What Does The Lovers Card Even Mean?

I think I prefer The Tower card to The Lovers. Maybe because I have pulled The Tower a few times now, and I can begrudgingly accept that whatever chaotic event it portended was probably for the best. At the very least, I can extract a few good stories from any Tower moment. The Tower is a ‘break you to build you’ kind of deal, and it gets rid of bad stuff along with the good. All you can really do when you pull The Tower is sit back and let the universe do its thing.

The Lovers card, on the other hand, puts all the responsibility on you. Though it looks and sounds like the kind of card a lonely spinster would pull in an 80s movie, compelling a psychic to say something like you will meet a tall dark stranger, this card is about contracts and choices. Not very romantic-sounding!

Sure, you could say that ‘to be chosen’ is a romantic ideal. But chosen for what reason – genuine affection and respect, or status and convenience? People rarely admit when they have married someone for the latter, or if they have settled – not to others or themselves. If this is the case, it’s not difficult to see how the two figures in The Lovers can devolve into the figures in The Devil and, shortly after, The Tower (in the natural sequence of the Major Arcana).

The Lovers is one of those cards I get so frustrated by when trying to research and understand, because I just can’t find a satisfactory answer about what it means. (If you know of one, please send me a link, or share your thoughts about The Lovers in the comments.) I think it exemplifies a union between masculine/feminine or yin/yang energies, which The Fool up to this point has learned about from The Magician (1), The High Priestess (2), The Empress (3), The Emperor (4), and The Hierophant (5). When The Fool reaches The Lovers (6), he/she/they is tasked with uniting the duality of light and dark, good and evil, etc, to understand how opposites are always both sides of the same coin, and must be integrated into a whole. But the whole wedding blessed by an angel thing – or, as in the Marseilles deck, a man choosing between two women – it’s giving patriarchy, in a way I can’t quite explain.

Maybe that’s what bothers me about it. I think The Lovers says that we kind of have to participate in life’s pre-existing systems, whether we like it or not. (I do not.) We can challenge and push against patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism; we can exist in the margins of these systems. But the margins are still a part of that giant ecosystem we call life. As long as the rest of the world outside our echo chambers participates in these systems, we have to as well. We already do, just by buying groceries at big chains or having social media accounts or credit cards. I’m not saying we need to play along with ideologies we disagree with in order to dismantle them from the inside – none of that BS. But we do have to contend with them, because they exist and we exist within them. How we participate within them is key, and a constant dilemma.

One memorable time I pulled The Lovers card, I was visiting my family in India, early 2025. I had no idea I would be back a few months later due to urgent, unexpected circumstances. Both these visits to India were so meaningful that I finally understood why, in The Godfather, after Don Corleone is attacked, Michael Corleone changes overnight. He goes from feeling out-of-place at a family wedding, whinging to his non-Italian girlfriend about how his family is so garish and he wants nothing to do with them, to shooting his father’s rival point blank at a restaurant. Shortly after, Michael hides out in Sicily, where he marries a local girl. The wedding scene is very Lovers-coded, in that all the choices Michael made so far now has now become one with his character. He is no longer just Michael Corleone, son of Vito Corleone, but Michael Corleone, heir to Don Corleone.

When you pull The Lovers card, some shift in allegiance – some shift in character – is made official. Whether it’s to somebody else, a family, a job, a place, an organisation, or an ideology. Or just a newer, wiser part of you than now has to co-exist with the old you.

It’s overwhelming! The Lovers is an overwhelming card. (I mean, look at the Rider-Waite imagery – it’s so extra.) It’s why Julia Roberts wears sneakers under her wedding dresses in Runaway Bride, and why Attachment Theory is a whole cottage industry. Commitment-phobes might hate The Lovers card, and serial monogamists might love it. But nobody is spared the consequences of their choices.

• I am hosting another tarot-creative writing salon in London, on Wednesday 22 April. The last one was a lot of fun, and I was told by a guest that it had demystified tarot for them in a way that was really helpful. It’s a very different vibe from a standard writing workshop, which can feel loaded with the pressure to impress. Here, it’s really just about learning to be less precious with your words and trust that the tarot will guide your creativity. For example, one guest said he hadn’t written in over a decade and hesitated to share. I encouraged / forced him to, and it was so clever and unique – about a piece of clothing somebody had donated to a charity shop with mysterious powers. I will think about it every time I pull the 9 of Cups (the card that inspired it).

• My books are open for tarot and astrology readings (in person or video call); menu is here.