“Come on in,” she coos through the radio in that trademark dusky voice. “It’s time to relax and unwind — to leave the cares of the day behind you. It’s time to love someone.”

It’s time to slip into Delilah’s world, a schmaltzy, airbrushed place where love is all that matters, although it’s often tragic or just out of reach. But we seek it despite the pain, because when love comes, as she likes to say, “it’s so stinkin’ worth it.”

For her predominantly female audience, Delilah Rene’s show is the comforting auditory equivalent of chicken pot pie, a silk floral arrangement or an ’80s-era stenciled wallpaper border. Women say “hubby” here, and “stud-muffin,” and rarely fail to mention their gratitude for God’s blessings.

A regular thing

De-liiii-lah … The unmistakable lead-in to the show wafts every weeknight from her studio near Seattle to 222 stations nationwide, making her the most listened-to woman on the radio. An estimated 8 million people a week tune in to hear the self-described “Queen of Sappy Love Songs” play cuts such as “That’s What Friends Are For” and “Hopelessly Devoted to You.” She reaches out to the lonely drivers and overworked moms, shuffling requests and dedications between second helpings of empathy and homespun advice.

It seems safe to assume that one doesn’t become a ubiquitous expert on affairs of the heart by spending a lifetime as an emotional idiot. But tune in long enough, and you’ll hear the radio star (born Delilah Luke the day after Valentine’s Day 50 years ago) drop hints about how she has made every mistake in the book, how unlucky she has been with men and how ironic it is that so many millions turn to her for advice.

Consider: She has been divorced three times. One marriage lasted six weeks.

Talk to former colleagues such as her old program manager, Jim Lamarca, and he’ll tell you about “the ongoing catastrophe of Delilah’s life.” You’ll hear about the “extreme highs and lows,” the turbulence and the breakdowns.

Steve Kenagy, the man who, with his brother Jerome, gave Delilah her first job in radio, will say it was all there from the beginning. She was 14 when she started working at their Oregon station, a natural talent with a penetrating, sugary voice.

“But she would get all crazy about some guy,” Kenagy said. “We’d say, ‘With your gorgeous voice and your creativity, the sky is the limit for you. … Don’t throw your life away chasing a boy right now.’”

But again and again, she would be overwhelmed by the compulsion to find love, or something like it.

Sit with the woman and she’ll run through the whole thing: the doomed marriages, the 10 children — three biological, the rest adopted — the drama and dysfunction.

But Kenagy was wrong about something. The boy-chasing didn’t portend professional implosion. He couldn’t have known that her full-throttled obsession with love would be the linchpin of her success.

“I think the saddest thing in the world will be for people who face their death and realize they never lived. That won’t be me,” Delilah says.

In the beginning

Delilah Luke would lie in bed with that AM radio as a kid in Reedsport, on the Oregon Coast, trying to pull in stations out of Portland and San Francisco. When her Girl Scout troop took a field trip to the local radio station, she came home with reams of teletype broadcast material. She read each sheet aloud to an imaginary audience, she says.

Every school report would be a variation on the same theme: “Your daughter is a delight to have in class; however, she has a problem with excessive talking.”

“I actually had a teacher tape my mouth shut with duct tape,” she recalls.

But in eighth grade, she won four out of five categories in a junior high oratorical contest the Kenagy brothers were judging. The next year, she started doing a weekly report for the station on the school. But it was apparent to the Kenagys that her motivation was as much about escaping a troubled home as it was about learning the radio business. Delilah, the second eldest of four children, says her strict father drank, and her mother had “issues with codependency.”

When she came home an hour past curfew the night of her high school graduation, she says, her suitcase was packed and waiting for her on the front step.

She enrolled at a community college in Eugene and worked part time at a radio station. She set off on both a personal journey and a professional one, journeys that would rival each other in jagged edges, tumult and felicity.

The men

Delilah’s taste in men — and people in general — tends toward the needy. “Delilah was always the kind who wanted to pick up the poor person, the underprivileged, kind of the down-and-outer, to get them on their feet,” Steve Kenagy says.

At 21, she married George Harris, a divorced man who also worked in radio. Her parents disowned her when they found out she’d wed a black man, she says. She eventually reconciled with her mother.

Throughout Delilah’s life, one craving has surpassed her hunger for romantic love: the desire for babies. As she wrote in her first book, “Love Someone Today,” even as a little girl she would pray that God would turn her favorite doll into a “real baby.”

Harris resisted the idea, but at 24 she gave birth to son Isaiah. In her telling — which is loud and still laced with anger — Harris walked out on her and their 10-month-old baby. “He’s cheating on me with a woman named Enid. Enid! Who the hell would leave me for a woman named Enid?” she shouts.

Good God

Religion wasn’t a part of her family life as Delilah Luke was growing up, she says. Her parents named their firstborn Matthew Mark Luke as a joke. They picked Delilah, the name of one of the most notorious women in the Bible, as a cheeky exclamation mark.

After her marriage died and her brother’s plane went down, she lay in bed with Isaiah one night, ravaged with loneliness and grief. “I had figured out,” she says, “that if I just turned the car on in the garage, we could both go painlessly.”

Out loud, she said: “God, if you’re real, I need to know.”

The next day, after stopping at Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle, Delilah says, she found a small red book under the windshield of her car. It was a tiny copy of the New Testament with a handwritten inscription: “Jesus Loves You.”

She went with a neighbor to church the next weekend, and felt as if everything the pastor said was directed straight at her. “And that was the day I gave my heart to God,” she says.

It was at church that Delilah met her second husband. She says they had a six-month “whirlwind romance” and were man and wife for six weeks before she had the marriage annulled. (She declined to provide the man’s name.)

Getting syndicated

By 1996, when she moved to Rochester, N.Y., for her first attempt at syndication, she and third husband Douglas Ortega were wed with a baby girl, Shayla.

The show started out on three stations and within a year was being carried on 12. A company called Broadcast Programming bought Delilah’s show the next year, took her back to Seattle and began marketing the program aggressively. In a little more than a year, she could be heard on more than 200 stations throughout the nation, with the lead-ins in each market tailored so that it always sounds as if Delilah was local.

“She is just an enormous talent. … Part of it is her unique ability to sound like she really gets, understands and cares about the person,” says Edie Hilliard, who was the general manager of Broadcast Programming, which was later bought by Jones Media. “And Delilah was able to match songs that had lyrical meaning to a particular caller’s issue — it resonated with listeners.”

But she and Ortega separated the following year, and in 2001 they divorced. She says she grew tired of being the family’s breadwinner. Ortega says that they made a joint decision to support her career over his and that their marriage foundered for other reasons, including their age difference.

She will say that her perspective on romance has changed a great deal over the years.

“When I was young, I thought romantic love was the end all-be all,” Delilah wrote in a follow-up e-mail. “That it was THE main thing you needed to have happiness and joy in your life.”

Now she tells listeners that searching for love is fruitless, but “if you’re in the business of living your life fully, love will come to you — so much love you won’t be able to even receive it all.”