THE silly things women do in the name of love amaze me.

What is it in female genes that makes it so difficult for us to let go and accept that a man does not love us, or has stopped loving us?

Take former air stewardess Constance Chee. She slept with a married karung guni (rag-and-bone) man, lent him money to gamble and then found herself in trouble with the law. She is on trial for killing her lover's little daughter.

Why? My girlfriends rack their brains for excuses for boyfriends who will not commit.

He is scared to commit because he was badly hurt in past relationships. He is scared of being distracted from career goals (and yet is never too busy for sex).

He needs more time to get used to the idea of marriage/divorcing his current wife/sharing a toilet because - you guessed it - he is scared.

Singapore is full of scared men.

Oh, why? Why do women tolerate men's bad behaviour?

Perhaps it boils down to the fear of rejection or abandonment. Out of vanity, women hate being dumped. We think that being ignored or dumped explicitly signals we are unattractive and have small boobs. Or have nasty tempers.

We'd rather be in superficial, unfulfilling, even damaging relationships than face up to the fact that we are not Fiona Xie.

Another reason is, like food wraps, women are instinctually clingy.

CLINGY

That's why we stick together when we go to the toilet. We love to cling, be it to our Gucci bags or to rotten relationships.

The problem is, we do not see it as a problem. We perceive it as a virtue - like loyalty or perseverance and delude ourselves to feel good inside. We are martyrs sacrificing our happiness on the altar of love!

One day, he will come round to appreciating us, and will love us more.

How validating. How romantic. How stupid.

I was once like that too. When I quarrelled with a boyfriend and he did not call me back the next day, I waited by the phone and obsessed about it with my girlfriends.

Maybe someone stole his mobile phone and he lost all my numbers. Maybe he was turned off by my crying. Maybe he is intimidated that I am a newspaper columnist. Maybe he is dying inside hoping for me to apologise. Maybe he died.

Why did I do it? Readers are going to label me desperate again for saying this but what the heck, I am going to say it anyway: I hate being single. I hate eating alone. It physically hurts.

But there are very few eligible single men in Singapore - I can testify under oath on that. On the rare instance when I meet one, I want it to work very much. I am willing to make concessions.

I am willing to put up with long-term pain for the occasional scraps of affection.

All that changed when I stumbled on a book at Borders. Every single woman must read He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth To Understanding Guys.

Author Greg Behrendt points out that men are not as complicated as women make them out to be.

When a man loves you, he (1) calls you regularly (2) does not send you mixed messages (3) wants to have sex with you only (4) does not put you down (5) AND wants to marry you.

If he is not like all of the above, then he doesn't love you. Love is given, not earned. Love is glory, not grief.

Have the courage to admit that your man does not love you. As much as singlehood sucks, being with an unloving man is worse.

Bad and uncertain relationships make you feel bad and uncertain, and that's not what you were put on this earth for.

Make a space in your life for the great feelings you deserve. Get up. Walk out.

Now.

THEY were a beautiful young couple seated a few tables away and obviously very much in love. They sat with their knees touching. Their conversation was animated and they smiled at each other a lot.

Clearly, their relationship was relatively new, though they had already reached a level of easy intimacy between them.

Had they been together for a long time, I think one of them would be staring vacantly out the window or maybe even reading the newspaper. At the very least, they wouldn't be smiling quite so much.

I turned my attention back to lunch, feeling a strange wave of envy disguised as mild disgust.

After 5 1/2 years in a relationship with the same man, no matter what happens, you don't ever smile that much. And with so many stars in your eyes too. That kind of smiling is reserved for the first rush of love.

My lunch companion Rae broke my reverie when she began swatting my forearm from across the table. 'Eh, eh, eh, eh look what she's doing! Eeeee!'

From the mixture of glee and horror written on her face, I thought the young couple were getting it on right there in their booth seat.

I turned to look, as surreptitiously as I could of course, and saw that the girl had leaned forward and was picking something out of her beau's nose.

Instead of recoiling and slapping her hand away, the guy leaned forward and angled his nose up and towards her. He remained quiet as she inserted her finger into his nostril and began fishing for what must have been a stray bat in his cave.

Two seconds later, she pulled out her finger, inspected the thing, and showed it to him.

He glanced at what had been trawled from his nose and smiled. 'Eeeh!' they said giggling in unison. He leaned forward to kiss her and she flicked whatever it was onto the floor. It was a moment straight out of an Animal Planet special on frolicking apes.

My first reaction was genuine disgust. Believe me, this time, there was no envy involved. But Rae, though a tad disturbed by such a public display of intimacy, conceded that it was quite natural.

'You don't pick your boyfriend's blackheads, meh?' she asked.

Well, yes I do.

'You don't clip his nails?'

Er, sometimes.

'Do you consciously look for pimples on his back and face so that you can pop them?'

Um. Ya.

'Then what's wrong with her digging his nose?'

Well for one, I draw the line at dipping my fingers in my boyfriend's snot, and secondly, I don't do any of the above in public. It's terribly unhygienic and, well, my boyfriend won't let me.

But Rae has a point. When it comes down to it, we are all just apes with better shoes and expensive gadgets. We did, after all, evolve from monkeys. So it's only natural that some of our fundamental traits remain.

That means that picking bits off each other's bodies is really one of the most natural, if not primal, acts in the world. Come to think of it, nothing makes us more human.

Until, of course, we start doing it in public.

Especially when other people are trying to eat.