Kendrick Sampson has an interesting approach to who gets to be the mother of his children, and it’s not as simple as being his partner.
In a new interview with the LOVERS by Shan podcast, the Insecure actor told host Shannon Boodram that he wants kids but would rather raise them with a close friend than with someone he is romantically involved with.
“I just look at love differently,” Sampson said near the 45-minute mark in the video linked below. “In my head, if I'm going to have a partnership, I don't want a child in there. I want a child. I definitely want children, but I want children with my homegirls. I want my homegirls to know that we ain't ever going to have a romantic nothing, and the only thing we worried about is the health of the child."
He continued, "It ain't complicated by what I feel and what mood I'm in, how you betrayed me, how you slept with someone, how you cheated. I don't want the romance. You haven't been shown enough romance, and so now the kid is suffering? I would rather be in a relationship where we know we got kids. ‘It takes a village.’ This is the village.”
He pointed to a couple Boodram previously interviewed, Lawrence and Brandy, who drew up a parental agreement before having a child. Boodram explained that the two lived together and he cared for her through the pregnancy without the boundary ever shifting into romance.
Sampson also pointed out the Black maternal mortality rate in Texas and the difficulty of navigating medical systems, doulas and natural birth.
"When they say it takes a village, it really do," he said. "And I've had conversation with homegirls. And I'm like, I think you'd be an incredible mom. That's the only thing I'm looking at. Hey, if you ever [want to], you know what I'm saying? I'm here for you."
By Sampson’s account, romance is a different “function” for him that relies on an entirely separate “set of skills,” such as soothing each other, bringing each other pleasure, working out how two people live and love well together.
"It's a different set of skills, different considerations, different goals, and it disrupts a lot of what I believe should be a healthy setup for a kid," he said.
Elsewhere in the interview, Sampson, who called romantic love "the smallest form" and "the most narrow form" of love, said he has no plan for romantic partnership.
“I like to say, specifically, I have no goal for that for the end of my life,” he said. “That doesn't mean it can't happen. I just have no plan for I've had a complicated, complex relationship with sex … Not saying that romance and intimacy can't be pleasurable. Obviously you want it to be but it's separate.”
