What does Three of Cups mean in love?

A relationship supported by a wider circle: the couple who have friends in common, the partner who has been absorbed into a group, the engagement party rather than the engagement.

The card is making a real point about durability. Relationships embedded in a community of people who know both parties behave differently from ones conducted in private, and the tradition reads the difference as protective.

Reversed, a third person complicating things, or a relationship that has quietly isolated somebody from their friends. The second is the reading worth naming plainly, because it happens gradually, is rarely intended by anybody, and is much easier to see from outside than from inside.

As somebody's feelings, it reads as warm, sociable and unpossessive: this person enjoys you and is not making a great weight of it, which is either welcome or disappointing depending entirely on what you wanted.

Celebration, friendship, reunion. Good news worth telling people. Collaboration that is genuinely fun.

Its instruction is unusually simple: accept the invitation. The card is associated with the thing that gets declined because of tiredness or work and turns out to have been the important part of the month.

It also favours saying the good news out loud rather than waiting to be asked. Three of Cups is the card of announcing something, and the tradition treats an unshared joy as a diminished one.

Overindulgence, or the third party in a two-person situation.

Also social exhaustion, gossip, and a friendship group that has become draining rather than restorative. That last is the most useful and the least dramatic: a circle maintained out of history rather than pleasure, where everybody is slightly relieved when it is cancelled.

The third-party reading is traditional and worth handling carefully. It describes a configuration rather than an accusation, and it turns up as often for a demanding friend or a relative as for anything romantic.

Upright: friendship, celebration, community, reunion, shared joy

Reversed: overindulgence, third party, gossip, social exhaustion

• Who have I not celebrated with lately?
• Which friendships feed me, and which do I maintain out of habit?