How to love, lyrics and lies

At five feet nothing Lil Wayne is no Prince Charming. He sports a gangster grille on his teeth and baseball which makes him look like a remand school adolescent. But he writes some good lyrics. Among them is his current hit How to Love:

"You had a lot of crooks tryna steal your heart

Never really had luck, couldn't never figure out

How to love, how to love"

Forever rarely happens

I guess in the game of love we have to go through some crooks before we can learn how to love. Some of us choose partners who are no good for us. Others choose partners who we expected to be with us forever, and that rarely happens. The question in many person's mind is 'How can I find the partner who is meant for me and how can I keep her/him?'

Many of us have been hurt by partners who were more in love with their own 'lyrics' than with us. Men, it seems, enjoy hearing themselves say pretty things and want the conquest of making a woman fall for them. I doubt that when a man is composing his lyrics he is thinking about how many women he tells the same thing or how the woman will feel when she is discarded. So the caution for us ladies is to believe what the man does, not what he says.

He is only using you

It is hard to accept that someone is only using you to refine his ability to seduce women but really isn't interested in you. It hurts to know you have been deceived, but actions tell you more than words. The magic words 'I love you' make many people vulnerable. Usually what we mean is 'I love the way I feel when I'm with you'. If the great feelings you experience are based on your partner lying to you then they might as well be saying, 'I love me more than you'.

The message here is to engage head before heart. Take a step back from the butterflies in the stomach and ask yourself the simple question, 'How has my partner shown me that s/he loves me in the last week?' Love ultimately is a verb in action and not just lyrics. Love is kind, it is gentle but it is also intelligent. Be honest with yourself and see your partner for what s/he is. There will be plenty of time left for the butterflies.

A male friend of mine says, "People want to believe the lie, and when they find out the truth they say I always knew it was a lie". That is a very painful way of learning how to love. Any relationship built on lies will have to be sustained on lies.

Dr Karen Carpenter is a Florida board certified clinical sexologist and psychologist. She is also the host of a radio programme, 'Love & Sex with Dr Karen Carpenter'.