I guess everyone thinks their love life is complicated. Joshua says that – he says however complicated it seems to you, he’s seen worse. Maybe he has. I guess he probably has. That didn’t stop my love life feeling complicated to me, and I told him so. My husband is in the army. He’s away for weeks at a time. Sometimes he’s away months at a time. How could a love spell work on him if he wasn’t even around to see me? Complicated, huh?
I guess I should follow tradition and back it up here and say something about why I needed a love spell on my husband. Given that he was, you know, my husband, and not some unobtainable unrequited love. That part is simple. He didn’t love me anymore. At least he didn’t love me enough. My sister, who is also my closest friend, thinks that he had a woman in every port. I adore my sister, but I think she was confusing the army with the navy.
I know what she meant though. Still, I don’t believe my husband was seeing anyone else. His deployments were not in those kinds of places. Anyhow, whatever else had gone wrong with us, he’s not the type to be unfaithful. He would divorce me before even going for a drink with another woman.
It wasn’t other women the problem. It was the job. He was married to the army. He loved the job more than he loved me. He loved everything about it. The camaraderie, the structure, the work ethic, and most of all he loved the travel. He’s always been a wandering soul, and the army gave him unprecedented opportunity to criss-cross the globe.
He’s always had that wanderlust, and when we got together I had romantic notions of us sailing the world together. Only I’m the opposite of the army. I’m not structured or organised, and to be honest I’m quite lazy. It’s kind of amazing we ever got together in the first place, come to think of it.
But together we were, and for a while we were amazing. I didn’t mind moving around living on different army bases, it was kind of exciting. I thought, yeah, this is good. He’ll do a few years, we’ll save up and by the time he’s done we’ll have enough to buy ourselves a bolthole somewhere and we can spend nine months of the year on our travels. That’s the nice thing about the army — they don’t pay great but you’re housed so it’s easy to save if you’re disciplined about it, and I might be lazy and unorganised but I’m good with money.
Things didn’t work out that way. He never showed any signs of quitting. When I asked him outright when he was going to leave, he looked at me like I was mad and said he was a lifer. I said but what about our plans to travel? He said the army was his plan to travel. I said but what about travelling together? By now he was going off on deployments leaving me behind on my own. He said this was his life and would always be his life.
I couldn’t understand what had happened. Except, as I thought about it more and more, I came to realise he had never promised anything about leaving. It had all been my idea and I had assumed he would leave. The plans had all been in my head, never openly discussed.
This was devastating. My marriage, my future, was a fairytale in my head, not a reality. We had different life goals. We should never have married.
I went into a deep, deep depression. It lasted months. More than a year. As you can guess, that took even more of a toll on our marriage. When my husband came back from deployments, eager to see me, I was morose and poor company. I neglected my duties as a wife. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he got his pleasures elsewhere. He certainly wasn’t getting them with me.
He went away on a long deployment — four months — and I thought that was it. I convinced myself I’d never see him again. I’m ashamed to say that in my lowest moment, I succumbed to the advances of one of the young squaddies on the base. It was a stupid, stupid mistake and I will never forgive myself.
My friends were worried about me, and my sister insisted I move in with her for a while. She was worried I’d do something stupid (more stupid than sleeping with a squaddie), and refused to leave me on my own. She’s the one who suggested a spell. The funny thing was she didn’t suggest a love spell, she said I should get a spell to cheer myself up, to start over.
That’s what got me thinking about spells. I started looking around the internet and thinking about love spells to get my husband to love me more than his job. For a while it boosted my spirits. I thought I had things figured out. But then I went back into an even deeper depression because I felt so guilty about wanting to tear him away from what he loved.
That’s what made my life so complicated, you see? I loved my husband, and I knew he loved me. But he didn’t love me enough. My selfish need for him made me want to take him away from a job he loved. How could that be right?
This all came pouring out one Prosecco-fueled night as I cried on my sister’s shoulder. She was very good about the whole thing. To my surprise, she said she thought it was a good idea. She said why not try a spell? If my husband loved the job that much, she said, then no spell was going to tear him away from it. If such a spell succeeded, then it was meant to be. I hadn’t thought about it like that, but she said fate would do what fate would do, so there was no harm in trying.
That’s when I reached out to Joshua and asked for his help. I was quite sure he would say no, that there were people who needed his help more than me, or that he was too busy, or any other excuse. But he said he’d accepted my request and had booked me in for a spell casting. I was over the moon. My sister noticed and asked what had gotten into me.
Waiting for the casting was hard, but waiting after the casting was even harder. Joshua was great and explained the process, keeping in touch before and after the spell, offering tips and advice, and he was always patient and took the time to answer my dumb questions.
One of those dumb questions was how would I know this had worked? My husband was halfway around the world. He was hardly going to come home with a bunch of flowers, a bottle wine, and some skimpy underwear in a bid to relight the fire of our marriage. Joshua gave me a long reply that can be summarised as you’ll know it when you see it.
He was right. I knew it because my husband called me from his deployment, which he hadn’t done in weeks. It was a video call. He was alone. He told me how much he loved me and how he couldn’t get me out of his head. The call took a turn and became one of those types of video calls you hear about teenagers making, if you catch my drift.
After, when we were both done, I figured he just needed a release and that I wouldn’t hear from him for weeks again.
But I was wrong. He called every day, and not just to get off, but actually to talk and laugh with me.
It was amazing. After a few weeks of calls like that I felt closer to my husband than I had in more than a year. My yearning for him was stronger than ever, and he told me he felt the same.
Then the guilt started again, because he began talking about leaving the army. He said he couldn’t bear being away from me.
I hadn’t expected it to happen that fast. Actually I hadn’t expected it at all. I went for the spell thinking best case, we might get back to how we were before — intimate when he was home, and communicating regularly when he was away. Now here he was offering so much more.
Again my sister came to my rescue. She is such a lifesaver. Having someone who’s known you their whole life, who you trust completely…it’s something I can’t imagine being without. If anything ever happened to her…I don’t even want to think about it.
Anyhow, she gave me the whole fate speech again and said if it was meant to be it was meant to be, and who was I to interfere with the hand of fate and so on. I said I had interfered pretty good when I got the spell cast, but she said that was fate showing me the way. I said how did I know fate wasn’t now telling me I’d gone too far? We went back and forwards like this until we’d got through another two bottles of Prosecco, by which time I was too far gone to care anymore. My husband wanted to quit the army and be with me, and that’s all I ever wanted.
This was all a year ago. It’s taken me this long to write my story because, well, like I said, I’m disorganised. And because this last year has been a whirlwind of romance and joy.
I feel bad for writing that because 2020 has been a shitshow for most people. We’ve had some bad times too, and I lost a member of my family to covid. That painful episode aside, it’s been wonderful.
My husband is no longer in the army, and despite lockdowns and everything else, we’ve managed to buy our little bolthole. Obviously the travelling the world thing has had to wait, but that’s fine. We’re just happy to be in each other’s company again.
We’re like a couple of teenagers. Every day I wake up next to him and I know he loves me as much as I love him, and I think, whatever shit the world throws at us, we can get through it together.
So thank you, Joshua, for all that you did. You saved my marriage and my sanity. My husband says he’s never been happier, and I believe him. Maybe it was fate, maybe it was all your doing. Whatever, I’m just so happy it all turned out the way it did.
