are family members, so, and that thing never really happens that I know of. I'm gonna admit, I I I am ignorant as to the ways, customs, culture of X, Y, Z generations. But I can just look at, you know, my kids and my friends' kids, and my kids would, and they're and my I had daughters, and they would go, they had a bunch of girlfriends, and they ran with a bunch of boys, they played sports. In every social event, the girls would go with a different guy, and the guy would be a guy that had gone to the previous event with her best friend, and they would switch dresses and things like that between the girls. Well, that didn't happen with us, man. When you locked into a chick, you were in. Like, you're my girl. I'm your girl, I'm your man, I'm your man, I'm your boyfriend, you're my girlfriend, and we aren't we're exclusive. That's it. The millennials, the uh 80s generation was much more loose about this. There was much less commitment, much more free and easy swinging around. But man, we were too jealous, too guarded. We didn't want anybody near our woman. So you dated the girl. You went to her house, you met her parents, you talked on the phone all night, you took her to a movie, you hung out on the streets with her. And way, way back in the deepest part of your brain, you're sizing her up. And wondering if she's the one. And she's doing the same thing to you. Even though you're 1617, she's doing the same thing. Little do we know that there's gonna be five, ten breakups before we even get to the point of you know, finding the one. But we're looking for the one. Nowadays, twister, twinder, tip, tinder, uh, swipe left, swipe right, grinder, uh, I don't know, all those things you know about, you've heard about them, maybe you've used them, I don't know. You're not really looking for a commitment, I I don't think. Maybe people are, I don't know. But I know that I met a lot of women, uh girls uh in my um teens. Well, that's not true. I had let me do that, one, two.

Jealousy Heartbreak And Hard Lessons

SPEAKER_01 19:30

I had three three real girlfriends before I got married. Three. And the third one I married, so I really wasn't uh that experienced in it. And so I didn't do a lot of hooking up, I didn't do a lot of one-nighters. I mean, it was kind of like against my religion to do that kind of stuff, and I I was kind of serious about it. But I had hormones, man. I had genes, I was a boy. So I got so the first girlfriend I get, I don't I forget where I met her, she was pretty. She was uh a girl that I met maybe at 14, 15, and ran the streets with her and my buddies and her buddies for a couple of years. And then I found out a couple of my buddies had sex with her. And I freaked out. I like freaked out. Of course, I broke up with her and blah blah blah, and uh, you know, thought it was the end of the world. My heart was broken, I cried, I disowned the kids that you know were with her, and ironically, in my early twenties, I ran into her somewhere. And I had a car, so I you know, it had to be in my early 20s. I forget where I ran into her, and she was still pretty, and we had sex, and the son of a bitch gave me the crabs, man. I got the crabs from this girl, so she was a kind of skanky chick, you know, she was having sex with a lot of people, apparently. So anyway, move on, then I meet this next chick, right? And this is you know, I'm talking about my personal story, but really uh I'm hope that I'm talking kind of generally, and that I'm describing a society where everybody was kind of doing what I was doing. Doing meeting a girl, staying with her for a long time, thinking about her as you know the possible one. But the kids you stayed with them for a few years until inevitably it just collapsed. So now I meet oh, this is a funny one. So I know where that girl went. After I got the crabs, my dad laughed his ass off. So now I meet a girl. I have no idea where how I met this beautiful blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl. Way out of my leg. Way out. Not even close, man. She was hot. She had a little reputation. I don't know how I got in with her. How I wound up with her. Here's what I remember. We dated five years. And we were serious. Now I'm pushing into the 1920. 20. I'm in college, I'm working. But this girl was like uh head cheerleader at a private school. She lived out in the uh really rich area, suburbs. Oh, now it's it's starting to occur to me why she stayed. And I didn't. I lived in a different area. I was the bad boy. Yeah, I was the bad boy. Oh, she liked me because I was the bad boy. This is true because her parents hated me. They couldn't stand me. And I was an alright kid, man. I was at this point, I'm working. Like I'm working, I got a job, and I'm going to college, and I'm pulling good grades, and and there were no friggin' anybody to you know bow down to. I mean, they had money, but they weren't better than us. They thought they were, but I know her brothers hated me. The father hated me. This chick comes to me one time and she says, Look at I'm late on my period. Now, this is how it was in the 70s. Alright? She says, I'm late on my period. I'm like, okay. I'm working at the plant, steel plant, and I'm going to college, and I'm doing well. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go to your house, and I'm gonna tell your mother and father that we're getting married. And then I'm gonna go and quit school and just settle in at the plant, and we're gonna raise a family. And she's like, Well, we must have been breaking up, and she was using this as leverage, because she goes, Well, let me take another test. She had taken one test, apparently, and I didn't didn't see it. So she gets the next test, and I'm telling you, as sure as I'm sitting here, I was ready to walk into that friggin' wasp house in the middle of the friggin' rich suburbs and tell those two people that tested my existence that I was gonna quit school and marry their daughter because I got her pregnant. I was ready. I was doing the right thing. Buddy, I'm telling you right now, this is what it was. This is what you did. There was no question. You weren't, we were cats, there's not an abortion, nothing like that. No, you marry this girl, right? That's what you do. And I was ready. God, thank you, Lord, that she was lying. We got the next test and it come back negative. And uh I said, you know what, man? We're done. We're done. That's it. We fight too much. Yeah, you're hot. You're hotter than me. Big time. I'm lucky to have you. We had some fun, but we're done. And after I told her that, listen, no, let me go back. This is funny. When I the first night I met her, I drove out to her friggin' house, way out into the far-reaching ivy-covered, manicured lawn suburbs, got her, met her parents like we had to do, and I drive her back into my neighborhood, right? Because I don't know nothing. I'm going to my place. We'll go shoot some pool. We'll have a drink. Yeah. So I'm driving down the street with this girl. This is our first date. I'm driving down the street with her. I get her back into my neighborhood. And I I'm going down the street and I see this really, really intoxicated older person walking down the street, barely able to walk, drunk out of their mind, and she had really never seen anything, I guess, like that. And I drive by and I look, and god darn it, I knew this person. I knew this person to be an older member of my family. And I told the girl, I said, look, it that's my family. Like, you know, I'm I'm dating the head, I'm I'm dating the head cheerleader. I'm dating uh Olivia Newton John. And I gotta run into a drunk uncle staggering into a bar. And I gotta say, honey, sit in the back of the sit in the car, I'm going in there and I'm getting him. I'm putting him in the car and I'm driving him home. I even called my mother. I said, Look at, I got your brother here. Right? I'm dating friggin' uh uh Olivia Newton John, and I got your brother, and my mom says, I don't care who you're dating. You get him out of that bar and you get him back to his apartment. So I told the girl, I said, look at I'll take you home, but I'm getting my family where they need to be. Oh man, the bad boy friggin' dynamite must have lit up because she stayed with me. She stayed with me. I took my my uncle home and um here comes the train. Like I say, I'm sitting at my patio. So there goes the train. Big deal. So um she stays with me, she's kinda excited. I'm the bad boy, I guess. And we go a few more years and then she does the fake pregnancy thing, and uh so that's a second girlfriend. Not 20. 21, right? Two girls. I can't speak for all you all you baby boomers. You might have tons of girls, but I think in general, everybody I knew had one, two, three, Mary. One, two, three, merry. That was it. You know? And so I made the third.

Marriage Mindset And Culture Clashes

SPEAKER_01 30:16

And she was older than me. And she had a daughter. Wonderful, beautiful daughter. And it's my third, right, man? It's my third. I gotta do something. She's steady, she's older, she understands that I can't be out partying all the time. She understands I'm working hard at school, I'm at work. I would come to her apartment and she would have like the typewriter ready so I could write my report for the next day. And she was Italian, she would cook all this food for me. You know, she was reeling me in. And uh I got reeled in. And I I don't say that in any derogatory way. I I took the bait and I was very happy. And I married her. And I was in now I'm in graduate school, and I married this beautiful, wonderful woman who I'm still friends with, even though we're not together anymore. And uh I remember going to uh the university and telling my uh I guess my counselor or my advisor, whatever, I'm gonna take a uh I'm gonna take a little break from school. I met a girl, I'm gonna get married, I'm gonna make some money, get a job, make some money. And uh and get married. And the guy looked at me and he said, Look at you're not coming back. I said, Yeah, I'm coming back. I just gotta get some money so I can marry this girl. Take care of her and her kid. And he said, Alright. We'll never see you again. I said, No, you will. I'm coming back. So let me back up, because I skipped a couple of things that are important when it comes to baby boomer dating in the 70s, is that there was some uh differences that we had to overcome. So she is Sicilian, Italian, West Side. I'm tied in the wool, Irish Catholic Southside. Never been to the West side. She never been to the South Side. So back then this could be a little bit of a speed bump. It wasn't gonna be a big problem, like I'm not marrying a uh, you know, friggin' uh I I can't even come up with an example now because now I'm married to a black woman, so it's you know what example can I come up with that would but I bring home this older Italian woman. I I first introduced her to my family at my grandmother's wake. So everybody's kind, everybody's fine, you know, we're decent people. So after the wake, that's how it used to be with us. After the wake, you would go to the nearest house of and you would get beer and get whiskey and get drunk. Now this woman had never seen anything like this. She was appalled. There was no food. She was like, Where's the food? I'm like, well, you know, we can go to 7-Eleven and get you some chips or something, but you know, we're here to drink. My uncles are blasted, just hitting on her blatantly. Like, I gotta like get in between them. And everybody's drunk. I drive drive, I gotta drive her back to the west side. I friggin' hit a car. I'm not proud of this. I hit a car, I was it was 40 years ago, and uh did leave my number on the car, it was parked on the side of a street, and uh get her home, and I'm like, alright, you know, what do you think? That's who I am, that's who we are. And she's like, cool. She actually got drunk. She actually went when we ran out of liquor, she actually went down with my cousin and got more. So she was alright. So I'm like, cool, okay. Now I gotta meet her family, right? So I meet her family. I don't know, they were mobbed up. Oh, they were they were a pain in my ass. They were kinda had they thought they were mobbed up, but they really were just criminals. So I meet their f her family. So I go to, let's say, Christmas Eve or something. I'm not we're not married yet. I'm you know kind of backtracking. So I go to her house, to her her mother's house, and I walk in and there's food everywhere. And I'm like, oh man, this is freaking great. There's food everywhere. And I says, yeah, uh, give me a beer. I'll take a beer. Where's the beer? And they're like, we don't have beer. Now they're kind of sensitive to the fact that I'm not from their neighborhood. I'm not from their ethnic reality from their group. Mildly, I mean, we're all Catholic, right? We all live in the same city. It's not like the Crips and the Bloods or the friggin' West Side story or anything. It's just these subtle little ethnic differences. So now they're like, okay, uh the guy uh that uh Debbie brought he wants beer. And I'm like, no, I I don't have to have a beer, I don't need a beer. I just don't understand why I would come to a home and there would be no beer. It doesn't make sense to me. Like it didn't make sense to her that she would come to a friggin' home and there wouldn't be any food. So they go get me some beer. They get me a friggin' case of beer. Like I'm gonna drink a case of beer. Right? I have a couple of beers. I didn't demand it. I could have gone, I just I was just confused. It's difference in cultures. I went back to that house a year later for Christmas Eve, and the same case of beer was still sitting there. Minus the three beers I drank in the year prior. Oh, geez, I lost my train of thought. So yeah, so it's about dating. Baby boomer dating. So now I'm on my third girl, right? Now I gotta buck up, I gotta get married. So what do I do? I break up with her. I break up with her. I break up with her. I said, this ain't gonna work, it can't work, it's not gonna work. You're too old, you got a kid, you don't drink beer. You know. And uh she's like, okay. And she was a good looking woman. And uh so I gave it three, four days. Coincidentally, on St. Patrick's Day, which she had no idea even existed, I should have been out, but I was in mourning because I broke up with this woman, and I called her on Saint Patrick's Day. She has no idea how significant that was that I did that on that day. And I called her and I said, Look at man, it's three days. I can't live without you. I gotta marry you. We gotta get married. And she's like, Oh, you know how chicks are. She's like, Oh, who's this? It's me. It's John. Oh, John, oh yeah, where have you been? I haven't heard. I said, we broke up three, you know, three days ago. I called you and told you I was breaking up. Now I'm trying to get back, and she's just, you know how women are. They're gonna test you. I arranged to have a uh meeting with her at a restaurant where she came in looking like friggin'. Who's like a Raquel Welsh? It's an old one. She didn't look like that, but you know what I mean. Right? So I uh I said, look at honey, I can't live without you. I gotta get married. I gotta marry you. You know, I live with you half the time anyway. I know your kid, she hates me. I know your friggin' cousins, these half-mobbed up guys, bust my balls every time I come around, you know, try to scare me, try to say, what's your intention with my cousin and shit like this? You know, I'd be like, what's my intention? She's ten years older than me. I'm gonna be a friggin' doctor. What's your intention at talking to me like this? Yeah. So anyway, married her. We stayed married for many, many years, and um we had uh children, and she's the mother of my children and wonderful, wonderful lady. And uh we parted as friends. Oh, here comes the train again. Right then we get the force we separated. I just I went I just left again and house. And I left her the house and we left it, and she left the like this. And uh I don't know if I'm gonna put this really button like so um again. Let me 48. Yeah. 45. That's the back of the figures. The Hallis Catch. Well that I went to Siglio. 45 eh. How to see how.

Later Life Dating Love And Caregiving

SPEAKER_01 42:56

And a bunch of them came for me. And I didn't get it at first because I had grown up in a world where the man was the instigator of the courtship, and the man was the one that pursued that haunted. And, you know, these younger women are coming at me, and I'm like, eh, don't dig this. This isn't the way to go. I'm supposed to meet your parents, we're supposed to have a few fights, then we have sex, then we figure out, you know, we're gonna, you know, uh this isn't this is moving too fast, you know. I don't even know you. I succumbed a couple of times. But nothing serious. Now I'm dating like I guess kids today are. Now I'm just like, yeah, here's the deal. I'll see you Wednesday, and every other day is off the you're not allowed to call me, you're not allowed to know where I live, you know, that kind of stuff. I become this kind of monster. And boy, did it piss some of these women off. And I don't know what they wanted. I think they I mean, I how attractive can I be at 48 to a 29-year-old? Yeah? I mean, I knew what they were after, and then they knew what I was after. Let's be honest, it's a game. Anyway, so I guess I'm going through the uh whole evolution of dating from my own point of view, from my own perspective, that probably has nothing to do with all the sociologic studies of courtship in the uh 19th century. And you know, I I don't really research this stuff, I just talk. So uh I fell in with this girl, this girl 20 years younger than me. And this girl would not let me go. I remember first rule was this. I told her, you're not gonna call me all the time. We'll go on trips, I'll buy you shit, we'll have sex. But I don't really want a for life mate. I had that, I'm done, right? And this girl would not let me go. She didn't give a shit what I said. So this is a different generation. I think she's a millennial. So now you got a millennial with a boomer, right? And a millennial chick is like, the fucking boss? Who the fuck are you? You know, Julius Caesar, you know, Don Juan, you're telling me when I can call you, when I can see you, when I can do this, what we're gonna do, what we're gonna. And I'm like, yeah, exactly. You know, that's I'm a baby boomer. That's how we do it. And uh, boy, she took my shit, she stood up to me, she said, this is how it's gonna be. And uh I had never met a woman like that. You know, I was a boss, I was a big shot, I was alpha. I'm not bragging. If anything, I'm asking for forgiveness. But that's how a baby boomer treated women. We were at, we were the top. You didn't dare challenge us until I met one that did. And God, I went head over heels with her sassiness, and I learned a lot about myself, and I learned a lot about how I treat treated women, and a lot about the prick that I was to my previous three girlfriends and one wife. Because this chick wasn't having it. I married her, still married to this day, and uh happily married, about 20 years younger than me. And uh some people say I married a trophy wife because she's gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous, and some people say she married for money. But let me tell you what happened. I married her. We got married, and a year after we were married, she was diagnosed with stage four cancer. And everybody looked at me, like, what you gonna do, boy? Her family's like, is it about the TNA? What's it about? And here's what I found out. Yeah, it was kind of about the TNA. It was, but I found out that I love this girl. I love her. And as I sit here tonight talking to you guys, I hope you hung up for the whole thing. As I sit here tonight, I tell you, I take care of this woman every day. And she was gorgeous, and they get you with the looks, they get you with the personality. But I didn't know that I loved her as much as I do, and it's had something to do with this friction between black and white, old and young, but more than anything, the friction that existed between a baby boomer grown man meeting a millennial woman who challenged the belief system and the code of conduct that I was brought up in when it comes to how men treat women. And so she's upstairs, and I'm gonna go see her and rub her feet, put her to bed, and uh thank you for all your support. You guys have been great. This thing has been going crazy lately. Have a great night, everybody.