The Lovers
The Lovers is arguably one of the most famous cards in the tarot. Only Death and The Devil are as well-known. One exception to this may be The Fool, if only because by dint of being the first card of the popular Smith-Waite deck, it is usually the first and consequently the most memorable card that people usually see when they interact with a tarot deck. In the popular culture surrounding the tarot, it’s also one of the most superficially amatonormative cards in the Smith-Waite deck, and as a result can be a really difficult card for ace and aro people to resonate with.
My first memory of this card is really the first memory that I ever have of the tarot as a whole. It comes from watching reruns of the James Bond movie Live and Let Die, with Roger Moore smirking and gunning his way through another British adventure opposite Jane Seymore. She uses Fergus Hall’s Tarot of the Witches, a deck patterned after the Tarot de Marseilles, and apparently commissioned specifically for this movie. (At that time, the notoriously litigious company US Games Systems squarely possessed the copyright to the Smith-Waite deck, and MGM/United Artists clearly didn’t want to pony up the cash for the rights.) In my humble opinion, I find the deck on the whole visually uninteresting, and downright ugly in some places.
In one classic scene burned into my memory, Roger Moore’s James Bond, ever dapper and dashing, succeeds in seducing Seymore’s clairvoyant character Domino. He does so by — surprise surprise — pulling the Lovers card for her, of course clearly signifying that they are fated to have hot, passionate normative sex with each other. They’re fated to become Lovers, because hey, that’s what the card says, right? Just like how when someone pulls the Death card, that means that someone is obviously going to die, or if someone pulls the Hanged Man, it’s an clear reference to someone being literally hanged. (And it surely wouldn’t mean anything else, would it?)
As we pan away from the couple, locking lips and bodies in an amorous, passionate embrace with each other, we see that clearly there’s been some tomfoolery with the deck, as a whole bunch of duplicates of The Lovers fall to the floor. What kind of Tarot deck is this!? Where did all of those extra cards magically appear from!? Clearly Bond wasn’t playing fair.
Even at a young age, I didn’t feel scandalized, or grossed out by this. I felt angry at this show of dishonesty and manipulation — and more than a little frightened at the thought of a pack of cards, cursed with evil, black magic, and demonic or occult energies being able to predict my impending doom. Or perhaps, more than that, was the fear that it had the power to take one’s fear of death, and turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Contrary to the frequent accusations of the tarot being demonically influenced, in the Smith-Waite deck, the Lovers is a blatant reference to the story of Adam and Evil from the Old Testament. In addition to the figures of Adam and Eve, we see the serpent (which we see coiled around a tree-like shape which is assumed to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil), and an angelic figure that is often attributed to be the Archangel Uriel, forever closing off the Garden of Eden to humans after Adam and Eve’s fall. It is a powerful symbol of the choices we make, and consequences we have to face (for good or ill), as a result of making them.
With this symbolism, the meaning of the Lovers has more room with aspec folks to shift to a place with more depth and nuance, and less blatant amatonormativity. Instead of being a card simply about partnered sex, the Lovers becomes a card about choices. And like the fateful decision made by Adam and Eve, it’s about the kind of choices from which there can be no turning back. Perhaps it is the ending of a relationship that comes from a conclusive realization that both partners have mismatched sexual desires. Perhaps it is a decision made to finally out oneself to friends, family and loved ones. Perhaps it is the decision to shed one’s own assumed allosexuality for a queer identity on the aromantic or asexual spectrum. Whether metaphorically or literally, this decision comes with the understanding that there is a powerful force compelling us to constantly move forward (which may even wield a flaming sword, providing additional motivation for us to not go back to old habits and mindsets). There is no turning back, and no looking back. Once you’ve bitten into that apple, or broached that difficult conversation in the company of your friend or partner, that’s it. It can’t be taken back.
This still weighs heavily on my mind. While I can likely trace the stirrings of my asexuality from instances in my childhood, or from those first conversations about asexuality when a childhood friend outed herself to me, I feel like the first real beginnings of my asexual journey was my decision to end a relationship of almost a decade. I’d poorly managed the changes in our lives that led to subsequent changes occurring in our intimate connection. And of course, I’d subsequently poorly managed those changes as well. I was confused about what I needed, what I wanted, and why. It all culminated in a Really Bad Decision I’d made, that at time made sense to my confused brain.
While it ultimately helped me on my journey, and in a 20–20 hindsight kind of way was actually necessary for me to endure, I still wish I could have handled that better. More things that needed to be expressed could have been said. Less people could have been potentially hurt.
As I said earlier, the road to better understanding oneself — whether or not that leads to queerness, or asexuality — is very seldom one that is smooth, and easy. And again, along the way it presents us with important choices that may not, if ever, give us the chance to go back to the way things were.
Another dimension to this card which strongly resonates with me is the theme of duality. Pamela Coleman Smith and A.E. Waite jointly made the decision to centre this card on the two figures of Adam and Eve, thus making and astrological correspondence of this card to the sign of Gemini, The Twins. As I’ve said before, a primary theme of the tarot is balance, and here, that balance is between male and female; I choose to see this in a very “Jungian” sense, in that it can represent an internal balance between the male archetypal spirit (the Animus) and the female archetypal spirit (the Anima). I’m consciously aware of the more problematic, strictly gender binary-reinforcing elements of this, that often ascribe the more logical, intellectual aspects of the self to the “male” side and the more creative, emotional aspects of the self to the “female” side. But I still think it’s useful to be open to thinking of these as elements of our inner world to both be brought out, encouraged to grow, and embraced.
In a more abstract sense, this may direct us as aspec people to explore our identity in new, previously unconsidered ways, like art, music, and writing. This might also take the form of seeking new forms of processing our inner experiences, like therapy or counseling, to supplement our existing techniques. If you’ve been intensely focusing on interrogating your own feelings and experiences, perhaps now is the opportunity to immerse oneself more deeply into the written experiences and narratives of other aspec people who have struggled with their identities; Julia Sondra Decker’s The Invisible Orientation and Angela Chen’s Ace are excellent places to start.
In a literal sense, this may involve further probing and exploration of how one’s own asexuality exists at the intersection of other non-monosexual identities, like being pansexual or bisexual. These kinds of journeys can be especially crucial for those who identify as greysexual/greyromantic, that gloriously fuzzy liminal space where asexuality or aromanticism may be punctuated by a unique level of non-normative sexual or romantic attraction. For some aspec people, myself included, their journey in exploring asexuality is intimately intertwined to their journey in exploring their capacity for attraction to other genders and sexual identities. In this same vein, this may also involve exploration and interrogation of one’s own gender identity, inviting one to challenge their previous assumptions of simply being cis-gender, or monogender.
On yet another level is an interpretation that I often also ascribe to this card, which further robs of it of its potentially oppressive amatonormative and heteronormative meaning: love for the self and love for one’s own hidden nature. To once again draw from the well of Jungian concepts, this embodies a call to love one’s own inner aspects that for various reasons, we may have ignored, repressed, or suppressed, which echoes some of the themes seen in the High Priestess: our inner, intuitive selves, which may often be hidden in the light of our day to day conscious selves. For asexuals and aromantics, perhaps this may mean a time for accepting one’s own capacity and experience in actually having a sexual or romantic attraction to someone else, as rare or as occasional as those may be. It may mean acknowledging the need to be in a partnered relationship, which in my own experience I’ve tried to deny or suppress as I explored my own asexuality. As someone on the asexual and/or aromantic spectrum, existing on other axes of oppression (in my own personal case, disability and race) I’ve thought a great deal about the shadow self; our own inner selves that, for our own individual reasons, we’ve tried to avoid, or disregard. This is the time to stop fighting and give that side of ourselves the long embrace it’s really wanted for so long.
Despite the long, exegetical analyses we can make of The Lovers that can reclaim it for asexuality and queerness, this card can still never seem to fully shake off the more amatonormative and heteronotmative associations cast upon it by popular culture. Which is why I often love to see how other artists and creators interpret this card in other tarot decks.
In the classic Tarot de Marseilles, this card takes the form of a man caught between an older woman reaching for his shoulder, and a younger woman reaching for his belly. This is sometimes taken to signify the tension between a man caught between his mother (or his wife?) and a younger lover, but since the Marseille deck is often one rich in ascribed symbolic meaning, it is often traditionally seen as someone caught between being driven by their more unrestrained passions vs. the influence of Sophia — the Feminine Spirit of Wisdom and Knowledge. His head turned, he chooses the latter. But given this person’s body language, I strongly feel that this card also tells us that it is important that one should be in balance between passion and reason.
In one of my favorite decks, Cristy C. Road’s powerful Next World Tarot, we see a woman fully dressed in a formidable leather jacket and an imposing and intimidating array of tattoos. She is someone who clear does no harm, but takes no shit. But she has a cane, too. Looking in the mirror at herself, fully naked, her other form exists without tattoos, without the cane. Maybe this is the woman she wishes she was, unfettered by her body or the traumas for which it has been forced to keep score. Maybe this is who she really is, her inner spiritual self in opposition to her outer physical self. Moving out of the mirror, her other self shakes hands with her. The road to acceptance and committing to self-love — arguably, the purest, most powerful and most important form of love — has started.
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Next: The Chariot
