Jasmine: What is the most reasonable time period in which a woman should receive a proposal from her boyfriend?

DY: I don’t believe in an arbitrary set time for things like that. But, I will say if you’re in your late 20s and above, just “dating” for longer than two years probably isn’t the best look

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From Essence

Q: I am eight months pregnant. It’s my husband and I’s second child. Our first is a daughter who is amazing. We have been together for three years and married four months. He walked out two months ago saying he needed time to think. The time he spent at home became less and less and then I found out he is living with a new female. He cheated on me before he walked out, but when he left he made it out to be my fault. I do love this man, and he doesn’t want to file for divorce and hasn’t removed anything from our home. I want to fix our marriage, but I know I cannot do it alone. How do I let my marriage go, and what I thought was going to be forever? Please help!

See what celebrity psychologist Dr. Sherry Blake has to say about this situation on Essence.com.

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“I’m supposed to trust it, after he touched it?” — Beanie Sigel, “Bread and Butter”

If you went outside and polled 100 men on what would happen if his woman cheated on him, it’s a safe bet roughly 99 of those men would say they’d kick her to the curb. For some men (I’m playing it safe here), cheating is an unforgivable sin and the worst thing a woman could do to a man.

There are more than a few reasons why a man might view a woman as “damaged goods” after she cheats. The three I’m going to discuss are: 1) the male ego; 2) society deems it necessary; and 3) the fact that it was a deliberate act and the man found out about it.

Let’s start with:

THE MALE EGO

Once a man decides to commit to a woman, he believes he picked the “right” woman. The woman who will pledge her undying loyalty (extreme? yeah…I know) to him and forsake all others in order to be with him.

Men believe this to be true because we understand women have the unique ability to create tunnel vision once they decide they’re interested in a man. I made a joke once that men will date and sleep with women almost all the way up until the point where he makes the woman he’s been dating his girlfriend. Women, on the other hand, will find a man that they’re really into and disregard all the other men who might come in between her and the possibility of getting with the man she’s interested in.

In short, men enter relationships with women believing: 1) the chances of his woman running astray are so low it doesn’t require a second thought; and 2) the woman he’s with is so intensely focused on him that other men will not be worth the risk of ruining what they have built.

(The male ego can make one delusional).

Even though guys try to be sneaky about it, there are some definite signs that he may be cheating on you with someone else. It’s never good to jump to conclusions, but if the red flags are there, you’ll want to start taking them into consideration and deciding where to go with your relationship. Here are 15 signs that he’s probably cheating on you.

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He safeguards his cell phone

In a relationship, being open and honest about everything is important. When a guy has something to hide, one of the first things he’ll begin to safeguard is his cell phone. When he has a text or phone call, he avoids letting you hear or see anything on it, and now his phone randomly has a password attached to it.

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From YourTango

We all know fad diets, weight loss pills and fat-burning underwear don’t help us shed pounds. But what does aid weight loss? Turns out, having an adultery could be the secret to a shrinking

According to a new survey from UndercoverLovers.com, cheating men lost an average of 6 pounds, while women claim to have lost about 10 pounds.

While we’re not suggesting you commit adultery to drop those last few pounds, it is a reminder of what having an affair can do to your body. Researchers explain that the stress and excitement of having an affair produces hormones which may aid weight loss.

Read more from YourTango.com.

George Chin / WENN

As its been said a million times before and remains true, music is a universal language. Before you know it, a song can take you on an emotional roller coaster, feeling things you didn’t know you felt.  The stories told in songs can have you agreeing…and throwing a side eye.  Some of our favorite songs have some of the most trifling situations: cheating, fighting over men, falling in love with someone else, babies, etc.  Check out the list and don’t forget to tell us your fave song that has a trifling meaning!

Source: WENN

From Hello Beautiful

If you’ve been keeping up with your daily HelloBeautiful dish then you know that Gabrielle Union recently made headlines for her response to an open letter written by an alleged jumpoff. It was cold, I had to layer up after reading the tweets I really did. I can’t lie I was secretly having a “yes girl tell em” moment in my head but then I snapped back to reality. If the open letter was from a “crazy batShyte loon” who tried this stunt a year before then why not let crazy be crazy and continue living good?

Whether you are Chocolate Hollywood fabulous like Gabrielle Union or the best braider on your block, the moment you announce the word relationship there will be folks who will try your patience and put your love to the test.  Unfortunately it’s what you sign up for. Jealously and folks who live in the past are like cancers and they thrive in all neighborhoods across the world. There will always be someone who doesn’t like the way you walk or dress. There will be someone who has a problem with the type of man you choose to be with or the career path you take. I don’t want to use the word hater because in my universe those who work against me are invisible.

Whether or not the open letter is legit I feel that Gabby (in my mind we are friends) should’ve used the best weapon possible…silence.

Read more on HelloBeautiful.com.

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Producer, Jermaine Dupri recently hit up the Power 105.1 studios for an interview with the hosts of The Breakfast Club. During his interview, JD promoted his upcoming So So Def Reunion tour, addressed how he feels about Kandi Burruss refusing to participate in the tour and responded to some antique rumors regarding his love life, including that back-fence talk about him cheating on Janet Jackson.

On Bow Wow going in on Kandi about the reunion and Xscape beef: 

“Bow Wow is like a So So Def rider, he’s like my son, so he’s gonna say something the second someone says something about me. It’s 15 artists performing though, we ain’t gonna let one person stop that show”.

“The way I designed Xscape, Kandi sang all the leads on the records. When you got three other people that want to sing, and you keep giving this one person all the leads… If the designer of the music was making a person sing, that makes those other three singers like ‘Yo, when we gonna get leads?’ When we got to ‘Who Can I Run To?’ I started making sure Tiny was singing the leads and Kandi was like in the back. When Kandi started falling to the back, the problems even got worse.”

On whether or not he dated Kandi Burruss:

“I would never date her. I never said nothing about dating her… I mean she’s a reality star now, so you gotta watch out.”

On his Janet Jackson tattoo:

“Janet’s a part of my life that means a lot. I’m tattoo’ed up by the way, not to mention every part of me is tattoo’ed. Before I had the [Janet] tattoo, my mother said ‘Why you got all these white people on you that you don’t know?’  That’s a crazy question if somebody ask you that. I got Al Capone, I got Scarface, I got all these people on me… It just hit me one day, I date somebody that’s famous, let me make a tattoo.”

On rumors that he cheated on Janet:

“Oh, yeah? So what, that’s what you heard? People just make up anything, right? It sounds good. We was together nine years, that’s a long time. That’s like marriage. I’m a young dude, I’m gonna leave it at that. You know what I mean? I’m a young dude in the entertainment business.My life is crazy sometimes.”

Boy, bye.

Peep Jermaine’s interview on the next page. What do you think of his explanation? 

In fifth grade, there was a scandal, so big, it rocked the school, community and maybe even the township. I remember hearing the adults gossiping about it, long before it was officially confirmed. I’d catch fragments of sentences being whispered between mothers. “Yeah, he just left her.” “Of course he’s going to have to resign.” “A mess!” Just a week or two later I found out what they meant. Our principal, in an unprecedented move, came on the television system which we used for morning and afternoon announcements, to tell us, the students, that he was resigning. He didn’t go into details, he just said that he’d really enjoyed his tenure as principal and that he would miss us kids and the colleagues he’d worked with over the years. Though, I hadn’t put all of the pieces together, I knew that his announcement had something to do with all the whispers.

When I got back home, I finally just asked my mom what had happened. She told me that our principal was divorcing his wife. Well, that was a bit of a let down. Divorce was nothing new. My grandparents were divorced. People’s parents got divorced everyday. Little did I know, it wouldn’t be long before the complete story unraveled. No more than three months after our principal announced his resignation, rumors and then facts of his upcoming nuptials starting swirling about. This principal wasn’t just marrying anybody. He was marrying one of the teachers at the school. And not just any teacher, he was marrying the teacher who taught his six year old daughter.

Like the adults had said, it was indeed a hot mess. Even us kids knew that in order for him to divorce and remarry so quickly, he would have had to have been at least flirting and most likely screwing his daughter’s teacher. It wasn’t a cutesy, clean love story. It was inappropriate and untidy. I’m sure there were times when it was certainly hurtful to the ex wife and her daughter. And for the rest of us, it was salacious. I remember hearing women talk about how their upcoming marriage would never last. The women were certain that our ex principal was going to do to the teacher just what he’d done to his ex wife. As a kid it sounded plausible and as an adult, it was a sentiment or a phenomena I’d seen and heard reflected over and over again. Eventually, I adopted it as my own.

But today, I don’t know how accurate that saying really is. Today, I know a little bit more about human nature and why marriages fall apart in the first place. Maybe the principal and his first wife got married too young and didn’t know themselves, much less each other. Maybe she, his ex wife, belittled him at home. Maybe their sex life started to suffer and his eyes started to wander. Who knows, it could have been a multitude of things. But what I do know is that over a decade later, my former principal and the teacher are still together. They have five kids now and judging from Facebook, which is admittedly not always the most accurate barometer, they seem to be happy together.

This story came to mind last night as I was on Jozen Cummings’ dating and relationship blog, Until I Get Married. In a video post, a woman who had cheated on her boyfriend with her current fiancé, wondered how she should go about apologizing to her ex. In his response to her, though he acknowledged that she was hella wrong for cheating, he also stated that her infidelity eventually brought the type of love she wanted into her life.

Hmm. Interesting. I guess it’s kind of like Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz or Olivia Pope and Fitzgerald Grant. By now we know that sometimes love doesn’t come in a nice, neat prepackaged box. Sometimes you get the box that’s already been ripped open by another, banged up by the postage man and pissed on my a stray dog or two. But it’s still love, the most universal, the most powerful force in the universe. I mean God Himself defines Himself as love. Now, I’m not arguing anybody run out here and take someone’ else’s husband; in fact I’d argue that when the initial stages of flirting start, you run like hell in the other direction. What I’m asking is if your beginnings are a little rough, arguably immoral, does that mean your relationship or your karma is doomed to fail? Will it be a “sins of the father” type situation where the offspring produced from the union end up suffering because of their parents’ indiscretions? Or can a not so good thing be turned into something great, with no lingering consequences. I’m not sure, so I’m asking you.

What do you think? When you fall in love in the midst of shady circumstances, can your union still work? 

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From Your Tango

On Feb. 6, Bob Marley would have turned 68. Although he passed away at just 36 in 1981, the music legend is rumored to have fathered 11 children, many out of wedlock. According to his website, three women carried Bob’s children in 1972: His wife Rita Marley, who gave birth to their son Stephen in April, Pat Williams who gave birth less than one month later, and Janet Hunt, who also delivered a son just three days after Pat.

Read more on Bob’s approach to relationships on YourTango

From affairs to a rape accusation, go behind Bob Marley’s scandalous and overly-sexual life.