After a divorce, you want to get it right the second time around. For author and motivational speaker Sarah Jakes Roberts, daughter of Bishop TD Jakes, she knew this meant she had to keep her guard up while dating again. When the ESSENCE Empower U speaker first met her new husband Pastor Touré Roberts, she was more confident than ever before in the kind of love she needed to find.
“In my previous marriage I was nearly arrested,” Jakes Roberts said while speaking with her husband at their ESSENCE Festival Empower U workshop on identifying your soul mate. “I mean I showed my tail, okay? So being vulnerable and being treated like a lady wasn’t something that I had really become accustomed to because I was so used to being tough and taking care of myself.”
Thankfully, Roberts was ready to show her all that he had to offer.
“I was at a place where I knew that anyone would be honored to take me to dinner, and so I extended the privilege to him,” she recalls. “And, I did declare that he better feed me well. So we went to dinner in Los Angeles.”
It was an epic first date moment neither of them will ever forget.
“He picked me up at my hotel and I remember that from the moment that I saw him when I got off the elevator I felt vulnerable and naked,” adds the mom of two. “Not naked like he’s looking at me, but naked like, I don’t think I can hide anything from him. There is something within me that wanted to be the truest version of myself with him. There was something that made me feel safe. Everything from him watching how I came down the stairs to him opening the door for me at the restaurant, it made me feel like for the first time in a very, very long time, I could be a soft, feminine, dainty woman and fall into the arms of a real man that could hold me down.”
The couple will celebrate their first anniversary this fall.