Ahhh, welcome danymason! It’s great to meet you. 😁
The first thing I would say to myself is if the Rider-Waite deck isn’t working for you, it’s okay to start elsewhere - that kept me from learning and really getting into it for years. So you’re already off to a great start by getting a deck that you are interested in! If it doesn’t work out for some reason, try to identify why and see if you can find or try a different deck. Personally, I need a lot of detail in my deck art - the minimalist style is beautiful, but I don’t have enough visual cues to help me remember the meanings and read intuitively.
The second thing I would say to myself is to read for me and my own decisions, not to cope with the decisions of others that are out of my control. Unfortunately, my start with tarot was part of coping with the uncertainty of a painful romantic situation. In the end, it turned out fine, but it was better to talk directly to the people involved, and where I was guessing or using tarot, that was a sign I wasn’t getting the communication I needed. It sounds like you’re in a good place, but I saw a lot of people on Reddit justify some really questionable sounding relationship dynamics using tarot, and that’s definitely something to watch for and be aware of.
Third - reading about each card is great, this is the way I do it too! What I do is I pull each card, and think of how it relates to my life and the gut feeling it gives me. Sometimes I know the general meaning and it clicks right away, and sometimes I need to look it up. Usually, a story kind of jumps out at me that connects the themes, and changes what aspects of the card I focus on. It’s kind of like looking for the details in a fuzzy picture, and then suddenly understanding the picture for what it is. So I would add that it’s good to focus on each card, but also to review the story that connects all the cards together in the spread. 😁