Strength in love, and the gap between holding something and putting up with it

Strength in a love reading is about the manner of your handling, and hardly ever about how much you can take. Worth getting straight early, because the word printed under this card everywhere you look is courage, and courage is the reading that sends people back into another year of exactly what they are already doing.

So start with the picture. A woman with her hands at a lion's mouth, closing it, gently. The animal is not fighting her. No cage, no weapon, and the only chain in the card is a rope of flowers she is wearing rather than using.

Nothing in the image is straining. If what you are doing feels like straining, you are not in this card yet.

the part of it nobody reads

Above her head there is a sideways figure eight. The Magician has the same symbol over his, and in the Two of Pentacles it comes back as a ribbon looping two coins that are never allowed to land. It means ongoing, with no end built into it.

That is the warning inside a card everybody receives as a compliment. This is not a crisis being survived. It is a state maintained, indefinitely, by one person who is good at it.

The mountains are in the distance. Nobody here is climbing them.

holding, and putting up with

Holding is when your hands are on something and it answers. The situation moves because you are there. The lion leans in.

Putting up with it is absorbing something that is not changing. You take the weight, you take it well, and the thing carries on precisely as it was.

From outside they are identical. Both get called strong, by your mother, by the friend who says she does not know how you do it. From inside they are nearly identical too, which is the real trouble.

One test, and it takes a minute. Has the thing you have been strong about actually moved in the time you have been strong about it? Not softened. Not discussed at length. Moved.

If it has, you are holding it and the holding works. If it has not, you have been supplying stability to a situation as a service, and everyone including you has called that patience.

The undefined thing you have been graceful about for two years. The man who is not ready, said in June and again in October with nothing in between. Neither is a strength problem. You already have the strength, which is the part the card just confirmed.

What it asks is what the strength is for. And sometimes the honest answer is that a decision has been sitting there a while wearing the costume of a hard season.

when it lands reversed

The lists say weakness and self doubt. That happens, and it is not what mostly comes through the door.

Mostly, reversed is force. The hands have tightened, the gentleness that made the card work is gone, and what is left is management: his moods anticipated, your messages timed, a Thursday spent pre solving a Saturday. Control does not stop being control because it is done gently and out of fear.

The second version is quieter and does more damage. The discipline turns inward and becomes self suppression. You have not raised the difficult subject since the spring, you have got very good at not minding things, and somewhere in there you started calling it maturity. Nobody will query that, because a woman who never makes anything awkward is a pleasure to live with.

what it cannot do

The card sits on your side of the table, so it is one of the least informative in the deck about him. Any reading that turns it into a report on his intentions has swapped cards on you. It will not say where he was on Friday or who was with him, and a reader producing that has started writing a story with a real person in it.

No date in it either, a stretch at most. And it does not tell you which way to decide, only that a decision is what is in front of you.

how Gillian reads Strength

Gillian will not congratulate you on how well you are coping. Everybody arriving with this card has already been told they are strong by three separate people, and in her view that praise is part of the machinery keeping the arrangement running.

Her first question is never about him. It is a date. When did the current version of this begin. Not when you met, when it became this. People give her a month and then go quiet, because saying June, last year out loud does something that thinking it never did.

Her second is what would count as it being finished, specific enough that you would know on the day. When the answer is a sentence he might one day say, she tells you plainly that sentences can be postponed forever at no cost to the person not saying them. She also reads the animal as the situation rather than the man, every time, and checks before she assumes.

And she is careful about the obvious wrong turn. This is not a leave him card. Staying is a decision too, and there is a difference between staying because you chose the terms and staying because choosing is the hard part.

what other cards do to it

Next to the Chariot you have two control cards working in opposite directions, one by force and one by contact. Both out usually means one is being used on a situation that called for the other.

Next to the Eight of Cups it gets uncomfortable and clear. One says you are able to hold this. The other says a person can walk away from something that was never broken and still be right.

Pulled about somebody who has gone, it reads on the months since rather than on the relationship, and that has its own page. If the question underneath yours is how much longer, should I wait or move on takes it directly.

bring the arrangement

You already hold what this card is asking for. The date, and the number of times nothing changed after a conversation, filed under patience because there was never a row to point at.

Bring that instead of the keyword. Gillian will want the date inside two messages and will have a view by the third. Cheaper found out in live chat than across another fourteen months of being admirable about it.