The corpus of love charms examined by S.G. has been collected by Stefania Cristescu, during the 1931 summer transdisciplinary research campaign in Cornova–Bassarabia, involving over 50 specialists in social sciences, economy, medicine, literature etc. and led by sociologist Dimitrie Gusti. Due to the political changes occurring in Romania after WWII, it could not be published by Cristescu and was edited by S.G. fifty years later, in 1984 (Stefania Cristescu, Descântece din Cornova-Basarabia, Providence: Hiatus). In the present study, using syntactic, semantic and pragmatic arguments, S.G. demonstrates the autonomous character of love charms with respect to the other two main categories represented in Cristescu's corpus, namely charms for healing and charms for the prosperity of the household. The study then presents the basic functions of the 21 love charms attested in the over 100 charms found in Cornova. These allow to distinguish between: 1. Charms for love and beauty; 2. Charms to find one's fated partner; 3. Charms to bring the fated partner to one's home; 4. Charms for hate and 5. Charms to undo hate. The charms belonging to these five operational categories are discussed in turn, both at the level of their formulas and of their techniques. Finally, S.G. demonstrates the ways in which reading charm formulas can allow us to detect a number of implicit magical gestures and actions that were not mentioned by the informants.