Five hours after drinking Monday morning coffee at Ellen’s house, her beau looked at her picture on his office desk and frowned.  Yes, she was pretty, but somehow not as gorgeous as he’d remembered; smart, but somehow that wasn’t so important any more.

And why did she so often seem annoyed when they were together, as if he were doing something wrong?  He deserved someone who would treat him better than that. He dithered about whether he should call it off or try to talk it over with her; but at their next meeting they were both so palpably unenthusiastic that the parting came naturally.

A month later, he got a call from Ellen; or I suppose I should admit it was I who got the call, since I was that party guest who was the subject of her appalling experiment.  “We need to talk,” she said.

Is there a man alive who doesn’t dread those words from a woman whom he had recently left?  Does she want me back?  Could she be pregnant?  Is she suing?  I expected the worst.  But I certainly didn’t expect the tale she told me.

Of course, at first I was sure she was lying, but the story did explain what in retrospect seemed so mysterious:  Why did I fall in love so fast and so deep?  Why did I fall out of love equally quickly?  Why did she yield to my approaches but, as I now saw with my newly cleared judgment, never seem happy that she yielded?  And her willingness to tell me this story, a story that didn’t reflect well on her, vouched for her credibility:  Why would she say all this, unless, as she explained, she felt she owed me the truth?

Once I came to believe her, I naturally began to hate her for what she had done to me: for the humiliation of making me beg her when she’d tried to break up with me, and for the deeper humiliation of tampering with my free will.  But after a while, I saw the mitigating circumstances.  She didn’t know the love charm would work (what sane person would have?).  She wasn’t trying to get anything out of me, not money or even affection.  She spent lots of time and money to undo what she had done.  She didn’t have the heart to just leave me heartbroken, though other women might have.

And, let’s face it, she gave me her body, and few men can really resent a woman for that.  It was (and is) a very nice body, and nothing feels as good as sex with someone with whom you are completely infatuated—even if in retrospect the infatuation was a fraud.

I was not, after all, so badly treated by Ellen Silber.  We are no longer friends, and never will be.  We probably never even were.  But I still think well of her, and wish her well.

She no longer thinks of her old friend Michael with the same affection, and I am sad about that.  She has not yet found a man she can love, and I am sad about that, too.  Sometimes I think that what she really needs is a charm to make herself fall in love with someone, not the other way around.

I have of course changed the names to protect the guilty; but I felt the story had to be told, so that people would learn its lessons:

There are three reliable love charms in Los Angeles, and that’s three too many.

Don’t perform experiments if you might not like the results.

And if you find yourself gripped by sudden, inexplicable love, think carefully about what you’re doing—as if you can.