My client was so excited to tell me his news that he almost shouted. "This is it," he exclaimed. "I've met my true love, just like you said I could."

I smiled and bopped a quick jig; we were working over the phone, so he had no way of knowing I had no dancing skills. After two bad marriages and infinite Match.com dates, my client knew whom he'd spend the rest of his life with.

"How do you know?" I asked, already having a sense of the answer.

"It's hard to explain," he said. "Mainly it's that we're both our true selves with each other. I can be more of my real self because of her, and the same with her."

Who doesn't want to be with their true love? Questions about this romantic yearning eclipse nearly all others that I hear through my intuition and energy healing practice. The full range of related questions are all over the board, to include versions of the following:

• Why do I keep marrying the same basic person over and over?
• Why can't I meet anyone?
• What do I do about my bad marriage? Is there any way to fix it?
• My soul mate left me, shattered and bruised. I thought they weren't supposed to do this?
• I'm dating my soul mate but I'm bored. What am I doing wrong?
• Am I too old/flawed/unattractive/attractive/dysfunctional/trendy/old-fashioned to meet my Eternal One?

There are all sorts of related questions but they are all posing the same deep query: Is there true love?

My short answer is, "yes." As I discuss in my book, Beyond Soul Mates, one of the significant keys to attracting true love or transforming a current relationship into its highest expression is to figure out the difference between soul and true mate relationships. Plain and simple, you want a true mate relationship rather than the garden-variety soul mate relationship most people talk about.

What's the difference between a soul and a true mate relationship? Baseline, soul relationships are soul-to-soul, or karmic, and true relationships are true self to true self, or dharmic. Karma involves clearing the past, and dharma, creating a brilliant future. Your true self is the spiritual or essential you, the one who knows itself to be completely and unconditionally connected to Source. With this knowledge uppermost, your true self is able to give and receive love generously, bringing the Divine into the picture for advice, healing, and guidance. Relationships with others who are living as their true selves are dharmic or continually evolving toward positivity and joy.

Your soul is the part of you that travels across time in order to learn about love. Its journey includes this life, but also many past lives. Its schooling has greatly increased its ability to formulate loving attachments but also caused injury. These wounds are the areas that cause us to compromise in relationships, feel unworthy of love, and act accordingly.

Soul relationships form between any beings whose souls can assist each other in clearing wounds and creating more loving bonds. Just about everyone in your life is probably a soul mate, from your mom to your companion animal. Don't most of your relationships involve teachings about love? Don't they assist you in healing your inner wounds? Relationships that help us fix the past are called karmic.

In our search for a romantic "soul mate," most of us, without knowing it, are really looking for a true love relationship. We want to help each other discover and follow the path of destiny, sharing activities that fulfill our individual life missions. These relationships tend to be much more exuberant and kind than many soul relationships.

One fun secret is that you can have many true mates. These are simply people or animals with whom you get to express your true self and they do the same with you. What if you're stuck in a few negative soul relationships? Well, all is not lost. By transforming yourself, by showing your authentic self, you invite reciprocity from another. That muddy soul mate lover could turn into a Prince (or Princess) after you first leapfrog ahead. If they don't, you have further decisions to make.

What if you think you already met your true love and it didn't work out? What if your true love died or is unavailable? You can have more than one true love. What's important is to become your true self and partner with someone whose true self fits you. If you're single, the most significant key to attracting a true love is to uncover and express the spiritual qualities that signify your true self.

This advice departs from most of the soul mate outlines, which encourage a list that includes necessary body type, income range, and even number of kids. All that's great, but you know what? You can attract someone with the right hair color but who has everything else wrong. You and your true love will share what is really important, like faith, truth, hope, generosity, healthiness, and whichever other spiritual qualities are vital to your true self.

Go ahead and start attracting true love by getting in touch with the spiritual qualities that are really important to you and then live them. Nourish, feel, speak to, breathe, and live them. Notice how your friendships shift. See how your relatives respond. And then compare the new people you attract in your life by doing this versus doing things the old way. True love can be as close as a star already fallen to earth.