Are you a hunter or a gatherer? A pursuer or a distancer? Are you a pusher, a puller, a thinker or a feeler? Or are you Venus trying to get close to Mars?

Whether you’re in a relationship and want to make it better, or you’re just looking – and looking and looking – for your soul mate, you can take heart in knowing there’s no dearth of advice in the North Bay. We seem to have more than our share of love gurus, each with a different take on what makes aching hearts tick.

Mill Valley, of course, is home to that maharishi of mating, best-selling author John Gray of “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” fame and Tara Fields, who has a private marriage and family practice in Marin County, and talks about relationships every Saturday morning on KRON.

We asked them for their riffs on relationships:

[Only the Tara Fields section has been reproduced here.]

Tara Fields

Going into a relationship thinking you’ll change the things you don’t like about the person later is one of the first pitfalls couples encounter, according to Tara Fields, a licensed marriage and family counselor in private practice in Marin County. Fields, who has a doctorate in psychology, also is a frequent guest on KGO radio and appears each Saturday morning at 9 on KRON.

“People want to believe in the fairy tale. They think: I will always be turned on. I will always be happy. The slippery slope is when what you are doing is making the other person responsible for your happiness. When you stop working on yourself, stop doing the things that make you happy, then you go into what I call ‘Flawomatic.’

That’s when you say; “Oh, god, I never noticed how he eats his peas. And what was I thinking, his nose is too big,” and all of a sudden you build a case and then you really do fall out of love.”

Fields dismisses the approaches that separate men and women into two different camps. But, she says, “women do have to accept the fact that we are different. We love to talk about feelings. It’s like a recreational sport for us. It’s like men watching football. It’s fun, and we can do it forever.

“But we need to be a little more compassionate with men. Even in the year 2000 men are still not encouraged to be intimate, they are not given the tools.”

But men are learning, she says, citing an increase in men seeking relationship counseling. Eighty percent of her clients today are men, and she says, it’s the men who are calling to set up appointments for relationship counseling.

“In every couple I’m seeing right now, it’s the women who want out.”