Jennifer Hudson got the question every woman in a long relationship gets, and she did not take it.
Speaking on Today with Jenna and Sheinelle, Hudson was asked about the pressure women face to marry. “I’ve never been that girl that feels like, ‘Okay, I’ve gotta get married,'” she said. And then the whole position in one line: “If that comes, it comes when you want it to or if you want it to.”
Read it twice. The second half is the part that does the work. Not when it happens, but whether you want it to at all, which is a possibility a lot of women are never offered.
She was warm about the relationship itself. Asked about Common, she said, “It’s been divine, every bit of that.” She also made a joke at his expense, offering him her chair: “Do you mind hosting the show for me today?” she said. “‘Cause he can talk.”
That is a woman at ease, which is a different register from the one these conversations usually run in. The standard version has a Black woman explaining her own timeline to an audience, half apologising, promising it is coming. Hudson did not explain. She described something good, declined to attach a deadline to it, and moved on to a joke.
Hudson hosts her own daytime talk show and has an award shelf that does not need listing here. She has been in public since she was a contestant on a singing competition, which means she has been answering questions about her personal life for two decades, which in turn is probably why the answer came out that clean.
What a reader does with it is the useful part. There is a version of this life where the thing you are waiting for is the proof, and a version where the thing you have is the point. She said which one she is living in.
