The Love Playbook: Rules for Love, Sex, and Happiness

by La La Anthony

  People keep asking me when I’m going to have another kid, and I always say that we’re happy with the dynamic of our family. The truth is, I had the worst pregnancy of all time and I’m just not interested in going through what I went through ever again.

  I had a condition called hyperemesis gravidarum. I had never heard of it before they diagnosed me with it. Apparently, less than one percent of women ever get it. It is perpetual morning sickness. Actually, it’s morning-noon-and-night sickness. It’s throwing up and being nauseous practically 24/7 for your entire pregnancy.

  You really get to test your relationship when you’re going through something like that. You really get to see how much he loves you. Most guys don’t handle sickness well—not their own or anyone else’s. But Melo was really cool about it. I know he felt bad. But he tried to keep my spirits up and make me as comfortable as possible—even when it got unbearable.

  It got so bad that I had to have an IV line in my house during my eighth and ninth months. I would carry a barf bag everywhere with me just in case. I couldn’t hold anything down—not even water. The doctors told me if I could hold down the food for even three minutes that would be good because at least some nutrients from the food could be absorbed into my body. But that wasn’t happening, hence the IV.

  To say I was miserable is an understatement. My misery was compounded by being in Denver—actually, not even Denver, but a secluded suburb in the boondocks near Denver. I was in this huge house alone most of the time because I was pregnant during the biggest stretch of the NBA season and Melo was either on the road or practicing.

  I was seven months pregnant and still trying to work every day on TRL. But because of the sickness, I finally had to stop working. I went from New York to Denver, which is totally not like New York. Great people, just not a lot to do.

  I was sick all the time, away from the hustle of the city, and I just felt as if I was missing out on so much. That year All-Star Weekend was in Las Vegas. And I couldn’t travel. I was miserable. It was the first time All-Star Weekend had been in Vegas, and everybody was there, calling and checking in on me, but I couldn’t be there. I had just jumped into this basketball world and it was still very fresh and exciting. I felt like everybody was having fun and I was stuck.

  I was a wreck. I was crying my eyes out every day. I hardly gained weight during the pregnancy. It just all felt very wrong. I used to fantasize about getting pregnant and having a baby and how beautiful it would all be. I had heard some amazing stories from friends about their experiences. Mine was so strange, and I had no one to talk with who could understand what I was going through.

  I went on the Internet looking for other women going through the same thing, and I found these chat rooms and message boards for women suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum. I finally felt like I wasn’t totally alone. It felt good to connect with other women who knew what I was talking about. No one had any solutions, but it just felt good to know that I wasn’t alone.

  My mom always laughs when we talk about my “condition.”

  “What are the chances?” she said. “We can’t get those kinds of odds for the Lotto, but we can get something like this?”

  We decided to induce labor to make sure Melo would be there for the birth. I didn’t want him to be somewhere across the country. We picked March 7, because the Nuggets had a couple of days off, followed by a couple of home games. That day couldn’t come quick enough for me.

  The night before, we checked in and started the inducing process. By the next morning, the doctor said that my contractions had started and I was relieved. It was finally happening.

  Melo said he was going to get something to eat. He had been there the entire night and through the day. He was gone for so long, I began to wonder exactly where he went to eat, the next state? Then the doctor came in and said, “It looks like we’re ready to go.”

  What? After planning this out for months to make sure Melo would be here, he might actually miss the birth!

  I called him and found out that he’d gone back home.

  “Babe, they said it would take a while and I wanted to take a shower,” he told me.

  I was fuming. But the doctor was able to hold up the process until he got back. He was there all those hours, and the one time he stepped out, look what happened.

  Kiyan was only five pounds and nine ounces. I had pre-term labor. They had to give me steroid shots for his lungs. But he was here. Having a child made this relationship real. We were a family, and now we had to be officially a family on paper.

  Melo and I had discussed having children before we had Kiyan and we’d talked about how we wanted to raise those children. Melo was raised by a single mom and my parents were divorced, so we decided that if and when we had kids we wanted to be married and be that family foundation for our kids. After I had Kiyan, getting married became more of a priority for Melo.

  Some people say that marriage today is played out, that it’s overrated. If that’s the case, then why are so many people fighting so hard to do it?

  I had even convinced myself that it wasn’t a big deal. But I can honestly say that after having my baby, things changed for me. Marriage became a big deal. I knew I couldn’t stay the “perpetual fiancée.”

  So how do you move from shacking up to marriage? Sometimes you don’t. So should you live together first? There are some pros to living with him first. Living with him, you get to see his habits, and you can decide whether he is actually someone you want to be with every day. Living together and dating are much different.

  I always say that when you’re dating, you’re meeting his representative. You’re not meeting the real man. When people are dating, everyone’s on best behavior and most people are simply wearing masks. But if you live together, it’s much harder to keep up the fake persona. You get to see the real him (and he gets to see the real you, too).

  One of the cons about living with him first is that he gets too comfortable. He doesn’t feel like he has to move on marriage, and perhaps he will even take you too much for granted. I definitely started feeling this way as the years between our engagement and our actual marriage started rolling along.

  I didn’t plan on moving in with Melo. It just sort of happened. I was visiting him a lot in Denver, as you know, and I just started staying longer and longer. I started leaving stuff there. Then he cleared a few drawers, then a whole closet, and before I knew it I was living there. Then I got pregnant and we were officially playing house. I didn’t want to be pregnant and living apart from him. And considering the kind of pregnancy I ended up having, I needed to be near him.

  What was crazy about our relationship was that Melo asked me to marry him so early in it. I just knew we would be married within a year or so, but we could never get around to setting a date. And I wasn’t the kind of woman to be pushy about it. I figured when he was ready, it would be the right time.

  But as a year turned into three, and then to six with a baby, I started looking at myself. I bent the rules on so many things being with Melo—being with a younger man, being with a baller, living with a man, having a child out of wedlock. These were all things I’d said I would never do. With him, I not only bent and broke my own rules, I shattered them.

  And now I was in this relationship with a ring and nothing else. There was no reason not to be married. I kept wondering, what was the holdup?

  I did, however, learn a lot in those six years between getting engaged and getting married. The first lesson is that no matter how much you want something to happen when you want it to happen, it’s not going to happen until it’s time. I was ready to get married the day after he proposed. He wasn’t. I stayed because I knew he eventually would be ready.

  I see women in long-term relationships who push and try to coerce their man to marry them. That will never work. If he’s going to do it, he will. If he’s not, he won’t. So how long should yo
u wait? That’s totally up to you. Again, for me, I knew he wanted to marry me . . . eventually. There was never a doubt that it would happen, which made it easier to endure the wait.

  But if your man is not even making a move to get engaged after a lengthy period of time, he probably doesn’t want to get married. If you want to get married to him, you may need to take a real look at the relationship and make a decision. If you decide to stay in a relationship with a man who has no interest in marrying you, you cannot get mad at him ten years in. That’s your fault. Your sticking around all of those years will not change his mind. What it will do is allow him to take you for granted because he’s getting everything without having to commit and give up anything.

  If you feel as if he does want to marry you, because he’s told you that and he’s given you a ring, then you can do a few things to move it along. For one, don’t make it so easy for him. Remember, men are hunters. Make him work for it. Move out until he’s ready. Because as long as you two are doing everything a married couple would do, he’s not going to feel pressed to make it official. Again, I questioned if I should have moved in with Melo. And I probably would have established my own residence had I not had such a difficult pregnancy. Once the baby came, with Melo traveling so much, it was just easier for us to be under one roof.

  I do believe that living with Melo made our marriage less of an urgent situation for him. When he said he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me, he meant it. And he was getting the exact same experience without having to actually get married. That was my fault.

  You have to make a decision and be firm.

  But if you make the mistake of living together for a long period of time and find yourself perpetually “engaged” the way I was, do not give him an ultimatum. Simply tell him what you expect to happen and if he’s not prepared to do it, be prepared to leave or be his girlfriend or fiancée for the rest of your life, or however long it takes.

  I didn’t want to be the only one in my household with a different last name. So I sat down with Melo and was straight up about it: “We have a kid. You’re grown. I’m grown. And I don’t want to play house anymore. We’re either doing it or we’re not.”

  You never want to coerce or manipulate someone into marriage. If he wasn’t going to marry me, I would have to go, and mean it. Don’t pretend to do something; it will always backfire. You have to make a decision and be firm.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Game Time:

  The Marriage vs. the Wedding

  Game time: Time to go do what has to be done; time to go to work.

  After six years, it was finally happening. We set a date: July 10, 2010. Kiyan was three. We had to do it in the summer because that was the NBA off-season. After a lot of back-and-forth, we decided to have a big wedding—and to have it on television. I was approached by VH1 to film it as part of a reality show. I have heard of people spending ridiculous amounts of money on a wedding, which was something I wasn’t interested in doing. It’s one day, and while you want it to be memorable, you shouldn’t spend a small fortune to show the world that you’re married.

  So filming our wedding for a reality show seemed like an ideal situation—we would have the big wedding we wanted with our family and at the same time be able to share this special day with the world.

  Melo was cool with the taping, but he wasn’t okay with them filming every intimate detail of our wedding. My position was either we do it all the way or we don’t do it at all. Understanding television, I told him that it wouldn’t be right to lead the audience right up to that point and then not give them the whole thing. So we compromised. They got to see some of the vows and some of the partying and reception afterward, but they didn’t see all of it.

  It wasn’t an intrusion because they were literally filming what we were already doing. It wasn’t scripted; there weren’t several takes of anything. They just rolled the cameras while we did our thing.

  Our wedding was beautiful. It was perfect. I couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful day. And Melo was into it. He’s not the kind of guy to get involved in things like that, but he was totally involved in our wedding, right down to picking the colors. If you look at the film, you’ll see a lot of red. That’s Melo’s favorite color. We even had a red velvet cake. He picked the deejay—DJ Clue, which was perfect, since he introduced us. Neither of us cares about details like that, but this was our day and he wanted it to be right.

  It was totally about us.

  I walked down the aisle to Kenny Lattimore’s “For You,” the perfect wedding song. And the reception was just how I like it, free and fun. We have a lot of friends who are singers, and they were grabbing the microphone and belting out songs as Clue spun. Ciara, Kelly, Trina, and Serena even grabbed the mic to sing. I got up there, too. Folks were just being themselves and having a blast. LeBron James, Chris Paul, and Amar’e Stoudemire were there having fun, too. Those personal moments didn’t make it on the show. There were quite a few sacred moments that didn’t make the cut as well.

  To this day, people who were there say that our wedding was like the best party they had ever been to. But when it was all over, when the music stopped playing and everyone went home and it was just me and Melo and Kiyan, I knew that the party we had was fun, but the marriage and us being a family was what it was really all about.

  I know some people put so much attention into the wedding that they forget about the marriage. I was mindful of that. We could have done it in front of the justice of the peace and I would have been just as happy. We waited so long that at the end of the day, I couldn’t have cared less about the wedding. It was Melo who said, “Let’s do it correctly!” and it turned out to be this big bash of a wedding.

  It wouldn’t have mattered to me either way. A lot of people just show up to weddings for the meal and to gossip: “Ooh, look at that dress!” They don’t even really care about you and your marriage.

  I know some people that are more concerned about their wedding and how it looks. The whole Bridezilla thing is real. Driving people crazy over the dumbest things. Some women (and men) really do lose sight of what it’s all about. If your wedding sucks, you can still have a great marriage. And you can have a perfect wedding and a disaster of a marriage.

  I have seen people spend all of their money on these elaborate weddings, with doves and Rolls-Royce limos and the over-the-top catering, and in less than a year the marriage is finished.

  The magic should not be about getting married. The magic should be in staying married.

  I don’t know a lot of people who are married. The landscape of life has changed, and it seems as if marriage doesn’t really hold an important place in society anymore.

  There was a time, probably my mom’s generation, when getting married was a major accomplishment. But people measure accomplishments differently today. I don’t know if that’s good or bad; it’s just the way things are. It used to be if you weren’t married by a certain age something was wrong with you; people would talk about you. Today, you can be single and no one cares. There’s no pressure or importance placed on marriage anymore. People are opting to travel, focus on their careers, live their own lives.

  I’m married. I happened to find someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. But if I had never met Melo and I was just dating and didn’t have a kid, I think I would be okay with never getting married. I think it’s more than okay for a woman to want to do so many things in her life that marriage isn’t a priority. There are plenty of women who are satisfied being self-fulfilled. They don’t need marriage to feel validated as a person.

  Getting married didn’t make me feel validated as a person. I was already validated in myself. But it was important for me to do it. It was important for my son to see his parents in a functional relationship. Kids start asking questions very early. I didn’t want to be a baby’s mother. I needed to be a wife, Mrs. Anthony, mother of Kiyan An
thony.

  What’s different when you get married?

  A lot of things didn’t change. But there was this place inside me that had nothing to do with anyone else and that shifted. I’m his wife. Your swag is different when you’re a wife. People lie when they say wives don’t get treated differently than girlfriends. I was now Mrs. Anthony, not the girlfriend or the five-year fiancée. The dynamics within the relationship didn’t change, but the dynamics outside it certainly did.

  As soon as we went on our honeymoon in Costa Rica and the hotel concierge said, “Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Anthony . . .” Wow! I had never heard that before.

  My mom said when you got married there is so much more riding on it. When you say “I do,” you go into your house together. Marriage was different back during my mom’s time. It meant starting a whole new chapter. People were waiting until marriage even to have sex during my mom and grandmother’s era.

  I don’t know anyone who is waiting to have sex before marriage. I did hear that DeVon Franklin and Meagan Good waited until they were married. That’s the only case I’ve ever personally heard of. Ever. And I think that’s amazing. You don’t see people with old-school values, waiting until they’re married, anymore. I totally respect that. It speaks to a certain commitment to each other that you just don’t see these days.

  I love being married. No matter what, I know I have one person in my life who will be in my corner—in sickness, hurt, disability, through financial issues. It’s in the vows. We pledged that to each other and God and we both took it seriously.

  I know I have someone I can rely on for the rest of my life. How amazing is that? That’s the beauty of marriage, knowing you have a partner to be by your side during the difficult times and during the amazing times. That’s a partnership.