“He’s all I can think about, day and night. It’s becoming debilitating. It’s like a handicap. I can’t think straight. It’s affecting my work, my social life, my family, everything.”
That’s what Agatha wrote when she first got in touch asking for a love spell. The object of her desires, the man of her dreams (literally) was called James, and he had no idea Agatha even existed. At least that’s what it felt like to her.
Agatha’s situation was very common. In fact, about 40% of the people who contact me asking for one of my free love spells, ask me to cast on someone that they’ve not previously been in a relationship with. Ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends, and broken and failing marriages get all the press, but unrequited love can be every bit as painful as a broken relationship. Fortunately, there is a cure.
“He Doesn’t Know I Exist”
That’s what Agatha told me. I kept in touch with Agatha after her spell casting, so I went back to her recently and asked her to tell me a bit more about then situation at the time. We got on a Skype call and she was happy to talk. “We play tennis at the same sports centre. There are about thirty of us in the group and we go every Saturday morning. So I guess, yeah, technically he did know I existed because we’d talked, played against each other, and even played on the same side in a doubles match once. But it was like he didn’t know I existed. He didn’t look at me. I mean, really look at me.”
Reading Agatha’s words it’s easy to wonder why she was so in love with James when he was paying her no attention. Don’t you need to spend time getting to know someone to fall in love with them? How could she feel that way without having more interactions with him than just bashing a ball around a tennis court once a week? I put the question to her.
“Oh but I did know him. We did spend time together. But all that time was as a group, not just the two of us. You can get to know a person without it just being you and them. You can be with them and listen to them talk, see how they are with other people, hear a bit about their life, and totally fall for them. We might only have played one morning a week, but we would spent hours on the court, and usually most of the group went to the cafeteria for lunch together afterwards, and that’s when we interacted socially.”
Agatha said the more she found out about James, the deeper she fell for him. He was a vegetarian, like her. He didn’t drink alcohol, like her. He had two cats (she had one), lived alone, enjoyed running in the country, loved kicking autumn leaves, and his day job was as a teacher — a profession Agatha found admirable.
“If I could have written out like a CV for my ideal life partner, it would have been James,” she said. “He was everything I could ever have wanted. Oh, and he was easy on the eye too!”
A Common Effect
Falling for someone in this way is more common than you might think. Usually I see it happen in different circumstances — when someone falls in love with a celebrity. I don’t cast love spells on celebrities for a number of reasons. One of them is that usually a celebrity has two personas. There is the one they present to the public — the one the fans fall in love with — and then there’s the real them, the one only their closest friends and family get to see. Occasionally there’s little difference, but in my experience they can often be a world apart. When someone falls for a celebrity persona, they are falling for an image, a fake. That’s not to say the love isn’t real, it absolutely is. But in that situation it will always be an unrequited love because that person doesn’t really exist.
Cases like Agatha’s are much more straightforward. She knew James pretty well, she knew that what she saw was what she would get, if only she could get him. So my next question was, had she tried?
Another Problem
And this brings us to the other problem with situations of unrequited love like this. Agatha explains: “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do anything about it. I’m a shy person. I don’t have a massive social life or loads of friends. Tennis is the one thing that gets me out of the house, apart from going to work. I couldn’t put that at risk.”
I completely understood where she was coming from. If Agatha spoke to James, told him how she felt, she would be putting her place in the tennis group at immense risk.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying he would have thrown me out of the group,” she said, wanting to clarify. “He wasn’t in charge anyway, so he couldn’t have. But if he had turned me down, which seemed very likely because of how, you know, he didn’t know I existed, then how could I have gone back? How could I have looked him in the eye every week? I could have tried to avoid him, not gone for lunch with the others etcetera, but I couldn’t avoid him on the court. Sooner or later I’d have to play him, or play with him. It sounds so stupid when I say it like that, but it really was a massive worry. If I didn’t have my tennis group I’d be lost, spending my weekends sad and alone like Eleanor Oliphant.”
The Love Spell Solution
Normally one of my four criteria for accepting a love spell request is that the person doing the asking must have tried everything in their power to resolve the situation before they come to me. I get more spell requests than I can physically cast, so I only work for those who have already tried (and failed) to help themselves first.
Agatha’s case was an exception, and one of only very few I’ve made. I understood her predicament. Her feelings towards James were making it hell seeing him at her tennis group, but at the same time her tennis group was about the only thing keeping her sane.
“Yes, that’s exactly it!” she said when I put this to her. “It was killing me inside. It feels so dumb to say I was feeling like this because of a man, but people need people, I really believe that. I needed James. And I needed the group. I literally could not imagine life being worth living otherwise. It was leading me down a path of very serious depression.”
That threat to her sanity is why I accepted Agatha’s case despite her not having made her feelings known to James already.
Love Spells For Unrequited Love
The spell I cast is the same whether it’s for a situation like Agatha’s, a case of unrequited love, or for a situation where there has been a pre-existing relationship (perhaps even an on-going one). The goal is, after all, exactly the same: to make someone fall in love with another person. So I got to work and cast Agatha’s spell.
At first it appeared to make things worse, though I knew this was to be expected.
James Disappears
Agatha explains. “The Saturday after the love spell I was so excited I could barely breathe. I changed my outfit five times before before I went out to tennis. I wanted to look my best, but I didn’t want it to be too much. In the end I went back to my usual tennis gear because, well it would look weird wouldn’t it, turning up all dressed up for tennis! But when I got there, James wasn’t there.”
She was terrified the spell had done something bad. “My belly was churning. What had I done? Had I messed everything up? I dared not ask the others if they knew where he was because I felt as though they’d see my guilt. I could imagine them all looking at me and shouting ‘you did this!’ Crazy I know, but love makes you crazy, right?
I lasted an hour, but then I had to go to the bathroom to be sick because I was so scared. Someone heard me throwing up and suggested I head home. I was glad of the excuse to get out of there to be honest.”
James wasn’t there the next week either. Agatha was beside herself, as I can attest because I was on the receiving end of a barrage of emails.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” she said when I reminded her of this. “I was terrified. I stopped going in to work. I sat at home shaking, wishing I could turn back the clock and go back to before the spell had been done.”
A Good Sign
I took some time to explain to Agatha that Jame’s disappearance was a good sign. When someone thinks they know how the feel about someone else, and then that feeling is overturned completely and without warning, it can be a very disorienting experience. It’s like waking up one morning and discovering the world doesn’t work quite the way you always thought it did.
In these circumstances it’s a natural defensive mechanism to retreat, particularly from whatever is the cause of these sudden unexpected emotions. In this case, James was ‘waking up’ to his newfound love for Agatha; the intensity of this emotion that had come out of the blue scared him.
Seen From The Other Side
James knows about the spell now, and he very kindly agreed to speak to me about his side of the experience for this article. In fact he was on the same Skype call when I talked to Agatha.
“It really was like a bolt out of the blue,” he said. “One morning I’m going about my life, minding my own business. The next morning I wake up and it’s like I have this yearning, this hole in my life that has to be filled and that if it’s not I’ll never be happy again.”
James said at first he didn’t connect it to Agatha. “No, not at all. To be honest Agatha’s not someone I ever spent any time thinking about. I didn’t think about anyone at the tennis group except when I was there playing tennis, so it was nothing personal. They were just casual acquaintances. But when Saturday rolled round and this weird feeling of something missing was getting to be intolerable, it hit me. I was getting my kit together, looking forward to a change of scene and hoping it might take my mind off everything, when a picture popped into my mind. I imagined the group sitting in the cafe for lunch after our game, and in my mind’s eye one person came to the fore: Agatha. It was like someone knocked the wind out of my lungs. I don’t remember falling, but I remember finding myself on the floor of my apartment, dazed and confused.”
Revelation
James said that as soon as he had pictured her, he had known what this unpleasant feeling had been. “Everything made sense but at the same time nothing made sense. I loved her. I loved her. To be honest I had trouble even remembering her name, and yet now I could see her in my mind’s eye, and she was beautiful and charming and funny and a bit shy but in an endearing way. All the snippets of conversation we had shared came rushing back. I recalled the time we had played doubles together before, only it was like a movie not a memory because as I looked back at that game I was seeing a whole new Agatha. The way she moved, the way her hair bounced, the dimples on her cheeks, even tiny details like the way she had one sock slightly higher than the other. It was weird. I loved her.”
As you can imagine, this realization took some getting used to. It’s why James didn’t go to his tennis group that day. “How could I?” he said. “How could I go there and look at this beautiful creature? Surely she would see how I felt. Everyone would. I couldn’t let them see it, especially when I didn’t understand it myself.”
He spent the day examining his feelings, trying to understand them. Was he confused? Was this a manifestation of some other problem? He didn’t drink or take drugs, which ruled out the most obvious explanations. “I had to take time out,” he said. “I didn’t go to tennis the next week either because I was still getting to grips with the whole thing. It was all I could do to keep it together while I was working. My students still noticed something was up, I heard the comments in the corridors at school.”
Love, Requited
Eventually nature took it’s path, and James came to terms with how he was feeling. He had no choice, his love for Agatha was only getting stronger.
“Before, to start with, I thought oh, I’ll get over this. It’s a stupid crush like a teenager. Only I never did. It just got worse. No, wrong word. It got stronger, not worse, because it wasn’t bad, it was just…weird. Unexpected. When I came to terms with it though, I was faced with a choice: do nothing, and be torn apart by this gaping hole in my life, or talk to Agatha and tell her how I felt. The risk of telling her was that she would laugh in my face and I’d be embarrassed, but that was a risk well worth taking.
Agatha recounts what happened next. “The third week after the spell, I wasn’t expecting James to be at tennis. I assumed he’d left. Still nobody had said anything, and I’d decided I was going to throw it into the conversation over lunch. Just casually mention that he wasn’t around again and ask if he had left the group. Only when I got there James was there. And he was looking at me. Right at me.”
She says she felt a flush of embarrassment and almost turned around and went back to her car. But then she thought about the love spell and the fact he was there and looking at her, and she felt a spark of hope. “Was this it? Had it worked? There was only one way to find out! I walked in and said, ‘Hi, James!’ and gave him a big smile. And I kept right on walking to the changing room to get ready.
James was elated. “Oh yeah, elated is the word,” he said. “She was even more beautiful in real life than in my memories. And I was thinking, how come I never noticed before? I wanted to scoop her up and kiss her there and then, but you know, you can’t go around doing that sort of thing!”
“I wish he had,” Agatha said, interrupting him. “It would have made everything easier. As it was we had to get through three tennis matches and a lunch with the whole group before he could make his feelings known.”
“It was hard going,” James agreed. “I lost every game of tennis because I was watching Aggie not the ball! And then we had to sit through lunch and I had to join in the conversation and all the time try not to melt into a pile of goo every time she looked at me, which she did often.”
Finally the moment came, they were alone at last.
“I hung around as everyone was leaving,” Agatha said. “And James was doing the same thing. It was obvious, and it filled me with confidence. I was sure the spell had worked. Finally the last of the group dispersed and there were just the two of us in the cafeteria.”
“I said, ‘Can I walk you to your car?'” James told me. “And she nodded with this cheeky little grin, and my heart nearly exploded. We walked together. I tried to speak. I think she did too. We went outside. The sun was shining and the birds were singing, it couldn’t have been more perfect. We stood under a tree watching a group of kids play football on a field in the distance, neither of us making any move towards our cars.”
Agatha said, “And I kissed him! I still can’t quite believe I did it. It was totally out of character! I’ve never done anything like that in my life. But I was sure the spell had worked. I could see he was struggling to say something, and I felt sorry for him because this was my fault. And anyway, I thought it’s now or never. If he rejects me, so be it. My life is over anyway. But I have to know, and I have to know now. So I kissed him.”
“What a relief that was!” James said, giving Agatha a playful little nudge. They were both giggling by now, their laughs slightly metallic over Skype. “She took away all the stress, made everything easy. That kiss lingered, seemed to go on forever. I was in heaven.”
“We both were,” Agatha said. They looked into each other’s eyes and he gave her a peck on the lips before turning back to the camera and apologizing.
There Is A Solution To Unrequited Love
I told them there was no apology necessary, and soon after that we ended the call — I didn’t want to take up any more of their time. Because since then they’ve spent all the time they can together.
Agatha emailed me the day after that fateful day at tennis to report back that everything had worked out. She asked for my advice at the same time, wondering if she should tell James she had used a love spell on him. I told her that was her choice alone. I’m glad she did, because being able to share both sides of their story will, I hope, bring hope to other people who are suffering the pain of unrequited love.
If you’re feeling the way Agatha did, if you love someone but they’re not reciprocating your feelings, take heart from her and Jame’s story. Love spells can and do work in these situations. They can bring happiness where once there was despair. Unrequited love is not hopeless.