The Lovers
The Lovers card symbolizes deep connections, attraction, and the power of love. It represents vulnerability, trust, and the magnetic pull towards others, not limited to romance. The card challenges you to love yourself before seeking love from others and asks profound questions about commitment and acceptance. In its inverted form, it warns of the dangers of unfulfilled love and the pain that can arise when self-love is absent.
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Description of the Card
The Lovers. Aw, come on. What a gorgeous image. The sun is shining high and bright, the Angel of the Outlandish Flaming Hairdo is giving a blessing, with a fog machine, the Tree of Knowledge (complete with serpent) on one side, and a burning tree on the other. Hello, overt biblical references! How ya doing? You gotta love it. The important figures here are the man and woman. Naked and beautiful and drawn to each other.
The Importance of Vulnerability
The man is looking forward, the woman is looking up and the Angel of OFH is closing its eyes in a benediction. The most important feature in this card is that the people are naked. They are vulnerable and exposed, and they have to trust that each means what they promise to the other.
Magnetic Attraction
The word that comes to my mind when I see this card is “magnetic.” Have you ever looked at someone and immediately felt your heart drop into your shoes? Have you ever felt so compelled to touch someone that you had to physically restrain yourself from doing so? Have you ever been unable to break eye contact but not sure why? You just grin and accept the fact that your life is going to change.
Collecting Your Tribe
That’s this card. It doesn’t even have to be romantic, although that’s most often the case. Some people who walk around on this earth are Tribe. They’re yours. You might take a couple of decades to find them, but once you have, they’re yours. It’s as if they were never not in your life, and they fit in your nook perfectly. It’s kind of awesome, really. Walking around, collecting your people—I’m a fan. When this comes up in a reading, it’s about attraction, sex, self-esteem, and confidence. It’s about rearranging your life to center around joy.
The Question of Commitment
The Lovers card asks a question: Will you be there for me? Even if I screw up? Even if I hurt you? Even if I accidentally show you all of the terrible things that I think lie inside of me? Will you love me then? When this card shows in a reading, it doesn’t represent those who are dating or those who “like-like” each other. This is about love. The kind of love that inspires poets and that holds us to our highest ideals. Dan Savage has a relationship theory called the price of admission. In it, he talks about relationships being based on us believing the best about our partners. Eventually we’re farting around each other, but when you love someone, you pretend every day that your partner is the better person they presented at the beginning of the relationship. We become better people than we actually are by living up to the ideal us that we have shown to our partners.
The Love of Fate
This card is the love of sonnets. Of fate. Of forever.
The Lovers Inverted
It’s difficult to find happiness when you don’t love yourself. Sounds clichéd and silly, but it’s true. Before you can truly love someone else in a healthy way, you have to love yourself first. You have to be The One that you’re looking for. If you are broken and pull other broken people to you, you try to complete yourself with parts of them, or vice versa. This doesn’t work. That painful thing is that love exists there, but it doesn’t have a firm ground to stand on. Sooner or later, the parts of them that clung to you fall away, and you’re bleeding again. This can be heartache, sadness, and the pulling apart of two souls. Sound heavy? Damn straight. The Lovers isn’t a card for the faint of heart. It hits you like a ton of bricks.
The Pain of Incomplete Love
If the Lovers were separated, pieces of themselves would be torn away; they would be incomplete and wounded. The inverted Lovers is honestly a bit creepy. Impulsive, destructive, damaging to oneself and to others. What happens when you love someone so very much, and they don’t love you anymore? What happens when you adore your job and you get fired? That love curdles. It turns into something sticky and heavy, and it is so damaging. It’s that thing which causes our brains to turn off and our ears to close to reason. This is Romeo and Juliet, kids. This is that love that means that everyone is dead at the end of the play, and no one is happy.
Tarot Of The Unknown
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