Man, I gotta tell you something real plain. This Five of Swords card, it hit me like a truck last month. I’d been avoiding writing about it because it’s just messy and nobody wants to admit they’ve been in a relationship that felt like a cheap parking lot brawl.
I’ll tell you exactly how this went down.
The Mess I Stepped In
A few months back, I was trying to disentangle myself from something that was never going to work. The arguments we had, man, they were brutal. Not physically, but the words—they felt like daggers. I remember one night, we were fighting about something dumb, like leaving a dirty dish in the sink, but it blew up. When it was over, I felt this rush, you know? I had the final word. I saw the look on the other person’s face—total, tearful defeat. I walked away feeling like I absolutely won that round. I won the point. I won the right to be pissed off.
I got home, sat on my couch, and I looked around. I had silence. I had ‘won’ the argument. But I felt empty. Worse than empty. I felt like a thief who stole a rotten piece of fruit. That feeling was the trigger, the moment the reality sank its claws in.
I grabbed my deck. I didn’t even shuffle properly, it felt too urgent for ceremony. I just felt this need to pull one single card that described the last three months of fighting. I reached out, pinched a card from the middle of the stack, and flipped it over.
It was the Five of Swords.
Recording the Card’s Punch
I swear, that image just stared back at me. You got this guy in the foreground, he’s got three swords slung over his shoulder, looking smug, looking victorious, maybe even a little guilty. But then you see the other two figures walking away, shoulders slumped, defeated, maybe crying, maybe just exhausted. And the whole sky is just awful and scattered. It’s a scene of conflict and loss. It looks like a battlefield, not a relationship.
I’ve read this card a hundred times for money, career, or general drama. It’s always about hollow victories, betrayal, or being the loser who gets the crumbs. But seeing it right after that fight, with the bitterness still thick in my mouth—it clicked. It wasn’t a reading. It was a mirror.
I immediately cracked open my old tarot journal. I started writing down all the love meanings I could remember, just trying to process why this specific image felt so personal, so immediate. My initial gut feeling was that I was the defeated one, the one walking away heartbroken. But as I kept staring at the smirking guy, I realized I wasn’t just the loser walking away. I was the jerk in the foreground, too.
I had fought to win the point, and in doing so, I had lost the entire relationship’s peace, its foundation, and my own sense of goodness. It was a victory of pure, raw ego over any chance of real connection. I documented this painful shift in perspective right there. It changed my view of the entire toxic cycle.
Mapping the Toxic Pattern
This is where the real practical work started. I decided to use the Five of Swords as a self-help checklist for recognizing and avoiding this kind of toxic chaos. It wasn’t about fortune-telling anymore; it was about pattern recognition. I was done being in that picture.
I went back through every major fight we’d had and wrote down who initiated the “win-lose” mentality. It was shocking to see how often the dynamics switched, but the feeling of the Five of Swords was always there in the aftermath, like a lingering smell of smoke.
I specifically looked for these toxic actions—the Five of Swords behaviors—and logged them in detail:
- The Gossip Victory: Winning an argument by spreading bad information about the other person to mutual friends or family. It felt like rallying troops for a fight you shouldn’t be having. (Check. Did that once, felt sick for days.)
- The Emotional Hostage: Threatening to leave or hurt feelings just to force the other person to concede the point and drop the subject. It’s emotional blackmail. (Double Check. Experienced this one hard, and shamefully, employed it once.)
- The Petty Scoreboard: Keeping a detailed mental list of past failures or mistakes to bring up during a current, unrelated fight. You just weaponize history until the other side surrenders from exhaustion. (Triple Check. The core of every argument we had.)
I realized that the moment someone—either me or the other person—put their own pride or need to be right above the relationship’s stability, that Five of Swords energy flooded the room. It felt like watching the tragic scene on the card play out in my own kitchen, over and over.
The Avoidance Realization
The biggest takeaway I wrote down—and I’m sharing this because it’s the only way to avoid this specific relationship mess—is you cannot win against the Five of Swords. It’s a rigged game. There are no winners.
If you play the game, you end up one of two things: the defeated person walking away sad and robbed of dignity, or the ‘victor’ who is now alone, holding useless swords, standing on a pile of broken trust and connection. Both outcomes suck. Both are losses.
I spent a whole afternoon just thinking about how ridiculous it was. I had destroyed a relationship, or at least my peace in it, over a towel, a dish, or some other meaningless piece of pride, and then I celebrated the destruction. The Five of Swords isn’t a warning about defeat; it’s a brutal warning about the fight itself. It says: Walk away from this argument, no matter how right you think you are, because the cost of winning is too high.
My practical record finishes with one blunt line I scrawled in all caps in my journal: THIS IS THE RELATIONSHIP WHERE YOU DITCH YOUR PRIDE AND KEEP YOUR PEACE.
I literally packed up all the stuff that reminded me of that destructive energy, put the Five of Swords card face down on top of the box as a marker, and just left it. That was the only true victory I got out of the whole mess: stopping the cycle. When you see that energy creep in, the only winning move is to not play the game. Trust me on this one. I learned the hard way so you don’t have to.
