Business Innovators Radio - Arielle Ford – Love Alchemist – Mark Stephen Pooler

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Arielle Ford is a love alchemist, bestselling author, and passionate guide for women ready to find love, keep love, and be love. A longtime “student of love,” she’s led transformative workshops at Esalen, Omega, The Chopra Center, and beyond. With 11 bestselling books—including The Soulmate Secret, Wabi Sabi Love, and Turn Your Mate Into Your Soulmate—Arielle shares the secrets to deep, lasting love. Her debut novel, The Love Thief (Hay House, July 22, 2025), is a mesmerizing spiritual romance-thriller set in India. MGM has optioned it for a series and describes it as Eat, Pray, Love Meets Dirty John. www.arielleford.com Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/arielle-ford-love-alchemist-mark-stephen-pooler

Welcome to Business Innovators Radio, featuring industry influencers and trendsetters, sharing proven strategies to help you build a better life right now. Welcome to Brilliant Business TV conversations with leading experts in business. I am your host, Mark Stephen Pula. We have an incredible guest on the show today, all about love with Ariel Ford. I'm really looking forward to this interesting conversation today. We're streaming on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube. We're also on the E360 TV network. We're also on business innovators radio network, MSPNewsGlobal.com, and many platforms. So let's bring in our incredible guest, Ariel Ford. Ariel, welcome to Brilliant Business TV.

Great. Nice to meet you, Mark. It's lovely to meet you too. I'm looking forward to this conversation. We all want to know more about love. So as a love alchemist, a best-selling author, and a passionate guide for women ready to find love, I would like to know how you define love, Ariel. Well, most often people think of soulmates when they think of romantic love.

And I believe that a soulmate is first and foremost, somebody you can completely be yourself with, somebody with whom you share unconditional love, and when you look into their eyes, you have the experience of being home. Now that said, even if you're not in a romantic relationship, chances are you have many, many soulmates in your life that fit that description. It could be your parents, your siblings, your best friends, your next door neighbor, your business, partner, your cats, your dogs, or whatever pets you have, all fit into that. So I try to get people to expand their thinking about what love is because love is much more than a romantic feeling. In fact, I believe the way to know if you really have love is that love is a behavior.

It's more than a feeling. It's a behavior. It's a choice. It's a decision. It's a way of being. it's an action. So there's no shortage of love in the world. There's just a little shortage when people think that they have a love deficit because they don't have a husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, sort of thing. Yes, and I think it's about finding love within yourself so that you can give love as well, Ariel. And how would you say what a soulmate is?

Well, if we're talking about romantic soulmates, then it's somebody that you choose very, very carefully because it's a long-term commitment. So you want somebody with whom you share mutual respect, shared values, you have a shared vision for the future, you want the same sort of things in your life, and you're willing to understand. that the good feelings of being in love are really just your brain on drugs. Those feelings are going to come and go. And the stuff that comes in the beginning when you're in this brain on drugs situation of being in love, that only lasts anywhere from three months to if you're really lucky, three years. And then it disappears.

So you want somebody with him, you have connection, compatibility, good communication, And really, I think the most important part is shared values and a shared vision for the future. Beautiful. And you say that the Beatles song, all you need is love, is a big lie. Tell us what you mean by that, Ariel. Because anybody who's ever been in a committed long-term relationship knows that love is just not enough, right? If you don't have this connection with your partner, if you don't have good, clean ways to communicate, then you could say, well, I have all these feelings of love for you or for them, but end up getting divorced. I don't know what it's like in the UK. But here in America, we all know that 50% of first marriages end in divorce. But what nobody else seems to know is that 62% of second marriages and 73% of third marriages end in divorce.

So it's not always the person. It's the quality of the relationship. So the song is nice. All you need is love. It's nice. And it's not true. I love it. And I think sometimes as well, Ariel, sometimes,

someone you love can bring out some of your wounds that you need to heal within yourself so you can both take each other on a beautiful journey of reflecting each of his doubts, each other's fears that we have to heal within ourselves to bring that connection closer together. What do you feel about that? Well, that's absolutely the truth. And Harville Hendricks, who's one of the world's leading love, marriage and relationship experts, and Oprah calls him the marriage whisperer. I've had many conversations about this with Horrible Hendricks,

and he says the whole purpose of marriage of taking sacred vows with another is to create a container so that you can re-experience the wounds of your childhood caregivers. So the purpose of marriage, is really to be in a safe place where all your core wounds can come up for healing and you can heal each other. Beautiful. I absolutely love that. Why do you believe happiness is the wrong goal for us to have? Well, I spent a lot of years chasing happiness and studying happiness. And what I ultimately discovered is that happy is one of those good feelings. Like being in love is a good feeling and happy is a good feeling.

But the truth is when you're chasing happiness, it's based on a person, place, thing, or experience. Like, oh, I'll be happy when I get the new Jaguar, or I'll be happy when I get the new job, or I'll be happy when I get the new mate. But the truth is, if you lose that, then you're no longer happy. So I learned about a word in Sanskrit called Santosha, which I absolutely love. And Santosha means how you get to utter contentment so that you're always in a place of contentment as opposed to happiness. And the happiness will come and go. But when you choose to live in utter contentment, which means, you know, okay, something really bad happened today. I've lived long enough to know that the bad stuff eventually heals and goes away.

It's not going to last forever. Can I find something good in this moment? Can I find a reason to be grateful and have contentment? So I always choose contentment over happiness. I hear you and I think it's like the word peace, actually, peace over happiness because peace comes from within yourself, whereas happiness you're normally chasing it on the outside. So I totally get what you're saying I love that word as well.

Today is a good day to talk about peace given what's going on in the world and bombs being dropped all over. You and I have no, there's nothing we can do about this. But can we embrace peace within ourselves, within our community? Can we find a way to be peaceful,

to be content in spite of the chaos and the craziness that's out of our control? I love it. Great, great words there, Ariel. Now, let's get on to your amazing novel, which we can see there as well. Tell us about your novel, The Love Thief. Well, it's a romantic spiritual thriller that has a very juicy revenge subplot and a happy surprise ending. And I had already written 11 nonfiction self-help books when the story. for this book came to me. And I did not want to write a novel. I never once in my life had the thought, oh, I should write a novel. That never happened. But the story just kept coming and coming and coming, and I realized that I was just meant to write it. So it's about a 38-year-old single woman whose entire life she's wanted the white picket fence. She wanted the husband and the two kids and the golden retriever and she had this whole plan for her life, but now she's 38 and it hasn't happened

and she's panicking. And then suddenly one night while she's working, she's a chef and a cater, she's working at this big gala, she meets him. He appears and he seems to be everything she ever wanted until he breaks her heart, crushes her dreams, steals her money, almost kills her, she realizes that she's made a very big mistake. So it's just been optioned for a series by MGM. So it's going to go into production. And people will be able to watch this if you get Amazon Prime. I don't know if you have Amazon Prime where you are, but we have it here.

It's a streaming service. And the story really takes you from this woman's most heartbreaking moments to when she goes to India to attend. cooking school and starts to have all these magical, mystical healing experiences and our whole life changes. And, you know, even men enjoy this book, even though it's sort of a rom-com sort of thing, the men that have read it have told me they really enjoy the storyline. And my executive producer says, it's really eat, pray, love meets Dirty John. I don't know if you know who Dirty John here, but it was a big thing.

scandal several years ago about a man who was dating women online and then stealing all their money. So that's what the love thief's all about. Sounds amazing. How can people get a copy of that, Ariel? The easiest way is just to go on to Amazon. So you can get the paperback or the audiobook, which is fabulous. The audiobook's really great too. It's very easy to find and to get. and it's simply called the love thief. I would encourage everyone to get to Amazon and go and get the copy of the love thief.

Ariel, I thoroughly enjoyed having a conversation with you today. I know people connect with you, Ariel. Who would you ideally love to reach out to you, to connect with you and to go to your website? I would say anybody who's interested in love and not just romantic love, because my motto is I help people find love, keep love, but most importantly, be love, how to be love to yourself and to everybody else. And I have a newsletter that I send out for free every single Tuesday.

So if they just go to my website, they can sign up for the newsletter, stay in touch. And then there's also a section on the... the website called Free Stuff, and there's exactly what it sounds. There's lots of free stuff in that section. I would encourage everyone to connect with Ariel, AurealeFord.com. That's Aureelford.com. Ariel, I fully enjoyed our conversation today. It's been really incredible.

I love what you're about. I love how you're educating the world on an amazing topic. And I encourage everyone to go and get a copy of the love fee for you. as well. Thank you for being my guest today. You're welcome. Thank you. The pleasure's being all ours. Thank you everyone for joining us for brilliance, business TV. Conversations with leading experts in business. Until next time, bye for now. Thanks for listening to Business Innovators Radio. To hear all episodes featuring leading industry influencers and trendsetters, visit us online at businessinnovatorsradio.com today.