The Relationship spread is a tarot layout of 7 cards, used for insight into the dynamic between two people. It is a spread built to weigh a connection from both sides rather than from one.
How it is laid out
In this arrangement the reader deals seven cards covering each person's role, the foundation and past of the bond, its present state, what is developing, and the overall direction.
Tarot spreads are conventions of interpretation rather than fixed rules: each fixes a set of positions, and the card that falls in a position is read in the light of what that position is held to mean. Some layouts, such as the Celtic Cross, are long established in the twentieth-century reading tradition; others, including several themed modern spreads, are more recent inventions. The Relationship spread is described here as one such interpretive framework within that tradition.
Multi-position relationship layouts of this kind, assigning specific cards to each partner individually before assigning further cards to the bond's foundation, present state and direction, became a standard feature of tarot guidebooks and card-included companion booklets from the later twentieth century onward, as tarot's marketed use broadened from the divinatory tradition's older, narrower run of general-fortune questions toward specifically relationship-counselling applications; no single guidebook or author can be credited as having invented the format, which recurs independently, with minor variation in card count and position naming, across a great many unrelated tarot publishers rather than tracing to one documented source the way the Celtic Cross traces to Waite.