A TIMELY intervention for substance abusers can save lives - but should you step in when the drug is love?

Anyone who has had a friend who has dated a jerk will know what I'm talking about. But this quandary will especially - if it hasn't already - hit home for those in their mid- to late-20s, for whom the stakes are much higher.

I'm talking about marriage, of course.

This year, I have on my hands not one, but two jerks I'd like to kick from the aisle to the kerb.

They are serial philanderers who have cheated on my friends while they were dating.

The first is a lawyer who recently used the pretext of tango classes to meet chicks after he proposed to my friend.

The second is worse: A few years ago, after six years of dating another friend of mine, he asked her for a '24-hour break' to re-live his bachelorhood .

His actions after proposing last year take the cake: He flirts with pretty girls, takes them to lunch, and expects his fiancee to be '100 per cent okay' with it because 'you have to get used to it'.

Talk about toxic assets.

My friend now has doubts but is still considering marriage because, as she put it: 'I love him.'

I was dumbfounded.

If love is a drug, my friend is one step away from an overdose.

But as an outsider, what do you say if you believe that the relationship is headed for the rocks when the rock is already bought, the dresses picked out and the champagne ready to be popped?

Should you say anything at all?

Interventionist Jeff Bray, an author who has appeared on CNN and written for Forbes and other professional journals, says yes.

In his second edition of Love First: A Family's Guide To Intervention, published last year, he says: 'Intervention gives love direction. It's a love that asks friends and family to demonstrate integrity and honour, by making the hard decision to do what is right, not what is easy.'

The easy thing here would be to shut up and sip the champagne.

But a lot is at stake - time, money and, of course, a failed marriage.

The odds are worse than ever: In 2007, one in three marriages here ended in divorce; in 1996, that number was one in five.

Some of those end after what feels like a lifetime.

The parents of another friend of mine just got a divorce after 38 years of marriage.

They were wrong for each other, but her mother had gone ahead with the wedding when, after two years of dating her father, it would have seemed too great a loss of face to break it off. She also felt no other man could want her after a broken engagement.

She was 24 at the time.

Now, of all the reasons to get hitched, that has got to be the most self-defeating - albeit one that characterised an older generation.

But having to decide between marrying someone who's wrong for you and being left on the shelf is a false choice, especially given the plethora of modern alternatives.

Both my friends - intelligent, beautiful, with great personalities - have to understand that.

And that's exactly what I'll tell them today.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.