Project Description
Dirty Laundry
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LAYLA, a successful financial advisor is stuck on the one man she can’t have: her live-in boyfriend Conrad, who won’t commit. CHANEL, a bartender turned hair stylist doesn’t want to end up like her mother with five kids and on welfare, but yet she continues to date thugs, jailbirds and men with baby-mama drama. REESE, a promising interior designer has the perfect image of her ideal mate. She’s had her wedding planned out since she was nine-years-old. A virgin, she’s saving herself for the right man but instead of finding Prince Charming, all she finds are playas. SKYE, a former supermodel has no trouble finding a man, be it a movie star, professional athlete, or younger man – too bad she’s aging and her career is on the downward spiral. Despite their heartbreak, failed relationships or lives being turned upside down by a life-altering events; the four women realize that the bonds of sisterhood are stronger than what they have with any man.
Dirty Laundry is a frank view of single women and the complexities of dating in the new Millennium. At times, funny and sexy, at times tender and sad, but always true-to-life, you’ll enjoy delving into the rich lives of these four women.
Prologue
EVER WONDER WHY SOME WOMEN hang onto a doomed relationship hoping that a commitment-phobic prick will one day decide to marry them? I never understood it, until now.
I know why because I fell prey to that situation. After dating a man for two nerve-wracking years and living with him for three years, I realized he was never going to get down on one knee and give me a ring. I’d wasted some of my best years waiting for a proposal that would never come. I was going to become yet another statistic. You know the one I’m talking about—another single, college-educated, African-American woman of a certain age without a man.
I still don’t understand how I got to this lonely place despite all I have to offer. I’m a thirty-four-year-old, high-level financial advisor with no children. I’m intelligent, beautiful, sexy and physically fit. I know how to cook, clean and screw a man’s brains out. I’m every man’s wet dream. Yet with all this going for me, I, Layla James, have always come out on the short end in the love department. So for every Single Black Female reads this, let my life be an example of the road that should be less traveled.
You see, I should have scoped out my future husband at Clark Atlanta University instead of waiting until I was settled in my career and financially stable. I chose an education over a lasting relationship. Once I received my degree, I thought the world was my oyster. Boy was I wrong. What followed was a steady rise in my professional career, while my social life netted zero.
Where shall I begin telling my sad tale of failed relationships? Hmmm…should I start with my good-for-nothing father, who left my mother and me for another woman and then proceeded to have three kids with her? Or perhaps I’ll start with Conrad Smith. Or maybe with the guys who followed him? That’s when my friends and I realized the abundance of good-looking, intelligent and available men was quickly diminishing, and what was left was online dating, speed dating, jobless men with no ambition, jailbirds, playas, thugs, athletes, old-ass sugar daddies, young-blood gigolos, professional students, white men and the worst offenders—down-low brothers, married men and men with baby-mama drama.
So, I’ve decided to take a sabbatical from all this falling in and out of love. Instead, I’ve decided to do some serious soul-searching to find out why I always come up empty. You know, see my therapist and preacher and find out why God has it out for me.
I’m going to share all of my and my girlfriends’ dirty laundry and explain exactly what led me to this moment.