Upright the Two of Cups is read as partnership, mutual attraction and the meeting of two as equals; reversed, as imbalance, a broken connection, or a bond that has gone cold.
Pre-Golden-Dawn cartomancy read a bare two of cups plainly as love or friendship begun, without Smith's caduceus and winged lion adding any specifically alchemical or higher-union dimension; those details are her own contribution, generally read by later commentators as elevating the card above ordinary romance toward a partnership understood as a reconciliation of opposites, a reading the older, simpler tradition does not require.
Waite's own printed meaning, the vision and formation of the marriage of love, is more explicitly conjugal than the broader mutual-attraction reading most contemporary practice now applies to any equal partnership, romantic or otherwise; the shift toward reading the card for business partnerships and close friendships as readily as for romance is a twentieth-century broadening not obviously present in Waite's own text.
Because the card is matched exactly by both the Golden Dawn's and Crowley's titles, both simply Love, it is one of relatively few small cards where a reader moving between Rider-Waite-Smith and Thoth systems does not need to reconcile competing occult names, a consistency this card shares with very few others in the deck.