Two of Cups

While nearly everybody who writes about this card speaks first of the love between two people (or an avowal of continued love), we need to remember that this card can as easily pop up in questions about business or broken plumbing. The vignette in the RWS deck obscures a far more general meaning, much as it does in the Trump of the Lovers. Recall that the Two is a stretching of the point, giving it a direction, a line, or a vector, or a contrast between earlier and later states, and that Cups represent affective states, shaped feelings or emotions. This card, then, is about making feelings last and go somewhere on purpose, an emotional connection either with a person or with a hoped-for result, changing, if possible, only for the better. The couple exchanging vows is one very good exemplar of this core meaning, but it’s not the only one, and even here, Crowley’s phrase “love under will” or love with some direction to it, is more to the point than simply love. It’s feeling or attractive force joined with purpose and permission. This is honest and conscious love, something elective, or chosen, not something fallen into. This is not a case of “the heart wants what it wants and can’t help it.” It’s water’s nature to fluctuate, often making the maintenance or even continuity of an affective state something of a challenge. While many will argue that since ups and downs are necessary, each to contrast the other, then they must be experienced in equal intensity and duration. But this is platitude, and suffering is not necessary to happiness. Neither does happiness require an attachment to something more stable. It’s often simply a matter of setting aside our complaints and deciding what we want, combined with a sense of gratitude for whatever we have at the moment, and patience with the pace of the rest of the parade. To make a feeling or emotion last in an unchanging way is perhaps a little deluded, but we might think of this as a stream that we can make more steady and reliable with better intentions and attitudes. Any extended feelings will have to come to terms with the changes that time has to offer. Besides duration and intensity, we also have choices of quality. We want worthy and meaningful states, hearts full of respect and appreciation, love and trust, comfort and enthusiasm. It’s OK to be conditional here, to set conditions like these. We want to grow into a future where such states come more often and stay longer. And we want to have the times that lie between these to show some improvement as well. We tend to think of our feelings and emotions as things that happen to us. Many somehow think it’s inauthentic to show some self-control or management here. Comes love, nothing can be done? That’s largely a way of fooling ourselves, particularly into proceeding with extramarital affairs. The vector that should be our greatest concern here is between our present and future selves. How much quality and worth do we wish to prepare for, and are we ready to work on the values we need to attract ourselves in the better directions. The Yijing counterpart, Gua 05, Anticipation or Waiting, concentrates on the things we might do while waiting for our real lives to begin, on maximizing the meanwhile, which will eventually include all of our moments. It will take more work than wishing to have the fullest life, and the work needs something to want. We could make better use of our emptiness here by not filling up on random experience. We may want to guard some gates and even lock some doors. Being reconciled or resigned to host any strange thing that comes our way is a big part of our emotional confusion, and the main reason we get knocked so far sideways when we at last cross the path that we should have been on. Lastly, there is the great challenge of doing all of this work with someone else as a partner. Life has evolved some useful tricks to help get us started here, like oxytocin and dopamine, to blind us to each other's flaws and faults for a sufficient amount of time, until it’s too late to just walk away. We have until these begin to wear off to have built a more lasting foundation, not just with promises and vows, but with meaning and sincerity, common ground and purpose, trust and support, sacrifice and conciliation. These must be enough to challenge and defy all reason. This is in hope of something more than sum of the parts, why two or more are gathered.