iS LOVE REALLY much LOVELIER THE SECOND TIME AROUND?

But is it a good idea to go back to the past in an effort to create your future? Phil Collins certainly seems to think so, he recently confirmed that he is back with his third wife Orianne Cevey.

The couple split up in 2008 after nine years of marriage. Phil and Orianne have since reunited and have been living together in Miami for the past six months.

Other star couples who have got back together successfully include, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas, who married in 2000 and split in 2013, only to reunite in 2014, and Prince William and Kate Middleton who took a break back in 2007 and later credited it with strengthening the bond between them. They went on to marry in 2011 and have two children together.

Sometimes a break-up isn’t the end of the story. Couples split for all kinds of reasons, it’s not always because they stopped loving each other.

Take the relationship with Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, it wasn’t a diminished love that kept them apart, it was the constrains of the monarchy. Yet their love survived under incredible pressures and circumstances. They came through the other side, although sadly Princess Diana became a casualty of their unbreakable connection.

Another flaw that some lovers are guilty of is once they have the person, they stop doing all those things that got them their partner in the first place.

Sometimes a separation can give a couple space to reassess their priorities and work on personal issues.

Expert relationship advice for couples reuniting suggests they replace the criticism in their relationship with curiosity. Couples should get curious about themselves, their partner and what led to the break-up in the first place, rather than finding fault with each other.

It’s also recommended each person should look at their own behaviour and see how that contributed to the cause of pain in the relationship.

Both partners should discuss how they would like the relationship to be and what they could both contribute to create the sort of relationship they envisage having together.

If a romance is to work a second time around, then a plan needs to be put in place and work needs to be done by the couple. There is little point in going back into a relationship with great intention to work harder at it, without a strategy for putting right what went wrong.

I for one am a great believer in second chances, because it has worked out well for my husband and me.

We met as teenagers and became engaged twice to each other over the period of a decade, but due to outside pressures and family commitments we couldn’t get things to work out. He was offered work abroad and I didn’t want to go with him as I was caring for my sick mother at the time.

We also had some other issues that were making us both unhappy. Splitting up seemed the only answer. We didn’t keep in touch. Then 14 years after parting my lost love contacted me again and within a few months we got engaged for the third time and a year later, we were married.

Thirty-five years after our first meeting, we have now been wed 11 happy years and have a gorgeous son. Before we decided to reunite we had a long discussion about what had and hadn’t worked within our relationship, and did all in our power to change those things before re-embarking on our romance. Being more considerate of each other’s needs than we were the first time around has made things better for us.

A break can most definitely be beneficial to a couple, it may help them see that a world without the other in it, isn’t the right world for them at all.

To anyone yearning for a second chance I would say, as long as both are free to do so, then try to rekindle that love. You never know if you don’t try. It may not be too late to find happiness in a second chance romance. In my experience, true love doesn’t have an expiry date!