MAGICAL LOVE
"People in the Muggle World have questioned your relationship with Ron, many thinking you'd have been more suitable for Harry. Can you address that, as well as magical love in general?" - A Reader
"As far back as we can trace magic, there have been Muggles, and as far back as we can trace Muggles, there has been magic." — Professor S. Binns
I imagine you've never heard of me, unless you've read Ms. J. K. Rowling's books about my friend, Harry Potter. She told the truth, mostly.
But she didn't tell all of it. How could she. Could anyone tell your story in seven books? No.
And the story that nobody can ever tell perfectly is the story of love.
Even Ms. Rowling seems to feel like my relationship with Ron doesn't quite fit the story: and maybe we didn't explain that to her properly. Maybe explaining would have opened wounds that were better left alone. But more likely, to explain would have been to explain the nature of magic itself, which was beyond the scope of her books.
But I need to set the record straight, for my own conscience, and also because I like it better if everybody knows the truth.
Where to begin?
Probably best to begin with magic itself, because in the end, it's magic that explains it all.
It's like this: a Witch or Wizard isn't completely different from a Muggle. If that were so, Muggles would have no interest in our story.
But rather, Magical people and Muggles have bodies and brains and (usually) obey the law of gravity, and even Muggles have a rudimentary form of magic that's underdeveloped but the same force as the one in us. Just as an athlete has remarkable control over a well-developed body, so a Magician has remarkable control over a uniquely well-developed magical faculty. If you've ever loved, hated, feared, or experienced intense desire, you've tapped into the magic within you. You might even have cracked the shell around yourself and felt it as a force that influenced the things around you. That's magic. We're just able to extend that out beyond ourselves very powerfully, and, with training, to control it.
When a Witch or Wizard wants something (or someone!) very powerfully, magic radiates out from him or her, influencing nature itself. It doesn't just grab the desired person or object and summon it, or life would be total chaos. But certain susceptible things can be charmed, cursed, hexed, jinxed, or transfigured.
"We vanished the sheets" is something a witch or wizard might say to indicate a night of unrestrained passion, and it isn't always merely a figure, as intense passion can provoke unintended magic.
And because she didn't explain that in much detail, Ms. Rowling had to seriously simplify for her readers what dating and romance and sex was like at Hogwarts. Madame Pomfrey had on hand sedating potions for "Hereos," or the sickness caused by desire. All the teachers, prefects, and heads of houses were skilled at detecting (and very wary about) students in whom desire for a thing or person had become too strong: it could create chaos, if the magic in the sufferer was strong. Fred and George's love potions were not just novelties, but seriously subversive, if you understand what happens when magic and desire collide.
For this reason, unlike with Muggles, it's rather pointless to deny that one is gay or lesbian or "differently gendered," as the Muggle academics say. Since desire is often manifested in the physical world through magic, Wizards don't bother with such taboos, as one might as well deny the rain.
I should say here that this explosion of desire was a problem in all houses, but particularly in Hufflepuff and in Slytherin.
Ambition and desires were actively cultivated in Slytherin, but centuries of experience had refined the art of controlling the inmates' magic: Slytherins took a lot of pride in their special ability to walk a line between desire and chaos. Ms. Rowling paints the Slytherins as highly distasteful, which they were, but also as unprincipled, which they most certainly were not. Professor Slughorn, as she paints him, was probably closer in character to most Slytherins than was Draco. Indeed, if a Hogwarts student showed enormous trouble controlling his magic, he most often found himself being mentored (at the request of a teacher) by an older Slytherin.
The Hufflepuffs are harder to account for. But my own hunch is that they were so accustomed to sublimating their own desires in favor of duty or work or family that, when it finally erupted, it was generally a shock. Hufflepuffs were probably the best of the Four Houses at deferring the moment at which Hereos would attack, but once it did, they were pretty helpless for a long period of time. So for example, when Harry and I went under the Time-Turner in our third year, Rowling paints the Hospital Wing as mostly empty except for Ron, but in truth, we had to duck under a privacy curtain: that late in the term, the place generally held a recovering Hufflepuff or two.
And you should understand this. When a witch uses a spell, she doesn't shoot it out of her wand like a bullet or a laser from a gun. Sometimes when reading Ms. Rowling's excellent books, I'm dismayed that spells seem to be "aimed." That's not quite how it works. Perhaps the most accurate description of how it really works is the account she gives (which I believe she got from Kingsley Shacklebolt himself) of Dumbledore's defeat of Fudge, Dawlish, and Umbrage in his own office: power radiated from him, violently. Dumbledore had enormous control over his own powers, but even he was concerned that he had inadvertently hurt those he had not intended to hurt. Less disciplined wizards were, thankfully, generally less powerful.
Magic rises up in us, and it comes out of us. And how it does that depends on, well, us. A great wizard has great power, but mostly he has great control over his power. Fear or excitement can call up lots of power, but it can also make it hard to control. More than once in our battles with Death Eaters, Friendly Magic tripped us up. It was never entirely safe standing next to Luna. for instance: she was one of the most powerful young witches I ever met, but she had no control, or desire for control, over her own magic. To her magic was like a violent storm with herself at the center, and the wilder it felt, the better she liked it. By the time of the Battle of Hogwarts, she had thankfully tamed herself a little, but to this day she remains fond of the wild and unexpected.
The Death Eaters, when they could manage it discretely, tended to favor standing a few yards behind Voldemort's right shoulder when he was angry: his wand-hand tended to swipe across his body,lashing his spells like a whip, and it was said that you could feel the force of his curses less from that position: they called it "the eye of the storm," and you could measure their seniority by who got that favored position.
Hopefully, by now, you'll see where I'm going with this.
Love among the magical is a serious business. When we desire someone, it calls up magic. Muggles of course comprehend this, because it does the same in them, both exciting the world around them and threatening to run out of control; but as their magic is not exceptionally strong, the damage owing to mistakes and mischance is relatively small.
But you don't want to be around a heartbroken Witch. Voldemort's mother was not the first or last Witch to submit to the magic that springs up with love and desire, nor was she the last to lose her mind along with her ability to control it.
The truth is, Harry and Ginny were both a little crazy that way. They love the experience of hurtling through life, out of control. Probably because Ginny was so tightly controlled by Molly, and Harry so restrained by the Dursleys, they match this way, temperamentally.
The objection that some readers seem to have to Ron is that he's a little boring. As Ms. Rowling describes him, he is a bit. And in real life, compared to Harry, he's fairly sedate and plodding as a Wizard. But the truth is, I don't like to unleash my magic on a man without keeping some control over it. Lots of harm comes that way. And I don't like a man to unleash torrents of magic on me, either: as thrilling as that can be when he has control, it's unsettling, and no way to live a life or raise children. It's not that Ron is not powerful as a Wizard: it's that his power is carefully controlled, which is more attractive to me than mere power, just as a well-proportioned body is more attractive than one that's laden with muscles that seem to have no real purpose.
Trust me, Ginny and Harry have given each other plenty of scars that don't show on the skin, and have had to learn painfully to control their passions and the magic they unleash together. I had discovered fairly early that falling in love with Harry would have required a considerable expense of energy: his magic in such times was reckless, explosive, and difficult to control. I had no wish to spend my energy and my magic that way.
Harry had enormous power. But he wasn't quite… safe. He didn't have a lot of control over it, even after Voldemort fell. And only somebody as reckless as he was could be happy living with that.
Which I discovered when he and I were, very briefly, together. But that's a story I asked Ms. Rowling not to tell, and I expect Harry did too. It's better as it is.