Getting Real About Love and the Deck
I’ll be honest with you all. For years, I thought I knew what “powerful love advice” looked like in a Tarot reading. I was doing readings for friends, pulling the typical spreads—Celtic Cross, maybe a three-card relationship pull. The advice was always fluffy: “Work on communication,” “There’s a new beginning coming.” It felt good, but it didn’t stick. It wasn’t life-altering.
The truth is, I was talking the talk, but I wasn’t walking the walk. I hadn’t truly tested the power of the cards until my own life completely imploded. That’s usually how the real wisdom shows up, right? Not when things are easy, but when you are lying on the floor wondering what the heck just happened.
My partner and I were together eight years. We owned a place, had pets, the whole nine yards. Suddenly, bam. It blew up. It wasn’t a slow fade; it was a detonation. After the dust settled, I realized I didn’t need a prediction about whether we’d reconcile. That was superficial crap. I needed to know what structural flaw in my own approach to deep connection had caused the seismic failure. I needed the brutal, transformative truth.
Shredding the Rulebook and Starting the Practice Log
That day, I grabbed my favorite deck—the Rider-Waite, because you need foundational honesty—and I tossed the whole “relationship spread” rulebook out the window. I decided I wasn’t seeking answers; I was seeking patterns of hard reality.
I started logging. I created a dedicated notebook just for this intensive study. I didn’t ask, “What does he think of me?” I started asking operational, heavy-duty questions:
- “What belief structure must I destroy to allow true commitment?”
- “What is the most painful, yet necessary, lesson required for me to build enduring love?”
- “Where am I mistaking attachment for partnership?”
I pulled one card for each of these three questions every single morning for six months straight. It was relentless. I documented the card, my immediate gut reaction, and then revisited the entry a week later to see if life had delivered on the sign.
Identifying the True Heavy Hitters
The conventional wisdom is that The Lovers is the ultimate marriage card. It’s not. Sure, it’s about union, but often it’s about the choice of union, or even superficial romantic bliss. I found that The Lovers showed up in my log frequently when I was obsessing over the wrong person. It was often a sign of temptation or indecision, not long-term stability.
The truly powerful cards for deep, committed, enduring love—the ones that gave me a real gut punch of necessary advice—were rarely the obvious ones. They were the cards of structure, destruction, and spiritual maturity. I started seeing these patterns emerge consistently:
The Hierophant (V): This wasn’t about organized religion, as many think. In the context of long-term love, this card screamed structure and tradition. It showed up every time my log revealed I was fighting against established relationship norms—shared finances, joint planning, formal commitment. It was the universe telling me: You want deep love? You need deep agreements. You need a framework. I hated this card at first because I saw myself as too free-spirited for “rules,” but it was the key to stability.
The Tower (XVI): Everyone dreads this, but in my practice log, The Tower was the ultimate sign of necessary clearing. It wasn’t advice about impending doom; it was advice about foundation failure. Every time I pulled The Tower in response to “What must I destroy?”, it meant the relationship I was analyzing (or the version of myself in that relationship) was built on lies, fear, or insecurity. The interpretation wasn’t “Your relationship will end,” but “It must end in its current form for anything real to emerge.” This card made me quit chasing things that were obviously broken.
The Devil (XV): Often interpreted as temptation, for deep love advice, this card was a warning about binding attachments and codependency. I realized through my logs that when The Devil showed up, I was sacrificing my own identity for connection. The advice wasn’t “Don’t cheat,” but “Break the chains of expectation and neediness.” It forced me to look at where I was holding onto a person out of comfort or fear of loneliness, not genuine respect.
The Empress (III) and The King of Cups (or sometimes Wands): These two were the signposts for true flourishing. The Empress wasn’t just motherhood; it was nurturing abundance and security within oneself. The King of Cups represented the mature, emotionally controlled partner—or the mature emotional self I needed to become. When I finally started pulling these two consistently, my life wasn’t fixed, but my internal system was rebuilt.
The Outcome of the Practice
It took the failure of my biggest relationship to force me to stop treating Tarot as a parlor trick and start treating it as a raw, personal operational manual. My log filled up. I stopped asking the shallow questions and started demanding the hard answers the Hierophant and The Tower always delivered. It wasn’t about predicting who I would marry; it was about interpreting the signs that told me why I kept failing at commitment. This whole messy, painful practice changed how I approach commitment today. You can read all the books you want, but until you log the cards that show up when your life is truly on fire, you haven’t really learned how to interpret the most powerful signs.
