Are we meant to be?

People type are we meant to be when something has become hard, and they want to know whether the hardness is a sign. The distance got longer, a family had opinions, the timing keeps being wrong, or the two of you have had the same argument four times and are starting to wonder whether the argument is the relationship. We want to take the wanting seriously, because underneath the big phrase is a very ordinary and very tired question about whether to keep going.

No card can rule on whether two people are meant for each other, and we will say something plainer than that: we are not convinced there is a ruling anywhere to be read. What a reading can do is describe what the two of you are actually like, over ordinary weeks, which is the evidence people walk past on the way to the larger word.

What this reading is looking at

The three cards below are the love spread: you, where you are standing in this; the other person, as far as what they do can honestly be read from outside; and what the two of you have built between you in practice. That third card is the whole reading for this question, because are we meant to be points at something outside the two of you, and the card points back at the thing you have actually made together, with its Tuesdays and its unwashed cups in it.

What are we meant to be hands away

The word doing the work is meant. It puts the decision somewhere else, in a plan that could be checked if only somebody had the right instrument, and it makes the two people in the relationship into the ones waiting to hear. That is a comfortable place to stand when things are hard, and it is worth noticing that it is also the one place from which nothing can be done.

We would rather hand the decision back, because whether or not a plan exists, the relationship is held up on Thursdays by two people doing ordinary things on purpose, and that part is yours whichever way the larger question goes.

Where we are honest about the word

The sentence to be careful with is the one that goes, if it is meant to be it will work out. It sounds like faith and it often works like a way of not deciding, and in most relationships where one person is saying it, the other person is doing the carrying. If that lands somewhere, it was said kindly, and you are allowed to put the sentence down.

The Temperance card is the nearest the deck gets to what people mean when they type are we meant to be, an angel with a foot on the land and a foot in the water, pouring between two cups at a rate that works, and it is a picture of continuous careful mixing rather than a verdict handed down. That is the honest version of the word, and it is a job description.

What the two of you are like on a Tuesday

Big questions get asked about small evidence, and the evidence here is the ordinary week: who does the noticing, whether repair happens after an argument or the argument just stops, what you are like with them on a day nothing is happening. None of that photographs well and all of it predicts more than a feeling of being meant does.

If the question has arrived because it has been hard for a long time, the is my relationship over quiz looks at the difference between a hard stretch and an ending, without telling you to leave, because nobody on the internet gets to do that. And if the question is really about him and whether he is the right person rather than about the two of you and a plan, is he the one is the closer page.

What the question is usually about

Most of these readings turn out to be about permission. The reader is asking to be allowed to stop trying so hard, or to be allowed to keep trying when everyone around them has gone quiet on the subject, and the card cannot grant either, but it can show which one the reader arrived wanting. That is worth knowing, because it is usually the answer they came for, arriving under the other question’s name.

The other finding is a hardness that has been treated as a test. Distance, family, timing, and a rough year are real weights, and a relationship that carries them is not proven by carrying them, any more than one that puts them down has failed something. Difficulty proves nothing on its own, and the question is whether the two of you are any good at it together.

What to do before you sleep

Take the plan out of the sentence and see what is left. Write down, in one line, what you would do about this relationship if you knew for certain that nobody was deciding it except the two of you, and then leave the line until morning before you do anything with it. Most people find the line is clearer than the phrase ever was, and a little more frightening, which is how you know it is yours.

Whatever you write, the deciding is allowed, and so is choosing each other on purpose without a plan behind it, which is what most of the long ones turn out to have been.