[Help] Why is love spells so frowned upon?

[Astralwitch]

Just wondering everyones opinion.
It seems like out of all the spells one can do, love spells are among the most controversial and always big warnings.
Do people have any experiences to share good/bad?

 

[Morell]

Post automatically merged: Friday at 8:58 AM

The girl is enchanted and in the moments when she snaps out of the spell, it is shows how she is in terror of what is forced upon her and screams and begs for him to release or kill her to free her from this kind of life when nothing she does is what she does, just her body...

 

[HoldAll]

The idea to employ love magic against a specific person is often born by desperation when the person planning to use it can't think straight anymore, is unable to correctly gauge the situation, and recklessly prepared to make any sacrifice to achieve his or her aims. Frequently such attempts are extremely heavy-handed (see Louvre Doll & PGM) and designed to blast through obstacles where none exist in actuality, or are at least not as formidable as they seem. Love spells are most often about possession, not seduction. The aim is to win control over a person, everything else is secondary. "If only I could have him/her, I'd be finally happy!", that kind of illusion.

Blowback can come in the form of obsession. Without a love spell, you may meet an even more interesting or desirable person but once it's been cast, chances are you'll develop tunnel vision and be like on hot coals the whole time, anxiously waiting for any small sign that your magic has worked, failed, may begin working, etc. while life passes you by. Anybody who's ever been in a doomed long-distance relationship will agree - it's as if other potential romantic partners didn't exist.

It's really better to conjure for success in love in a general way, for becoming more attractive or charming, else you might miss out on more suitable candidates around you.

 

[Aeternus]

The idea to employ love magic against a specific person is often born by desperation when the person planning to use it can't think straight anymore, is unable to correctly gauge the situation, and recklessly prepared to make any sacrifice to achieve his or her aims. Frequently such attempts are extremely heavy-handed (see Louvre Doll & PGM) and designed to blast through obstacles where none exist in actuality, or are at least not as formidable as they seem. Love spells are most often about possession, not seduction. The aim is to win control over a person, everything else is secondary. "If only I could have him/her, I'd be finally happy!", that kind of illusion.

Blowback can come in the form of obsession. Without a love spell, you may meet an even more interesting or desirable person but once it's been cast, chances are you'll develop tunnel vision and be like on hot coals the whole time, anxiously waiting for any small sign that your magic has worked, failed, may begin working, etc. while life passes you by. Anybody who's ever been in a doomed long-distance relationship will agree - it's as if other potential romantic partners didn't exist.

It's really better to conjure for success in love in a general way, for becoming more attractive or charming, else you might miss out on more suitable candidates around you.

I agree. What I would add good besides success for love in the general way, is also finding someone that shares common interests with you and is suitable for you on the spiritual side as well.

What I mean by this is that another problem with the love spells approach, besides obsession, is that they are also way too focused on the physical / sexual side of things. There are multiple categories that make one person connected to another, and one thing is their shared interests; if one who knows computers A-Z meets someone who doesn't give a damn about them, that conversation won't be engaging at best.

And the other thing is the spiritual resonance, where we talk about to meet a partner that doesn't belittle us based on the spiritual practices we have (i.e. considers their path as better than yours), or that discriminates based on your spiritual path (witchTok and other cringe stuff comes to mind when talking about this), and also is not proselytizing (either on the atheist side or ultra-religious side). The partner should be supportive and also open to receive new spiritual perspectives, add their spiritual contribution when needed to support the other mate and so on and so forth.

 

[Tryp]

^ which, in the case of what we all agree would be a good use of love magic, can be very easy to implement in a conjuration like "I ask that you help me find the right partner" or "a healthy and fulfilling partner to have in my life".

 

[solxyz]

The problem with the dominant discourse on love magic is that the notion of "free will" or "autonomy" is BS from the start. It doesn't exist. If it did, we wouldn't be able to "override" it. In reality, our thoughts, feelings, desires, inclinations, and so forth result from complex causes and conditions, completely interwoven with our environment - both current and historical - and are constantly being revised through new experiences. Influencing people is part of life. I'm trying to influence you right now. Specifically, I'm trying to "override the freewill" by which you might have otherwise turned away from certain kinds of love magic. If you've ever gone to a job interview and tried to put your best foot forward, you were trying to override the interviewer's freewill decision to hire someone else.

This isn't to say that any kind of spellwork you want to do is inherently ethical. Trying to make someone love you by locking them in a dungeon and giving them Stockholm syndrome is not ethical, and the magical version thereof is also not ethical. It is also not to say that any given love spell is a good idea, strategically speaking. If someone is really just not into you, you really are better off finding someone else. But there are lots of situations that are much messier than that.

I don't know why love magic has been singled out for disdain, when so many kinds of magic involve trying to change other's attitudes and dispositions toward us: business and career magic, courthouse magic, in fact in basically every part of our life the way that other people are relating to us is one of our biggest concerns and there is magic around that.

 

[Beyond Everything]

You can do whatever you have the power to do. If people truly glimpsed how predatory the universe actually is, they would be quite discomfited.

The reality is someone advanced on the path is not going to be performing love spells on someone. For one thing, in real advancement you'll be naturally getting quite a bit of interest from others as your aura and 'subconscious' are cleaned out. More importantly, needing the love of someone else is a dependency, and dependencies and advancement are at odds with one another.

 

[solxyz]

dependencies and advancement are at odds with one another.

Nonsense. We are fundamentally relational beings and dependency is structural to our existence. Any "advancement" that thinks it is getting away from dependency is just strengthening some kind of dissociation or some narcissistic shell.

This is not to say that all experience of need is healthy. Consider the simpler case of food. We do actually need food, and it is healthy for us to experience a need for food. There are however people who experience an unhealthy need for food - an experience of need in excess of their actual need. At the other end of the spectrum there are people who experience an unhealthy aversion to food or a desire to be independent from food.

The case of love is not so different. Our social needs are part of our biology and our orientation toward meaning calls for placement within a system of meaningful relationships. Romantic love in particular tends to touch into early childhood emotional patterns, where most of us carry some degree of wounding. Our experience of need for a particular romantic partner is often result from unhealed or incomplete early childhood emotional process, in which our actual need was for healthy love from our parents. The projection of these unsatisfied needs onto a romantic relationship creates a lot of problems, nevertheless the healing of these inner wounds generally does require require relationship of some kind.