Helpful Tarot Love Readings

Whether you are a tarot pro, a tarot enthusiast, a tarot client, or merely curious, you know the trope. There is a perception that the primary consumers of tarot readings are the lovelorn.

There are real reasons for this. There are many, many cautionary tales of psychic addiction that stem from the pain of uncertain relationships and the false belief that a tarot reader can tell you, for certain, the destiny of your relationship. There are an equal or greater number of people who rely on wisdom from tarot to help them navigate difficult situations with great success.

We humans tend to over-spiritualize romance, often to our detriment. I think that is because so many of us are driven, either by hormones, societal conditioning, or genuine desire, to find a workable relationship. At the same time, workable relationships can be hard to find, and hard to maintain.

When an attraction or connection with another person catches us, it can feel spiritual, whether it is or not. That crush, or new relationship, or amazing sex, can be captivating. That sense of connection with another human generates for us all sorts of questions. Where better to take those questions than to your own tarot deck, to a friend with a tarot deck, or to a professional reader?

Skillful work with tarot can indeed help us with all aspects of navigating relationships. That includes finding love, choosing a partner, building a healthy relationship, ending what doesn’t work, healing problems in a long-term relationship, healing from a breakup, and handling the grief of widowhood. Yet, tarot in the hands of naïve or manipulative people can sometimes make things harder.

How Unskilled Tarot Hurts Us in Relationships

Sometimes people stay in abusive relationships because they believe that tarot told them they were meant to be together. Sometimes people mourn the ending of an unhealthy relationship because they believe tarot told them that they were soulmates, or that their lost relationship was their only possibility for partnership.

I have seen readers encourage clients to believe that a spiritually ordained ‘soulmate’ relationship would be without any conflict or difficulty and would not need any maintenance work to prosper.

I have seen readers give false hope to clients for relationships that are obviously over, never to return.

These are but a few of the ways that unskilled use of tarot can hurt us in relationships. In this age of livestreamed collective tarot readings, there are also those who conflate a collective reading on YouTube or TikTok with a specific one-on-one reading. This can lead to a great deal of misunderstanding and misguidance for those already in emotional turmoil.

How Tarot Can Help

Good practices in relationship readings require asking the right questions and managing expectations.

Collective readings on social media can be fun, interesting, informative, and even profound. However, do not assume that the collective reading about “where your relationship is going” is necessarily a valid piece of helpful information for your individual situation.

Do not assume that the future of a relationship is always predictable at all. Love is a choice that each partner must make every day. It may be impossible, in a single reading, to predict what two people will choose each day for the rest of their lives.

 “Will we stay together?” “Is he the one for me?” “Is this the right relationship?” “Is this my soulmate?” are very often not helpful questions, or questions that can easily receive an accurate answer.

On the reverse side, if the cards clearly suggest that a person might be dangerous or abusive, and you have other substantiating information or history, it might be a good idea to trust the cards and use caution, no matter how attached you may feel in your heart. If this is the case in an ongoing relationship, asking the cards about options and solutions can be very helpful.

When we ask, “What does this person feel about me?” or “What does this person think of me?” we may get a valid answer that is helpful. Or we may get an answer based on a passing thought or mood. Even in very stable relationships our moods and feelings can shift from moment to moment. A snapshot of a particular moment might be misleading. Asking that sort of question could also be a gross invasion of privacy.

There are many questions we can ask of the cards to help us navigate relationships.

A single person may receive great counsel by asking, “What can I do to attract the right partner?” or, “What can we know about the possibility of a new relationship for me in the near future?”

Tarot can be helpful in vetting possible candidates. A reading can give us a heads-up about potential good matches, and those who might be incompatible and inappropriate.

When you want to access the potential of a new relationship, a two-question reading is helpful. Ask “What is the worst this relationship could be?” and “What is the best this relationship could be?”

Another helpful question to ask any time in a relationship timeline is, “What can I do right now to make this relationship the best it could be?”

In a relationship, tarot can help us improve communication with our beloved, and can help us meet their needs, and get our own need met. “How can I help my partner?” can be a great question to ask. “How can I communicate my concerns to my partner in a way that they can hear me?” is another helpful question.

Tarot can help us know when it is time to leave a relationship, and how to heal. Tarot can keep us in communication with our loved one in spirit after they leave this earth.

If you have questions about love, romance, and relationships, tarot can provide helpful answers, but only if you have the skill to ask the right questions and interpret the cards thoughtfully, or if you find a good, intuitive, intelligent tarot reader to do those things for you.

If you are reading for yourself on your own relationship, it is helpful to remember this. No matter how intuitive you are, no one should fully trust their intuition when it comes to matters of their own heart. It is almost always impossible to discern the difference between desire and intuition when we are in the throes of heartbreak or attraction.

Follow your heart, certainly, but keep your head, and attend the wise counsel of tarot in a way that is healthy and healing. It is better to use the cards to help us make wise decisions, understand our feelings, find solutions, and know our options.

Many relationships feel like fate and destiny, but only a few of those truly are. Even a relationship that is a brilliant match can suffer from neglect and poor communication.

Many people think that the cards can help us know our fate. I think the cards do a better job helping us understand ourselves and those around us so we can make good decisions for the best possible future, in love and in life.

Reading Tarot for Yourself: Are There Times to Put the Cards Away?

Scroll through any social media tarot group and you will find a great deal of information, a bit of misinformation, and plenty of advice from tarot enthusiasts all around the world. It’s an opportunity to put your finger on the living, breathing pulse of tarot and see what is unfolding in the tarot world.

One bit of evolution I’m happy to see over the past few years is that the notion that one can’t or shouldn’t conduct a reading for oneself seems to be less in play than ever before.

This makes me happy. I believe that if one can’t read for oneself one shouldn’t read for others. I believe that self-reading is the process through which we learn about tarot and learn about ourselves. When we get good at self-reading, we also learn a great deal about practicing detachment.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t have readings with others. There is something very powerful about letting another individual divine for you, and it’s a different process than divining for yourself.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that, while most people seem to advocate self-reading, many tarotists also advocate the concept of “giving the cards a rest” and “putting your deck away” in response to sincere queries from readers who feel disconnected from their cards, or unable to read for themselves.

Let me restate that to be clear.

A tarot reader asks for suggestions because they are not feeling the flow of a reading. The standard ‘helpful’ solution is to stop trying and put the cards away.

There are plenty of techniques for pushing past a tarot reading block, including simply saying the name of the card aloud and listing its keywords. The idea that one should stop trying because one is struggling seems ludicrous to me.

Imagine telling a golfer struggling to get their putt right to put their clubs away! Would you tell a singer to stop practicing if they couldn’t hit the high note? Would a yoga teacher tell a student to just give up on a challenging posture, rather than helping them do the best expression of that posture possible?

Struggling to find a psychic connection, or having a hard time getting into the tarot zone, is rarely a reason to put the cards away. That so many tarotists use this as a first go-to seems to me to be the next bastion of the “you can’t read tarot for yourself’ crowd. The tune has changed only slightly. Now you can read for yourself, but only if no struggle or need for skills growth is involved.

This begs a question, though. Are there times when it does make sense to put the cards away? If you are using it right, tarot is a helpful companion on life’s journey; a companion that can make your life easier by giving focus, reassurance and perspective daily. Yet, I can think of two times in the past thirty years when it has made sense to put the card away for a minute. One was personal, the other happened to a client.

Long before I was a professional reader, I was a dedicated tarotist. When I became pregnant with my first child, I was a bundle of nerves. How would things turn out? Would I be a good mother? Would we have enough money? My mind raced with worry and insecurity.

I turned to the cards, but not in the contemplative and support way I now teach my students to use. I fell into the anxious cycle of predictive questioning, made worse by the fact that the Devil was stalking me. It was time to put the cards away.

After my son turned one, the cards came back and haven’t left since. I became a professional reader when he turned three. He’s twenty-eight now.

The only other time I’ve seen a need to put the cards away was in working with a client. My statement to her was not that she should put her cards away, per se, it was that it was okay not to listen to them. In fact, my exact quote was, “F the tarot”. Here’s why.

My client, a young woman, had met a guy she really liked. They were getting along, she saw a few red flags, but enjoyed him nonetheless. Her friend did a tarot reading for her that said he wasn’t to be trusted, and the relationship would not last. This prompted her to call me for a professional reading. My assessment was the same.

My client was bummed. She was having fun and enjoying this new relationship. The cards suggested that she was grounded and realistic, and that she could easily survive the worst this relationship might become. I didn’t see evidence of violence or abuse, and neither did she.

It was under those circumstances that I said, “Okay, F(orget) the cards. It’s fine to go forward and see what happens. If things start to go bad, you are forewarned and can get out quickly. In the meantime, enjoy yourself.”

Basically, the cards are not your mother. They can’t tell you what to do. Well, they can tell you what to do, but you can always choose to do something different. That’s how free will works.

If you are struggling to read the cards and understand their message, it’s usually better to lean in, study harder and listen deeper. If you are struggling with anxiety, or with a desire to throw caution to the wind and take a risk, there may be a moment in time when you find yourself unable to use the cards in a helpful way. These moments in a tarotist’s life should be rare and temporary.