One Simple Trick To Increase Passion in Any Relationship

It should come as a surprise to no one that the deeper your relationship is, the more you open up and discuss your lives and life in general with your partner, the more satisfying both of you will find it. One study, which became a pop culture phenomenon when the New York Times reported on it as The 36 Questions That Lead to Love, found that intimacy between two strangers could be accelerated by what the study’s authors called “sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure.”

Those questions likely spawned a million better first dates (that were statistically more likely to become actual relationships) for anyone brave enough to wield them. More often, they probably made for better-than-average “date nights” for couples who were already together. While passionate love tends to decline over time in long-term relationships, studies also show there can be exceptions. The key to being an exception, maintaining and even increasing passion long-term, is continuing that deep level of self-disclosure.

My soon-to-be wife and I had fun when we stumbled on those thirty-six questions at the beginning of our relationship seven years ago. While rehashing those thirty-six questions wouldn’t do anything to continue deepening or building passion in our relationship, we also stumbled on an equally interesting and constantly changing set of questions that does.

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While in college, she had a side hustle reading Tarot in bars in New York. She doesn’t pretend to be any kind of psychic, explaining, “The thing about tarot, what I never hide or even try to mystify, is that it’s really just a Rorschach test.” She was ahead of the psychiatric community in her realization. Since that time, tarot cards have become an accepted therapeutic tool in psychotherapy. As Jessica Dore explains in her 2017 article Using Tarot in Psychotherapy:

Just like the Rorschach and Thematic Apperception tests, a set of classic tarot cards portrays ambiguous images of humans in a wide range of situations. Though tarot cards do not function in quite the same ways as projective testing methods, when the cards are used correctly, they can help to better understand the patients, and to help them to better understand themselves.

Here’s a quick glimpse at how it plays out in a relationship. Several months ago, she was reading my tarot and the “Hermit” card was in the “things working for me” position. That card symbolizes “withdrawal from events and relationship to introspect and gather strength, seeking the inner voice or calling upon vision from within.” We had a short conversation about me being an introvert and a writer and the projects I was focusing on and how all of that fit together. Recently, we decided to spend an evening making martinis and reading each other’s tarot again and that card popped up in the “things working against me” category. That lead to an even more interesting conversation about my tendency to overanalyze and overprocess and where the line is between those things working for me and against me.

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You don’t need to “know how to read tarot” to do this

If you want to memorize tarot cards’ meanings, learn fancy ways to spread them out, and wear a turban while you read them by candlelight, go for it. The truth is, you don’t need to know what any of the cards mean or even have a deck of tarot cards.

If you want to have an interesting and fun conversation on a date, pull up a random tarot card generator like this one, type 10 in the number of cards you want, search the name of each card (which will provide an immediate summary of it’s meaning) as you go along, and think/talk about how each of the cards, in order, relate to:

1. Your present situation
2. Your current path in life
3. What’s working against you and blocking your path
4. What’s working for you and your current opportunities
5. Your home and family
6. Your job and vocation
7. Your relationship
8. What you need to become self-aware of
9. Your past
10. Your future

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Finding out the cards’ meanings is more important than it may seem because many tarot cards mean things that aren’t obvious from the face of them. If you draw the fool in your relationship slot, it doesn’t mean you or your partner is a fool. That card has more to do with new beginnings and faith in the future than actual foolishness. Death in your future has more to do with letting go of things holding you back from your past and present through self-awareness than an impending coronary.

The only other thing you need to know is that “major arcana” are essentially like face cards in a normal deck; more important and more significant than the “minor arcana.” If you draw one, think and talk about how that specific thing may be a more significant issue than you’ve realized in terms of your past, job, or home and family, etc.

That’s literally all there is to it — no turbans, candles, or even cards required. You can “read,” which really means discuss, each other’s tarot over dinner on your phone. That means twenty glimpses into your lives, often from angles neither of you have looked at them. Twenty short conversations that can sometimes become longer conversations, all of them deepening your relationship though self-disclosure.

In terms of passionate love, current science says nothing will establish, continue, or build passion better than doing that.

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The usefulness of tarot in building relationships is not limited to romantic relationships. It’s fun to do with friends, often deepening those relationships as well. Conversations about how a card meaning “completion, accomplishment, and travel,” relates to their jobs or something they should be self-aware of aren’t small talk.

As parents, our daughters’ periodic request for tarot “readings” has provided fascinating glimpses into their teenage lives as well. I seriously doubt either my daughter or I would ever pause to think about — let alone have a brief conversation about — how her drive and ambition, represented by the Knight of Swords, is something that could be working against her. We have, though, and as the conversation unfolded I think we both realized that’s probably something both of us should already have considered.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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