The Love Tarot Guide — What the Cards Can Show You About Your Relationships

It will not tell you whether he is coming back.

Nothing can. That question is the most searched thing in this entire category, and the honest answer to it is unbearable in the week you most want to ask — which is exactly why so much of this market has decided to sell a different one.

This book does something narrower and, in daily use, far more useful. A relationship has two halves and you are one of them entirely. Everything about your side — what you actually want, what you are afraid of, what you keep repeating, what you have not said — is available to you and is mostly not being looked at. That half is where the readings that hold up live, and it is also the half you can change.

What is inside

• Six chapters on asking a question the cards can answer — including the reframe table that takes "will he come back?" and gives you the version with an answer.
• The four suits read for relationship: what Cups, Swords, Wands and Pentacles each mean when the question is about a person, where each one turns up, and what it means when a suit is missing entirely.
• All 22 Major Arcana in love — upright, reversed, and what each one is commonly misread as.
• The six cards people most dread in a love reading — Three of Swords, The Tower, Death, The Devil, Eight of Cups, Ten of Swords — written as plainly and undramatically as possible.
• The six cards most over-read as a yes — The Lovers, Two of Cups, Ten of Cups, Ace of Cups, Four of Wands, Knight of Cups. These are the ones that do the damage.
• The court cards, and how to read them without inventing a person.
• Attachment, plainly — the four-pattern model, what each looks like in a reading, and two honest cautions about a framework the internet has flattened into a horoscope.
• The pursue-and-withdraw loop, communication, boundaries, and the relationship that keeps arriving in different clothes.
• Eight spreads. Every position is about you, or is explicitly labelled as your own reading of somebody else. There is no position anywhere in this book for what they are feeling.
• 21 pages of journal — readings, pattern pages, one relationship tracked over six entries months apart, and one page called "what I keep asking" that you will not enjoy filling in.

What it will not do

It will not tell you what somebody else is thinking or feeling. No card reports another person's interior life, and a reading that claims to is describing your own hope back to you in a more expensive font.

It will not give you a date. There is no timing system in tarot that is not a convention somebody invented, and they contradict each other.

It will not decide whether you stay. Handing that to a piece of card is a way of not making the decision.

One more thing, said plainly

If you are frightened of somebody, that is not a reading. No spread in this book applies to control, contempt or being made to feel unsafe. There is a chapter on it in the body of the book, not buried at the back, and free confidential numbers for the UK and the US on two separate pages.

What you get

• 76-page PDF in US Letter
• The same 76 pages in A4
• A READ ME

You will need your own deck of cards — any Rider-Waite-Smith deck, or any of the many based on it. You do not need to know card meanings already.

This is the companion to The 78 Cards, which carries the full reference for every card in the deck. That one is the dictionary; this one is the lens. Neither requires the other.

Ask · Draw · Write