Six Cups are filled with flowers. A boy gives a cup to a small girl. As in all Sixes, this card shows an exchange whereby both parties benefit in their own way. The Six of Cups shows the harmony of giving and receiving loving attention, connecting to each other, forming attachments that are stable and yet dynamic. While both parties gain, they do not - cannot! - give love just to satisfy their own emotional needs. They have to be generous, in that sense.

 

Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

 

- Maria Popova

 

To understand and be understood, that is the real joy to be got from any relationship. And more generally, our identity and humanity seem defined by these relationships with other humans. This is what is expressed by the South African concept of ubuntu:

 

'A person is a person through other people' strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through recognition of an ‘other’ in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the ‘other’ becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The ‘I am’ is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance.

 

- Michael Onyebuchi Eze

 

Coming back to a personal level, the important thing to remember is that a healthy exchange of love always takes two generous parties, and a delicate balance between them. If we are too reliant on a more independent partner, or conversely, if we get more love than we can give, it might not be so easy to sustain the relationship for too long.

 

Alternatively, we can also take Six of Cups to refer to the emotional equilibrium within ourselves. This too, is a game of give and take. We can only face so many negative emotions before we need to restore the balance and connect with something positive.