Happy Valentine’s week! I am a big fan of celebrating everything celebratory and spending enough time doing it. I believe in doing all 12 Days of Christmas plus Epiphany, and celebrating your birthday for its entire month. Valentine’s week seems good, too.

This afternoon, my daughter, Adair, and I went to Barnes & Noble where we gave each other the quiz questions from Dan Carlinsky’s little book, Do You Know Your Husband? It was fun. I mean, do you know if your partner puts on his (her) socks in the sock/shoe, sock/shoe, or sock/sock, shoe/shoe fashion? Where was your father-in-law born? What was the name of your truelove’s childhood pet?

We decided that we both know our husbands well enough to be well matched but not so well as to lose the mystery. And that led us to discussing the soulmate question. Do soulmates exist? Do you just get one? Can you have platonic soulmates in your really good friends and favorite teacher and your grandmother who’s gone now but still seems to be guiding you along? We decided that they do exist, and you can have quite a few — both in the case of remarriage (or another permutation on falling in love again after you’ve done it before), and having soul-deep closeness in non-sexual but oh, so divine, relationships.

Still, this is Valentine’s week. We’re thinking about romantic relationships — the one we’re in, or the one we wish we were in. To that end, if you’re looking for a soulmate, I just read the perfect book: The Soulmate Secret: Manifest the Love of Your Life with the Law of Attraction, by Arielle Ford. (Arielle was the guest on my radio show, “A Charmed Life,” on January 28. You can listen on the archives at HealthyLife.net.) Like so many women (and men, for that matter), Arielle had used spiritual tools and practical savvy to create an enviable life. He had tremendous professional success in the p.r. and publicity field, working with luminaries such as Deepak Chopra, Neale Donald Walsch, and her sister, Debbie Ford. Then it hit her: why not use the same principles and practices that had made for a dazzling career to draw the ideal partner into her life? It worked, and she shares in the book detailed instructions for preparing your body, mind, soul, spirit, and home to invite this partner into your life.

Arielle’s definition of a soulmate is: “someone with whom you share a deep and profound connection and feel that you can be completely yourself.” She has some probing questions for whether or not you’re ready for your soulmate to surface. Among them:

• Is there someone I am still in love with?
• Is there someone I am still angry with, feel betrayed by, or haven’t forgiven?
• Is there room in my life for another person?

Her practical suggestions for getting ready to attact the love of your life include writing a “soulmate list” (what are you really—really—looking for in this person?), and making a treasure map (also called a vison board): a collage of pictures, words, and phrases cut from magazines that act as a visual prayer and a mental nudge. She advises looking at your treasure map daily, but not putting it out where someone who could diss it would get the chance.

She shares this prayer: