You gotta stay smart when it comes to your heart.
Faith Jenkins, host of Oxygen's true crime series Killer Relationship with Faith Jenkins, has some expert tips for anyone looking for love this Valentine's Day.
Inspired by some of the cases on her show, which documents toxic real-life relationships that ended in murder, Jenkins wants you to stay safe by paying attention to these dating don'ts.
"If you want to be in a committed, monogynous relationship, if someone has a history of infidelity that should be a red flag to you," Jenkins told E! News in an exclusive interview. "Because people's patterns say a lot about them. I always say people lie, patterns don't. So when you're coming into a new relationship and someone says, ‘Yes, I have this history of lying or yes, I have this history of cheating, but things are going to be different now.' Why? People don't change for other people, they change for themselves."
Jenkins continued, "So you always have to look at someone's actions and ignore what they say. Look at their actions only as evidence of who they are."
Another action to look out for? Possessiveness.
"Another one is, something that you see in the show, displaying elements of control disguised as smothering love," Jenkins added, explaining that this type of behavior only becomes worse when you go from dating to marriage.
She continued, "The number of phone calls a boyfriend would make to a girlfriend throughout the day just checking in, and when they get married she finds out he wants to know her whereabouts all the time. That's not normal. When you marry someone, you don't own them. It's a partnership, it's not ownership.
"Most of these cases the men end up being the perpetrators and the murderers, you see this element of ownership over their wives instead of partnership."
In her book, Sis, Don't Settle: How to Stay Smart in Matters of the Heart, Jenkins shares even more advice for dating and love.
"I wanted to write a book to encourage single people, especially women who are out dating, looking for love, to be hopeful and not give up and don't be discouraged about getting questions about why you're still single," she reasoned. "That's not something that you need to explain or defend. You're living your life's journey."
Jenkins tells one story about a time she invited a man to a black tie event during college, only to get rejected. Years later, she learned the reason he said no was because he couldn't afford a suit.
"So often when we're single and we're dating, we deal with rejection and we make it about us, we take it really personally, we get our feelings hurt. And a lot of times it has nothing to do with us," she said. "You don't always need to know the why. It's just really important not to take rejection personally."
Jenkins also has a Valentine's Day message for all the singles out there: Take "advantage" of being untethered!
"This single season of your life, it's a time for you to live your best life, it's not a rest stop. Valentine's Day, just like every other day, enjoy it," she shared. "There are so many things that when you're single you should take advantage of the time. You should take the time to get to know yourself, spending time with your friends and family as much as you can...You don't ever want to look back on your single life and feel like you wasted so much time being down or depressed because you were waiting to really live until you got in a relationship."
Killer Relationship With Faith Jenkins airs Sundays at 7 p.m. on Oxygen.
(E! and Oxygen are both part of the NBCUniversal family)