Marques Houston has shared why he doesn’t date women his age.
“There’s a lot of women my age I’ve dated, they may have baggage,” he toldPage Six. “A red flag to me [was] always with a woman that had a kid. Nothing against single women, but single mothers with children are a red flag for me.”
“I tip my hat and respect women that are raising children on their own,” Houston added. “But when I grew up, I never really wanted to have kids.”
The 41-year-old actor and R&B singer’s marriage to 22-year-old Miya Dickey has made headlines in recent years, with the couple welcoming their first child together in 2021. Houston has come under fire for the age gap between him and his wife.
“I tip my hat and respect women that are raising children on their own,” he continued. “But when I grew up, I never really wanted to have kids.”
Houston explained that he would “talk to my dad a lot, and he would always tell me to have your own kids because you never know what the baby daddy‘s are about.”
He added that he wanted to make sure to have kids with a woman that had previously never had children. “So that was always my red flag,” Houston added before saying that he doesn’t like women with “funky attitudes.”
“I could’ve married a 44-year-old woman, and it could’ve been disastrous,” the singer added. “Women that are my age… they kind of have a different outlook on life. Like a lot of women my age are very independent. They are very like, ‘I don’t need a man to do this for me ’cause I can do it for myself.’ I come from a generation that I love to provide for my wife.”
Houston also clarified why he fell for his current wife.
“There’s so many different women I’ve been with throughout my life, and it just so happens to be that this one [Miya] caught my heart. Everything that I prayed for—and everything that I wanted in a woman—she came with. Although she was young, I’m young in spirit,” he said,
Houston met Dickey in 2018 through a friend. She was 17 years old at the time. The couple announced their engagement in March 2019 and said their “I do’s” over a year later, in August 2020.
He previously addressed criticism over the age gap in his marriage earlier this year.
“Me and my wife’s situation is a little different, how we met through mutual friends and everything like that,” Houston said on TV One’s series, Uncensored. “When I met my wife, she was 17. We had no, really, conversation and no, really, connection until she was of age.”
“People don’t understand it. And of course, I got a lot of backlash for marrying someone that was 19,” he added. “And, you know, when we did finally start to talk, I was like, ‘This woman is like me’… For one, we had a spiritual connection, and I feel like that’s the most important thing… and being able to start being around her… we connected through music and her spirit, her kindness, her heart, reminds me a lot of my mom and we connected on so many different levels.”
