By Zela Feraco | The Working Notes | Category: Spellwork Guidance
When people search for directed love magic, magic intended to influence a specific person, they typically encounter three types: love spells, come to me spells, and obsession spells. These terms are used interchangeably by some practitioners, which creates significant confusion. They are not the same thing. They produce different effects in a specific person’s experience, and choosing the wrong one for your intention does not just fail to produce what you wanted. It produces something else entirely.
This post is a practitioner’s honest account of what each type of directed love magic actually does, the energetic mechanisms behind each, and how to think clearly about which one matches what you genuinely want.
A Preliminary Note on Ethics and Directed Love Magic
All three of these categories involve directing magical intention at a specific person without their explicit consent. That is a fact worth naming plainly rather than hedging around. Different magical traditions hold different views on whether this is appropriate. Some refuse all directed love magic on consent grounds, others work with it freely, many sit in positions of considered nuance.
My framework is sovereignty-based. I believe you are an adult with the right to make considered choices about how you pursue what you want, including through magical means. In addition my Vindicta Collection, which includes directed love workings, is designed specifically to operate in these grey spaces and is governed by a clear code of conduct. I also believe that clarity about what you are doing, and why, is an essential part of doing it well. Magic cast from honest self-knowledge is more effective than magic cast from confusion or self-deception. This post is designed to support that clarity.
Love-Drawing Magic: Working with Feeling
Love-drawing magic, sometimes called heartstring work, heart-binding, or simply a love spell, works on the emotional and romantic experience of a specific person. Its mechanism is amplification and activation: it draws out feeling that exists at some level, warms what is dormant, and creates the energetic conditions in which love between two people has room to develop and deepen.
The key word is amplification. Traditional love-drawing magic does not create romantic feeling from nothing. It works with what is genuinely present: latent attraction, unacknowledged feeling, the genuine romantic potential of a real connection, and draws that feeling into expression. This is both its power and its practical limitation: where there is genuine energetic basis to work with, love-drawing magic can be remarkably effective. Where the basis genuinely does not exist, it has very little to amplify.
What love-drawing magic produces in a person is an increasing awareness of feeling toward you that they may not have fully acknowledged or acted on. A warmth when you enter their awareness. An emotional openness in your direction specifically. A growing recognition that what they feel for you is more significant than they had permitted themselves to realise. The development of this feeling tends to be gradual rather than sudden. It moves at the pace of genuine emotional experience rather than the pace of a hex.
Love-drawing magic is the most romantically centred and relationally oriented of the directed love categories. It works on the heart and on feeling. It is not primarily about movement or behaviour. Someone under a love-drawing working may or may not immediately act on what they feel, particularly if they are emotionally avoidant or the situation is complicated. The working draws the feeling; what they do with it involves their own agency and circumstances.
Come to Me Magic: Working with Movement
Come to me magic has roots across multiple folk magic traditions, including Hoodoo, European folk practice, Stregheria, and various African diasporic traditions all have versions of it. Its mechanism is magnetic attraction at the level of attention and action: it creates pull that draws a specific person toward you through their thoughts, choices, and physical behaviour.
Where love-drawing magic works on feeling, come to me magic works on movement. The distinction matters. A come to me working draws someone toward you who may not yet be feeling what you feel. It operates at the level of action before the deeper feeling has necessarily caught up. Someone under a come to me working finds themselves thinking of you when they pick up their phone, gravitating toward reaching out, making choices in your direction, showing up in the spaces where you are. The pull becomes increasingly difficult to ignore until it manifests as action.
This makes come to me magic more immediately behaviourally visible than love-drawing magic. The effects tend to manifest as changed behaviour, contact, presence and movement, before they necessarily manifest as changed feeling. Whether feeling follows movement depends on the person and the situation.
The most complex application of come to me magic involves third party removal: where an existing relationship or significant influence is creating resistance to the directional pull. Traditional come to me work applied against an entrenched third party situation is working against active counterforce. The pull you are generating is competing with an existing bond. Third party removal addresses the obstacle and the attraction simultaneously, which is why it requires more complex and sustained magical work than a straightforward come to me working.
Obsession Magic: Working with the Mind
Obsession magic works on the mental and psychological layer: the level of thought, preoccupation, and involuntary attention. Its mechanism is the creation of a persistent energetic thread that keeps you front of mind in someone’s awareness at a level they cannot easily control. You become the thought that surfaces without prompting. The name they compare new connections to. The person they dream about. The presence in their head that persists regardless of what they are doing or who they are with.
Obsession is categorically different from love and it is important to be honest about that. Love is a relational experience involving genuine care, mutual recognition, and chosen connection. Obsession is fixation, a compulsive quality of attention that is not the same as feeling and does not necessarily lead to it. Someone who is obsessed with you may pursue you, contact you, and be unable to stop thinking about you while simultaneously being emotionally unavailable, unsuitable, or a genuinely difficult presence in your life if they arrive.
Obsession magic has a legitimate place in magical practice and serves real human needs: the desire to be unforgettable, to shift a power dynamic, to reclaim agency in a situation where you were treated as disposable. It is most appropriate when the goal is explicitly preoccupation rather than love: you want someone to be unable to forget you, to compare everyone to you, to regret what they walked away from. What you do not necessarily want is a relationship with this person, or you do but you understand that their obsession with you is not a substitute for their genuine emotional availability or compatibility.
The practical consideration worth sitting with before commissioning obsession magic is this: are you prepared for the specific experience of this specific person’s fixated attention? Obsession works. When it lands, it produces exactly what it says. The question of whether you actually want that, from this person, in your life, at this time, is worth honest consideration.
Combining Directed Love Workings
These three types of magic are not mutually exclusive and are often more effective in combination than alone. The most commonly useful combinations are:
Love-drawing alongside come to me: this produces feeling and movement simultaneously. The person develops genuine romantic feeling toward you and acts on it. This is the most complete combination for someone who wants both the emotional depth and the behavioural response, and for situations where one without the other would feel incomplete.
Heart-opening magic preceding love-drawing: where someone is emotionally avoidant or shut down, directing romantic feeling at a closed heart has limited effect. Heart-opening work loosens the defences first, creating emotional availability. Love-drawing directed into that opened space has significantly more to work with. For avoidant connections, this sequence is often the most effective approach.
Come to me alongside obsession: this produces movement driven by fixation. The person cannot stop thinking about you and acts on that compulsion by reaching out and showing up. The combination amplifies urgency.
Choosing the Right Type: A Practical Framework
The simplest way to identify which type of directed love magic is right for your situation is to answer this question as precisely and honestly as you can: what do I actually want this person to experience?
If the answer is: I want them to develop or deepen genuine romantic feeling for me: love-drawing magic is your working.
If the answer is: I want them to move toward me, reach out, show up, stop being distant: come to me magic is your working.
If the answer is: I want to be the person they cannot stop thinking about, whether or not we are in contact: obsession magic is your working.
If the answer involves all three, commission all three, with a practitioner who can align the petitions so the workings reinforce rather than compete with each other.
And if the honest answer reveals that you want something more than any of these can provide: genuine mutual love, chosen connection, a real relationship with this specific person. It is worth sitting with what magic can and cannot do before commissioning anything. Magic creates conditions. It amplifies what exists. It draws, pulls, and preoccupies. What happens within those conditions still involves two people’s choices and natures.
The most effective directed love magic is commissioned from a place of honest clarity about what you actually want. Not what sounds most justified, not what is most intense, not what you think you should want. What you genuinely want. Start there.
In my practice I work with all three types of directed love magic as well as the full range of self-directed and relational workings. If you are uncertain which approach fits your situation, reach out before purchasing.Â
I would rather spend five minutes helping you identify the right working than have you commission the wrong one. View the full love and relationship collection
