The Lovers Card Meaning
We all come to relationship with the desire for wholeness. We seek to balance what is missing in us in another. We ache for the feeling of being seen, heard, and to belong. What is not taught to us is the fact that we are seeking to relive patterns once deemed love by our child mind and repeated throughout life in a state of ambiguity and constant repetition. We are the gardeners of our own demise when we look to another to fill the empty places deep in the psyche of our humanity.
Another person cannot fulfill you unless they too have a dynamic that is fraught with illusions. We project ourselves onto one another in a dance we call love until there is the first breaking point, when the illusion of the other’s perfection is dashed and we are brought back to our aloneness. As we are alone on earth we are too seeking to be not alone and we ache to merge body-mind and soul with the Lover.
Originally this card was named, “The Decision.” Why would it be called that? Because when we choose to merge our lives with the Lover, we are choosing to sacrifice our ego to the flame of union. In true union we must part ways with our identification of being alone, of being right, and of being wrong about what love and relationships really mean. For to be merged with another is not to be one, but to realize our aloneness in oneness and to accept our ideas and delusions will be reflected finally back to us through true love and not be taken away or solved for us by our Lover. We wish to release responsibility for half our lives to give the other half our burden but in reality we are not sharing a burden as much as we are staring into the mirror of our own false ideas about love and relationship and self when we commit to being in a true relationship.
We cannot merge with the other until the mirror of our own reflection is accepted and healed and then we see the other as who they are and we see ourselves as who we really are. That is the resolution of The Lovers, we are merged with ourselves through other. Then and only then we can decide if the delusions we have of love and union were keeping us in a relationship or if we want true relationship which is merging with ourselves to be whole for our Lover. When we are whole, we have accepted all of ourselves and chosen to love ourselves. From this state of self-love we are able to delight in the garden of The Lovers.
Fantasy is the source of great trouble and suffering when it comes to the Lovers card. For to fantasize about your lover either present or past, to fantasize about the future lover or of a lover that is not yours is to be a child living in a hall of mirrors. Love is the most practical of adult matters and most people will not realize this through their fantasy lens. So if you receive this card in a reading it is time to draw the mirror to your Self and begin to take inventory of what is reality and what is fantasy.
If you wish to find love, look in the mirror of your desires and the lists you make of your “ideal mate” and the theories you have of “soul mates” and begin to dismantle what is based on your values and what is based on your fantasies. Do you want an honest Lover? Do you want a successful Lover? Do you want a kind Lover? Take stock of these values and write out how you are living them—are you projecting what you are not owning onto the “other” or are you wanting to draw near more of the values you wish to emulate because you have experienced them deeply in your own life?
To merge your life with another is not to hand your inner work to them. It’s to share in the journey of your individual evolution and support one another along the way. You will not merge with the other, you will be alongside them as you both commit to your own self expansion and growth as you share in the responsibilities of living wholeness each.
To draw this card is to see the love within you is asking to be felt and experienced first for your Self, and then surrendered to the fires, your ego must burn fully in order for the truth of Love to be fully lived and experienced. When you are whole, when you can generate self-love, when you can express alone what you wish to express in union, then you are ready for this card to mean a mate and Lover is arriving or will be renewed. Until you have accepted yourself and your Self as whole and worthy of true love generated by you, for you, you will see this card as a seeking card when it is meant to be a mirror card.
The Lovers Card Symbology
Father Sky and Mother Earth in a dance of duality and reflection. We look to the Creator as the benevolent sun shining upon our darkest recesses and to bring them to light. When embodying the Earth we feel the darkness and dampness of the roots, taking hold of the underbelly of our unconscious. Together the masculine and feminine nature within each of us creates wholeness of our self-discovery and surrender. We pray to the sky as we dig deep into the recesses of our darkest shadowy selves, seeking to merge the Yin and Yang within us first and then to dance with the other in celebration of our wholeness.
