What does Seven of Cups mean as someone's feelings?

Idealising somebody, or too many options preventing any real connection.

The idealising reading is the sharper of the two and is about the shrouded cup: what is being loved is a version supplied by the person doing the loving, and it does not survive contact. That is not a comment on the other person, who is usually unaware of the part they are playing.

The second is a genuinely modern situation and the card handles it well: plenty of possibility and no actual connection, because a shortlist that never closes is not a shortlist.

Reversed, seeing a person as they actually are, which is either a loss or the beginning of something real and is frequently both.

As somebody's feelings, it reads as unclear and probably idealised: this person may be feeling a great deal about an idea of you rather than about you, and it is not a stable position for either of you.

A card drawn to represent another person's feelings does not read their mind. What it can do is describe the dynamic as it reaches you: what is being expressed, what the shape of the connection is from where you sit.

That is a real answer and a smaller one than the question usually wants. Readers who promise more than that are not being straight with you.

A better question with the same card: what is this connection actually like, and what do I need from it?

Choice overload, wishful thinking, illusion. Options that look better than they are, with one that is genuinely good hidden among them.

The hidden good option matters. This is not a card that says everything on offer is worthless; it says the presentation is unreliable and the sorting has not been done.

In an advice position it asks for something specific and dull: investigate one of them properly rather than imagining all seven. The card is quite clear that the imagining is the pleasurable part and the reason nothing progresses.

Clarity arriving. Cutting through to the real option and committing to it, usually with some relief.

Or, less happily, retreating into fantasy entirely, where the options have stopped being candidates and become a place to live.

The useful test the tradition offers is time. A choice that has been open for a long time is not being considered, and the card reversed is often the point at which somebody notices how long it has been.

Upright: choices, illusion, fantasy, overwhelm, wishful thinking

Reversed: clarity, commitment, disillusion, escapism

• Which of these options would I still want if nobody knew I had chosen it?
• What am I imagining rather than investigating?