Falling in love with someone is often the easiest part of a romantic relationship. Making the love last and creating a fulfilling marriage is often not as simple. Over time, reality can set in, we may take our partner for granted, push one another’s buttons and forget about the love that brought us together in the first place.

Known as the “Cupid of Consciousness” and “The Fairy Godmother of Love,” bestselling author Arielle Ford’s newest book, “Turn Your Mate into Your Soulmate: A Practical Guide to Happily Ever After,” is dedicated to helping couples rediscover and rekindle love, improve their romantic relationships and change their lives for the better.

And she also set out to bust the myth that once we find our soulmate — something she taught so many to find with her book “The Soulmate Secret” — that everything will be easy, with no problems or disagreements.

“Like a lot of people I bought into the fairytale myth of soulmates and happily ever after. If they are really your soulmate, they will know how to make you happy in every moment, and it will be really easy and effortless,” Ford tells Elevated Existence in the March 2016 issue cover story. “Then I manifested my soulmate, got married and found out it wasn’t true. I had no idea the person you thought was totally perfect when you were in the honeymoon phase, or the phase I like to call the ‘socially acceptable form of insanity,’ when you are literally crazy in love and your brain is flooded with all these good hormones like dopamine and oxytocin and adrenaline, wouldn’t last.”

Ford believes this phase is nature’s way of tricking us into mating so we keep the species going. But often around the 16- to 18-month mark, those “feel-good hormones” disappear, and we are left with a “perfectly imperfect human being to live with, and we don’t know how to do it,” she says, explaining we then start questioning if the person we are with is truly our soulmate because it just shouldn’t be so hard.

“I wrote this book because I really wanted people to know what’s true about love, soulmates and relationships, and what is really normal,” Ford explains. “I spent 130 hours interviewing the world’s top love, relationship and marriage experts, and then took their best advice and road-tested it in my own relationship. That is what’s in the new book.”

Elevated Existence interviewed Ford for the March 2016 issue cover story to get some of her best advice, tools and research when it comes to relationships, including how to communicate, what men really want and much more!

Here are some of the highlights:

• “So many people think love is just a feeling. If I’m feeling love then there is love, but it’s so much deeper than that. Love is a behavior, a commitment, a choice, a decision and an action,” Ford says. “So there will be days when you don’t like your soulmate very much, but it doesn’t mean you don’t love them. Just like you might have a favorite dog or a cat, and you might love your pet, but there are days when they misbehave and you don’t like the behavior. But it doesn’t mean you don’t love them. So when your partner is doing something you don’t like, you have to just ask yourself, is this a reason not to love them?”

• “You start off with chemistry, but that is actually not the most important thing to predict a long-term relationship,” Ford says. “You want connection, compatibility, communication, and most important, a shared vision for the future.”

• “[Men] they are wired to win,” says Ford. “If you can set up a man to win, if you could let him know every day that he is your hero, you could get almost anything out of him. They will do almost anything for you because they want to win.”

For the full article, you can purchase the digital or hard copy of the issue, or subscribe to Elevated Existence’s Membership here!