The Lovers Beckon Us to Become Balanced

Osho Zen Deck

The Lovers card in Tarot can cause much confusion.  Many automatically assume that it means love will be crossing their path (the Tarot’s Two of Cups more aptly signifies true love), when really the card is more about balancing and merging the male (The Emperor) and female (The Empress) energies in oneself than about experiencing love with another.  We must all no matter what sex we are balance our male energy/yang with our female energy/yin to attract and sustain the loving relationships we wish.  The corollary is if we are unbalanced within ourselves, we will attract unstable relationships.

From my experience of first love at sweet 16 up until my separation from the father of my eldest daughter in my mid-thirties, I could never get enough affection or reassurance to appease my fear of abandonment.  Such a fear may have rooted from feeling abandoned by my father at one year’s old when my parents divorced.  No doubt many of us born after WWII in the Western world have confronted such fears with the break-down of the traditional family unit.  This fear of abandonment fueled my position of vulnerability in relationship to the men in my life.  Ironically, in retrospect, I was always the one to leave my adult relationships so I did not actually ever have to re-experience the pain of being abandoned myself.  Please look out for my future posting on The Devil to read more about how we often become what we fear as a way to overcome it.

When the Lovers card appears in a reading, you can expect that one or more lovers will be in your path, but more importantly expect to come to terms with what you need to balance in yourself.  If there is more than one lover crossing your path, then you are looking at the complexity of your own psyche.  If you have trouble knowing who is the right one for yourself, then that reflects a dilemma in yourself about how to integrate your different sides.  What you will find is that no matter what form a lover takes in looks, ethnicity, religious background, gender orientation, mannerisms, or personality, the same relationship dynamics will re-occur with any and all your lovers over time until you recognize and reconcile your own emotional patterning.  After three serious long-term partners, all very distinct from each other, I realized that no matter what they were like, I always ended up feeling the same, second to their other interests.

A partner or lover will always mirror back both strengths and weaknesses within your self.  So for a woman, the significant men in her life mirror her male energy.  Likewise for the man, the significant women in his life mirror his female energy.  If you become critical of what you see in the significant other, then you must examine what you may need to change in your self (see my previous article on the Magician).  It’s easy to point the finger at the other and not admit your own weaknesses.  It took me years of relationship struggle before I realized that the weaknesses I saw in my male partners were a sign that I needed to strengthen my own male energy (see my previous article on The Emperor).

Soon after the revelation about my own male energy, I became engaged to the most respectful and supportive man (now my husband) I had ever met and we went on a holiday adventure to Istanbul.  There perched along the beautiful Bosphorus Sea, we visited the spectacular Topkapi Palace, dating back to the 14th century Ottoman Empire.  Within the palace walls, we entered the very cloistered former harem.  At once within those windowless blue-tiled walls, I knew with every cell of my being that I had been there before, not in this life, but what must have been many lifetimes ago.  I could not help but weep and weep as I felt the memories of confinement and absolute subservience in that sad place.  Then, holding the hand of my fiancé, when we exited the harem suites, I leapt with joy at the sense of total freedom I felt in leaving with a man of my choice, a man with whom I could feel equal not subservient.  Interestingly, my older brother, did some research on our family genealogy (see  www.23andme.com) and found it rooted back to a Turkish woman.  So this magical experience gains factual validation!

Here see how the Major Arcana in the Tarot represent levels of experiential learning whereby the previous lessons of the Magician, Empress, and Emperor clearly must be integrated in your mastery of the Lovers.  Just as Genevieve explains in her previous article on The Four Elements in Relationships that each zodiac sign evolves to a greater level of complexity, so it is with the Major Arcana of the Tarot.