Weird ways to find love

October 7, 2022 10:47 AM

Per some articles I've seen recently, what are some strange/"lucky" things people do regarding a certain object/location to find love? Such as this "groping a statue to find love" article in the NYT or writing letters to a love tree in Germany. Just wondered how often stuff like this comes up around the world.
posted by jenfullmoon to Grab Bag (6 answers total)

Fascinate the woman with cheese. It would work for me

And of course, catching a bunch of flowers tossed by a bride
posted by Jacen at 12:50 PM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was watching somewhere street in NHK world in which they mentioned some women throw stones at the saint at the San Anton Chapel in Mijas, Spain to find boyfriends.
posted by SunPower at 1:41 PM on October 7, 2022

Flower petal love diviniation goes back to at least the 1800s

Consult flower petals.
This game, sometimes called the daisy oracle, goes all the way back to medieval times, and it's about as simple as love superstitions get: Pluck a petal and say, "he (or she or they) loves me"; pluck another and say, "he loves me not." Repeat. Whichever one you end on when you run out of petals should be taken as the absolute truth about that person's feelings for you.
The oracle became so prominent that it even got a shout out in Goethe's Faust in the 1800s. Some say it's specifically French in its origins, but it's hard to say if that's true or just yet another old wives' tale.

Also listed: love diviniation by consulting chickens.

Love Magic and the Dead

According to Lady Jane Francesca Wilde (1888), a particularly potent Irish love charm involved dead bodies. The charm instructs women to tie a piece of skin from a corpse’s arm to the person they want to love them. It needs to be tied on while this person is asleep, and then removed before they wake up. The woman also needs to carefully preserve the skin to retain her lover’s ardour.

If that wasn’t enough, you could also put the skin strip under your head while you slept so you would dream of your future husband. According to Lady Wilde, a serving girl tried it for a laugh, only to find she dreamed of her master. When the lady of the family died, the serving girl then tried the ‘tie dead skin to the arm’ trick, and the master married her within the year. Trouble was, a year and a day after the wedding, a fire broke out in her bedroom. It destroyed the strip of skin, breaking the charm and turning the master’s love for her into hate.

It’s still preferable to Tinder.

...

An Italian Love Charm
A dispatch sent to the Oakland Tribute from Amalfi in Italy referred to a nearby grotto used in love magic (Loomis 1956: 134). Called “the Grotto of the Pirate”, the folklore advised single girls to go there by moonlight. Once there, they needed to throw three pebbles at a particular rock. Surprisingly, they didn’t need to hit it, though apparently, it was useful “to recite the name of a likely young man or two during the pebble tossing” (Loomis 1956: 134). The dispatch noted that older people in the area commented that girls rarely needed to return a second time to the grotto.

Also: love diviniation by seeing wild birds,
posted by sebastienbailard at 5:12 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

It’s not quite love, but rubbing the crotch of the statue on Victor Noir’s tomb in Père Lachaise is supposed to bring you a good sex life (and/or fertility, which for some people is the opposite).
posted by babelfish at 10:35 AM on October 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: babelfish, that's exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of. Heh heh heh. Like the Blarney Stone of love.

I'm still cracking up at the cheese thing, though!
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:08 PM on October 8, 2022

In Finland (and other places in Scandinavia, I think), women pick flowers and put them under their pillow so they can see their future husband in their dreams (or, alternatively, you look into a well to see the reflection).

And there's a place in Rwanda where you hug a tree at night, ideally naked, to find a partner (turn on subtitles).
posted by snusmumrik at 2:13 AM on October 10, 2022