The Lovers card vs. the soulmate myth

A client came to me in February, in the small hours of a Saturday, with the question I get more than any other. Some version of, when am I going to meet my person. She is thirty-four, lives in Williamsburg, works in publishing, is exhausted and tender and a little bit angry. She has been on dating apps for four years. She has done the work. She has read the books. She wants to know when the soulmate is going to arrive.

I pulled the Lovers in the position of what the question is actually about. I expected to. The Lovers comes up in almost every reading that has the word soulmate in it, and almost never in the way the client thinks the card means.

I want to write about the Lovers properly, because this is the card that takes the most damage from popular culture and the one whose actual teaching is most worth recovering. The Lovers is not the soulmate card. It is, if anything, the anti-soulmate card. It is the card of choice made from values rather than fear, and the difference matters enormously for the actual life you are going to live.

What the card shows, and what it doesn't

Pull out a Rider-Waite-Smith Lovers and look at it. Two figures, naked, in a garden. A tree behind each of them. An angel above. The sun. The angel is not blessing a marriage. The angel is presiding over a moment of decision.

That's the first thing to notice. The Lovers is not a card of an arrival. It's a card of a choice. The angel is there because the choice is serious enough to require witness. The figures are not being given to each other. They are choosing each other, in front of someone who can see them choose.

Look at the trees. The tree behind the woman has fruit. The tree behind the man has flames. Read symbolically, these are the two histories each of them brings. The temptations, the longings, the patterns. The card is not pretending they arrived empty-handed. It's saying, given everything they each carry, they are still choosing this.

That's a much more specific thing than soulmate. The soulmate framework says you are meant for each other. The Lovers card says you are choosing each other in spite of all the other things you could be meant for. The first is given. The second is earned, and re-earned, and earned again.

The soulmate framework, where it comes from, why it limps

The soulmate idea, in the form most clients bring to my table, is a fairly modern invention. It picks up steam in the 19th century, gets reinforced by 20th-century cinema, and becomes load-bearing in 21st-century dating apps, which have a strong incentive to keep you swiping by suggesting that the right one is one swipe away.

The framework says: there is a person who fits you in a specific, predestined way. They are out there. Your job is to find them. Once you find them, the difficulty of love will be lessened, because the rightness of the match will carry you through.

It's an attractive story. It would relieve a lot of the labour of relationships if it were true. It's mostly not true. The closest thing to truth in it is that some people do, in fact, fit each other better than others do. Compatibility is real. Compatibility is also not enough. Two compatible people who can't make a choice from their values, instead of from their fear, will tear each other apart. Two less-than-perfectly-compatible people who can make a choice from their values will build a long, working love.

The Lovers card knows this. It's not asking who is the right one. It's asking what kind of choice you are making with whoever is in front of you.

What the Lovers card asks you, when you let it ask

When the Lovers comes up in a love reading, the question I almost always end up asking the client is some version of this.

Are you choosing this person, or are you avoiding being alone.

Are you choosing this person, or are you trying to settle a feeling about your own worth.

Are you choosing this person, or are you trying to get your parents to approve of your life.

Are you choosing this person, or are you afraid of starting over.

The Lovers is not asking whether the relationship is good. It's asking whether the choosing is yours. A good choice that came from fear is still a fear-choice, and the relationship that follows it will, eventually, run into the wall of the fear that made it.

Conversely, a choice that came from values, even a hard one, even one that other people don't fully understand, has a different quality. It holds. It can be revisited. It doesn't need constant external validation. The Lovers, in the card's truest reading, is a values card before it's a love card.

The client who came in asking about a soulmate

The client I mentioned, the one from February, came in asking about her soulmate. She wanted the cards to tell her where he was. I asked her, before pulling, what she meant by soulmate. She gave me the standard description. The one who would understand her. The one who'd make the work of dating end. The one who'd give her life the shape it didn't currently have.

I pulled three cards. The Lovers came up in the present position. The Four of Cups in the past, the card of the figure under the tree refusing the cup that's being offered. The Eight of Cups in the future, the figure walking away from a row of cups toward the mountains.

The pattern was clear enough that I just laid the cards out and let her look at them for a minute. She started to say something about whether the soulmate was the figure with the mountains. I stopped her gently and said, look at the Lovers. The choice is in front of you, but the choice is not the one you came here asking about.

She asked what I meant. I said, the soulmate question you brought in feels like it's about a person. The cards are saying it's about a place. The Four of Cups is the city you've been refusing to leave even though you know it isn't fitting you anymore. The Eight of Cups is the move you've been postponing. The Lovers in the middle is the choice. The cards don't think you have a soulmate problem. They think you have a do-I-stay-in-this-city problem, and you've been routing it through the dating apps because that's the form your loneliness has taken.

She cried a little, which is something that happens in those readings. She said her sister had been telling her to move to Mexico City for two years, that she'd been turning the idea over and refusing it because she had built a publishing career in New York and she was supposed to want New York. I asked her if she still wanted New York. She thought about it for a long minute and said, I think I want a city where I'm not the smartest in the room. I think I want a city where I can keep learning.

She moved in April. I had a postcard from her last week. She has a small apartment in La Roma. She has not met a soulmate. She has, in her words, met herself.

The Lovers card did exactly what the Lovers card does. It gave her back her choice, in front of her own face, and let her make it from values instead of from fear.

A reading I gave wrong, briefly

I want to be honest, because the rule of this blog is honesty. I read the Lovers as the soulmate card for the first three years I read. I told clients that the right person was coming. I told them to be patient. I told them the cards saw a love arriving.

I was using a script I had absorbed from the culture, not a reading I had earned. The clients liked it. They tipped well. They came back. The trouble was that several of them, a year or two later, would come back and tell me they had married someone the cards seemed to have promised, and that the marriage was hard in ways they had not been prepared for.

The marriages weren't bad, in most cases. The clients had been told the hard part was the finding, and the keeping would take care of itself. The Lovers card had been used, by me, to promise an arrival, when the card was actually trying to teach them about the choice that has to be re-made, on most Tuesday mornings, for the rest of a long love.

I don't read the Lovers that way anymore. The clients sometimes resist the change. They came in for the soulmate card and they want the soulmate card. I tell them, gently, that the card has more to say than that, and that they are welcome to keep me in the chair for a little longer and let it.

De-romanticising the card without removing the romance

I want to be clear that none of this is an argument against love. The Lovers is still a love card. Love is still wondrous. The arrival of a real partner is still one of the largest gifts a life can offer.

What I'm arguing against is the soulmate framework, not the love. The framework is what makes clients miserable. The framework is what keeps them swiping into their forties, refusing perfectly good people because they don't match the imagined shape. The framework is what keeps people in relationships they should have left, because they think the difficulty is proof of soulmate status rather than a sign that the choice has been made out of fear.

Take away the framework. Keep the love. The Lovers card, properly read, will not promise you a person. It will promise you a kind of agency. The agency to choose, from your own values, in front of your own eyes, with the trees of your own history behind you, and to keep choosing.

That's a better promise than the soulmate one. It's also a more honest one. And the people I know who are in long, working loves, the ones I'd take advice from, are not people who found their soulmate. They are people who learned how to choose, and they live in the practice of choosing every day. The Lovers card is on the table in their kitchen, even when the deck isn't.