Will We Get Married? A Tarot Spread for Couples Who Are Wondering

You’ve been together for a while. Maybe he talks about “someday,” maybe he doesn’t say anything at all, and you keep doing the math in your head. So you ask the cards: will we get married?

Below is how I read this question and the spread I’d start with. If you’d rather not lay out the cards alone, you can send me your question.

What tarot can and can’t say about marriage

I don’t name a wedding date, and I don’t promise a ring. A reading is not a script written in advance. What the cards show well is the state of the couple: how close you really are, what each of you wants from marriage, and what’s standing in the way. That’s the part you can actually work with.

There’s something else. When a woman asks “will we get married?”, the question can mean different things. “I’m ready.” “I’m tired of waiting.” “I’m afraid that if it doesn’t happen, everything will fall apart.” The cards pick up all of it. So in a reading about a man you see two layers at once: him, and your own attitude toward him. I wrote about this in the article on the Magician and the Moon.

The five-card spread

Start with an open question: “What is going on between us when it comes to marriage?” An open question gives you a picture of the situation. A yes-or-no question gives you a single word. I explain the difference in the article on asking tarot a yes-or-no question.

Shuffle and lay out five cards in a row:

1. Where the two of you are now. The real state of the relationship, not the one in your head.
2. What marriage means to you. Your hope, your fear, your reason for asking.
3. What marriage means to him. How he sees it, and how ready he is.
4. What’s in the way. It can be a circumstance, something between you, or something inside one of you.
5. What depends on you. The step that’s actually yours to take.

Read the five as one story, not as five separate answers. The positions are a frame, not a cage. A card in the fourth place can turn out to be about him, or about you, so I look at the whole row before I decide.

The cards everyone hopes for

Some cards point toward marriage, and you’ll recognize them:

• The Hierophant: an official, traditional relationship. Marriage, a church wedding, a union built on shared values, respect, and trust.
• The Four of Wands: an engagement, a wedding, starting a family, a home together.
• The Ten of Cups: a happy marriage, a family, the feeling of home, where you belong.
• The Empress: often an official marriage, children, a warm home.
• The Lovers: a decision to take the relationship to a more serious level and make it official.

But one of these cards in your spread doesn’t mean a wedding is coming. I always check the position first. The Ten of Cups in “what marriage means to you” is a dream. In “where you are now” it’s a fact. And a spread with no wedding cards at all is not a no. It tells you the relationship is busy with something else right now.

A case: marriage as a way out

A client asked whether she would marry the man she was with. Three cards came up: the Knight of Swords, the Hermit, and the Nine of Swords.

The Knight of Swords is coldness. The relationship was one long fight: lots of arguing, each of them defending their own rightness, lots of sharp words and mutual claims. The Hermit is loneliness and distance. Even side by side, there was an emotional gap, because each of them was shut inside their own state. The Hermit also asks for a pause, time to think things over. The Nine of Swords is heavy tension and sleepless nights. It’s the stress she was in right then, and the way she kept winding herself up.

My conclusion: the idea of marriage was probably forming as a way to escape that anxiety. It wasn’t a natural next step of love. I didn’t see an early wedding in those cards, because there were too many contradictions. So I told her to move the focus from making the relationship official to a different question: how do you get out of this crisis and stop hurting each other?

She wrote back: “I really am thinking about reconsidering the format of our relationship. We’re constantly at each other’s throats. He has his point of view, I have mine, we both flare up, and it’s wearing us down.”

A case: why can’t I get married

Another client asked why she couldn’t get married. She got the Four of Cups, the Wheel of Fortune, and the Moon.

The Four of Cups shows emotional fatigue and a closed heart: “they’re all the same.” On the card, a hand holds out a cup, and the figure sits with folded arms, not wanting to take it. It’s quite possible she was turning away the people who came into her life. The Wheel of Fortune is a cycle. She was living the same scenario again and again, picking the same type of partner, one she couldn’t build a marriage with. The Moon is fears and anxiety. Behind the wish to marry there may be a fear of betrayal, or “I don’t want to live the way my parents did.” And the Moon is also self-deception, hiding your real feelings from yourself. A partner can feel that.

My advice: change the criteria for choosing a partner and your own habitual reactions, and step out of the inner isolation. The cards left room for change, but she had to turn toward it and reach out her hand, like the figure on the Four of Cups.

What to do after the reading

Notice what happened in both cases. The question “when?” turned into “what is going on between us?” and “what is going on inside me?” That is the useful part of a marriage spread.

When the cards are laid out, ask yourself three things. What did I hope to hear? Which card did I want to skip? And what does the fifth card, the one about what depends on you, ask me to do this week?

If what you see in the cards and what he actually does don’t match, don’t take the cards to him as proof. Have a calm conversation about what each of you wants. What he’ll do, you’ll see in how he behaves with you day to day.

If you want me to read it for you

You don’t need a perfectly worded question. Tell me what’s going on between you and what you’re hoping for, and I’ll lay out the cards, including the ones you may not want to look at. If two cards seem to contradict each other, I’ll explain what that means.

Order your reading. You’ll get a recorded video within 24 hours, where I go through your spread card by card.

A reading does not pass a verdict; it lays out the possible options so you can see them. For entertainment purposes only, not financial, medical or legal advice. No guarantees of accuracy or outcomes. 18+.