R&B singer Ciara took to Instagram on Sunday to try to calm the fury over an earlier post in which she came off as shaming single women.
On Twitter and Instagram, Ciara posted a clip late Saturday of pastor John W. Gray III preaching in 2016 to women about how to find a husband. She captioned it on Instagram: “#LevelUp. Don’t Settle.”
“Too many women want to be married but you’re walking in the spirit of girlfriend,” Gray said. “When you carry yourself like a wife, a husband will find you.
“You’re not a wife when I marry you, you’re a wife when I find you.”
Ciara, who has been married to NFL star Russell Wilson since July 2016, immediately took heat on social media.
“Ciara, honey, no,” tweeted People reporter Cici Adams. “I’m so disappointed that you would share something so silly.
“Ciara is doing what many women do when they overcome trials and get married. She’s using her marital status as a weapon against women who are not married. And it’s clear that she’s tied her value and sense of self worth to her marriage, otherwise she wouldn’t have shared that.”
Kimberly Nicole Foster tweeted: “I think we all could've guessed Ciara was going to be one of *those* women after she got married.”
And @KevCoke6 shared: “Ciara’s playing a dangerous game. You should never, no matter how perfect your relationship/marriage appears to be, sit on a throne and tell people why they’re not romantically successful. You can be the queen of the ball today and have cake in your face tomorrow!”
Ciara, 32, responded hours later.
“I was once that girl wanting to be loved a certain way but was making the wrong choices,” she explained, in an Instagram post. “I found myself at my lowest moment. I was a single mom sitting at home, and I then realized that the perfect love I was looking for was how God loves me, how He wants me to be loved, and who He was calling me to be a mom and a woman.
“That’s when I realized married or not married… I needed to love myself.”