Author Barbara Bérot knows how dramatic love can be. Her debut novel, When Europa Rode the Bull, is an erotic tale of betrayal and loss.

Its recently released sequel, Lies & Liberation: The Rape of Europa , deals with the chancy and often fickle nature of love and commitment, and what can happen when a man and a woman – married to other people – rediscover the abiding passion of their lives.

Bérot bills herself as a philosophical type when it comes to love and offers expert advice on soul mates, risk-taking and how to overcome past relationship crap for a better future.

Q: The term "soul mate" gets tossed around a lot, but what exactly does it mean?

A: For most people, when you've found your soul mate, you feel a connection like no other. That person just feels different and right. When I met my husband, it felt like the easiest, most comfortable and most fun I had ever had.

I feel that you have to be ready to meet your soul mate. If I had met my husband years ago, it would have never worked. I was a different person back then – insecure, needy and confused. I probably would have chased him away somehow or sabotaged the relationship little by little. When we did finally meet, I had done a lot of work on myself.

Q: How can risk-taking lead us to better relationships?

A: When you take risks, you enter into unexplored areas eyes wide open and take in all the newness around you and eventually become more at ease and confident and content as the situations become familiar.

As you assume these new characteristics, they become part of your personality and are traits that come across in your relationships with others. As odd as this may sound, people often feel safer with risk-takers, because they know that those kinds of people know how to land on their feet if a particular situation does not work out ... and they also know how to try again!

Q: How can a person use trauma from past relationships to become a stronger person?

A: The most important thing is to learn from your past mistakes or losses. It is how we use what we learned from these experiences that can make the difference in our futures.

We can choose to look inside of ourselves, take responsibility for our actions, process what occurred and decide what can be done to make things better the next time. In doing this, we can move on from the pain of the past because we realize and believe that the past does not equal the present or the future.

Are you Leah's soul mate? E-mail her at lashafer@gmail.com.