ON LOVE
Valentine’s Day has always haunted me.
It was never the sweet, movie-like day most people picture. For me, it was a quiet, creeping feeling that settled deep inside, almost like a curse. In my family, it wasn’t about roses or romance. It was about silence, absence, and the kind of heartbreak you learn to expect before it even happens. As I got older, I started to expect pain on this day, sometimes even welcoming it. When it came, I told myself it was fate, something written in the stars or woven into my family’s story. Whether it’s astrology, inherited memory, or just the way expectations meet reality, I’ve realized that my urge to understand love is also a need to break away from what I’ve been told it should be.
Love spells have been around much longer than Valentine’s Day, Christianity, or even the word “love” as we use it now. In a recent podcast episode, I explored erotic magic, looking at rituals and beliefs found in the Greek Magical Papyri and later grimoire traditions. I wanted to understand the techniques, intentions, and emotions of the people who left behind these lasting records of their desires.
Today, you can walk into a bookstore or scroll through TikTok and find plenty of spellbooks that claim to help you find your twin flame, reclaim your sexual energy, or attract the right person. But when I read many of these books, often written by white Western authors who turn centuries of mysticism into Instagram trends, I don’t feel empowered. I feel unsettled. It’s not because I think magic is wrong, but because love isn’t something we can summon without also facing the questions that come with it: Who gets to define love? Who benefits from the spells we cast? What happens when desire gets mixed up with possession?
Maybe that’s why I’ve always been drawn to characters in love stories who aren’t clearly good or bad. They make us question our beliefs, love deeply but sometimes destructively, and struggle with the weight of connection. We celebrate them in books, in the rise of Dark Romance on BookTok, and in social media reels. On screen, characters like Joker and Harley Quinn, Damon Salvatore from The Vampire Diaries, and Christian Grey from Fifty Shades of Grey are messy and magnetic. They reflect our confusion about love. The lovers who betray, the witches who cast spells, the vampires who take just enough to keep you alive — these archetypes aren’t warnings anymore. Now, their chaos is something we admire.
We want love to save us, excite us, and take over our lives, but we rarely stop to ask if we even know how to feel it without turning it into something to sell. Love has become a kind of economy. It’s something we buy on holidays, show off on social media, or try to create with step-by-step spells. Somewhere along the way, we stopped sitting with the raw, scary, and beautiful truth of what it means to be vulnerable with someone else.
I don’t write as an outsider. I write from my own experiences with love, loss, and complicated intimacy. I meet people where they are, not where I wish they were, because that’s how I learn what love really looks like. Not the polished, social-media version. Not the one in wedding vows or dating profiles. The real thing. I’ve learned that love doesn’t always mean commitment, and intimacy doesn’t always lead to connection. Sometimes, it’s messy and transactional. Other times, it’s sacred and silent. In a culture where marriage is still a milestone and parenthood is expected, we’re also living in a time when sex work is common, intimacy is found through apps, and porn is easier to access than real conversation. Somehow, love is everywhere and nowhere — shown in public but misunderstood in private.
I’ve come to see that love and magic have always been closely linked. From ancient erotic spells to today’s ideas about manifestation, love magic tells us more about our desires than our logic. Sex magic, often misunderstood and commercialized, offers a path not just to pleasure but also to power, and with that comes responsibility.
To understand where today’s ideas of sex magic come from, we also have to look at the people who shaped its modern form. Two of the most prominent voices in early 20th-century Western occultism, Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley, offered very different visions of what love, sex, and power could mean. Fortune saw erotic energy as something sacred and orderly, rooted in mystical polarity and divine union. Crowley, always the provocateur, pursued will, ecstasy, and breaking taboos as a form of liberation. I am drawn to his intensity and irreverence, but I approach it with caution. I’m not here to follow either of them blindly. If anything, I’m trying to find what Fortune and Crowley couldn’t agree on. Why do we still chase possession? Why does love remain the greatest mystery of all? For me, writing about love, much like practicing magic, isn’t about denying control. It’s about learning when to let go, when to take charge, and how to move through its currents with clarity. Love is messy and full of contradictions. Maybe that’s where its deepest magic lives: in the tension between surrender and control, between longing and certainty. In that space, we find a spark—not of fantasy, but of something real — that inspires us.
