Romantic love might be the thing humans chase hardest and understand least. In this episode, Cynthia Marks welcomes back Dr. Loren Weiner, the show's in-house expert on the work of Dr. Bernard Bail, to look honestly at why love goes the way it does, and why so much of it runs on a definition we inherited before we could speak. Loren makes a direct case: the "type" you're drawn to, the chemistry you can't explain, the person everyone says is perfect but somehow leaves you cold, all of it traces back to the imprint, the unconscious ball of a mother's own pain and limitation that gets passed to a child in the womb. If the love we first knew did not quite feel like love, that becomes the blueprint we carry out into the world looking for more of the same.

The conversation works through real patient dreams that show the pattern in motion: a woman who pictures herself eight months pregnant with a man who cannot show up on time, a dream that asks "am I a gold digger" and turns out to be about the riches of love rather than money, and a victory parade that signals she has finally found something that feels calm and good. Loren and Cynthia talk about proceeding slowly enough to feel what a person actually stirs in you, the difference between forgiveness and spiritual bypass, and the larger idea at the heart of Bail's work, that we arrive carrying a memory of pure love and spend our lives trying to find our way back to it. The hopeful part: when you dismantle enough of the imprint and discover who you really are beneath it, love has somewhere to land.

This is And Now Love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Please follow, rate, and share the podcast, and pass this episode along to someone who might need it.

0:33 — Welcome, Dr. Loren Weiner

3:46 — What the Imprint Is

10:44 — The Wrong Definition of Love

17:09 — Why We Hold On to Suffering

18:46 — Dreams of a Woman Afraid to Be Alone

27:05 — The Pregnancy Dream and the Man Who Won't Show Up

35:00 — Proceed Slowly and Trust Your Feelings

41:27 — Love, God, and the Soul's Curriculum

49:03 — Why We Suffer, and Changing the World

53:19 — The Victory Parade Dream

57:28 — Getting Truthful About What Wasn't Love