Ask A ____ : Advice From Desdemona the Diva, Someone Who Knows

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Next Up: Desdemona, the Diva

Mix a little red tongue with a penchant for truth-telling and vodka in equal parts, shake, serve ice cold and you would have the diva known as Desdemona. Your friends lie to you, your parents don't want to hurt your feelings and haters take too much joy in killing your delusions.

Desdemona isn't a friend, family member or hater. She's a lover – of common sense and grown folk who act grown. Should you fall short on either of those she's here to tell you what no one else will, out of love.

Sure, love burns sometimes but it just makes the afterglow all the more sweeter don't you think? Visit Desdemona's real life altar ego at tressiemc.com or get more of the Double D Diary-style truth telling at her AC home.

Q. Do men ever change? I have a man who says he is going to change for the
better, for his children and myself, but I don't see that happening. I'm taking
care of his two kids and his ex wife's daughter and it seems like they both walk
all over me! Help! What do I do?

Mary Effing Poppins

Dear MEP,

Do men ever change? Sure. They get worse and then they die, all changes in the purest sense of the word.

However, I believe you're asking if YOU can change a man. I like to address such wistful thinking with the following cold, hard, mocha-colored reality: Halle Berry has been beat, cheated on and treated like a sideline ho. Now, if the walking coke-bottle frame with multi-racial beat-off potential and good hair has been unable to "change" a man, what makes you think that a chick working for her next paycheck can do much better?

I say this with love MEP because I am a woman's woman. I love women in the no-I-don't-want-to-rub-vajayjays-with-you kind of way. It is that love of women that makes me want to shake the body waste, lovingly, out of them every time I hear this foolishness.

The real question you should be asking is not do men change or can you change them but why should you have to? Unless you have sewed your love hole shut you hold a position of power in the male-female dynamic. That you have men and even children walking all over you suggests that you have given so much of this power away that you have forgotten it even exists.

That is why I am here – to remind you of who you are. You are a woman. You are the keeper of the hole. You are a human being deserving of respect and happiness and love. I know all of this to be true but it matters naught if you do not.

So, here's my advice MEP. I want you to buy a clean day planner. Then I want you to figure out your hourly rate of pay at the job I'm sure you have because trifling ass men never bamboozle broke chicks. For the next month I want you to record every minute of the day you spend doing for this man and his evil kids. At the end of the month you are to total up the time you have spent caring for this man's needs, multiply it by your hourly rate of pay and add an additional $50 for ever good nut you ever gave him - $100 if you didn't get one too – and arrive at a total.

Then write his ass a bill and a Dear Raheem note.

Men do not change.
Why should they when some woman like you is always willing to settle for him unchanged?

'-^^\~~~/^^-'

Q. My fiancé has just told me he is bisexual. He said that he has never told
anyone else and has hidden it from me until now. I cried all night and I have
many self-esteem problems. He also said that if he were in my shoes he would end
the relationship but he's glad that I haven't. He promises that once we're
married he'll always be true. What should I do?

Desperate for the Down
Low

A. I have really got to get into the minister/justice of the peace business. It's like being Houdini or that freaky white guy who tries to convince me that the work of the devil is "magic". I mean, they say a few words they didn't even write, charge fools $300 a pop and are seen as miracle workers!

And that is what you're thinking will happen isn't it, DDL? A miracle?

Don't feel bad. Lots of women make the same foolish mistake. They have dreamt of those age-old words being uttered to them by some drunken bastard for so long that they have imbued them with a power they never had.

Weddings are not magical DDL. Most of the time they aren't even fun. Black folk don't RSVP, guests show up late, drink too much of the liquor you paid for and tulle itches like a summunabeyotch. At the end of it you'll be tired and broke with appliances you could have brought your own self from Target.

Yep, weddings suck, for the bride most of all – all those failed expectations and such. So why in the world would you think that an event that cannot even manage to entertain drunkards will somehow transform your mate's sexual orientation? If dude likes the hang of a nice salami on the morning of your wedding he's gonna like one even more when the biological thrill of the chase wears off five minutes into your honeymoon. If anything, marriage stands to turn him 100 proof gay. I mean, have you seen yourself with 15 marriage pounds with bedhead and a bad attitude over dirty laundry? Well, when he sees it chances are excellent he'll be having wet dreams about thin, out-of-his-league Sanjaya look-a-likes.

You say your self-esteem is shattered and that he wouldn't blame you for ending your relationship. Somehow I'm thinking he was hoping you'd have just enough esteem to do just that. Now he has to figure out how to meet men on Craigslist between runs to the store for "bread and milk". You are really effin this thing up for everyone.

Fortunately, there is still time for you to redeem yourself and the already dying institution of opposite-sex marriage. Get out now, not because he is bisexual, but because it obviously bothers you and you don't have enough sense of self to protect your own interests.

You do not deserve to get married to anyone, be they straight or gay. Self-esteem is a function of self and marriage is pretty much the antithesis of self. Spend some time with you, on you, for you before you go and trap some poor guy into a life of parking lot blowjobs.

He deserves better. And so do you, you just don't know it yet.

'-^^\~~~/^^-'

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