What does Six of Wands mean in love?

Pride in a partner, and a relationship other people admire.

That second half carries a small warning inside a warm card. Being admired from outside is pleasant and it is not information about the inside, and the two are easy to conflate when the admiration is enjoyable.

Reversed, a relationship performed for an audience. The performance is usually not cynical: it starts as pride and becomes a habit, and it gets harder to say anything true the longer it runs.

As somebody's feelings, it reads as proud of you and pleased to be associated with you, which is genuinely good and is a slightly different thing from tenderness.

Recognition, achievement, good news. You have won and people know it.

Confidence earned rather than performed, which is the distinction the card cares about: this is not self-belief, it is an accurate reading of a result.

In an advice position it says accept the acknowledgement, which sounds trivial and is the part people reliably fail at. Deflecting praise is a habit, and it teaches everybody around you to stop offering it.

Success without recognition, or recognition without substance.

The first is demoralising and common: the work was done, the result arrived, and it was absorbed into somebody else's account of the year.

The second is ego inflating past achievement, and the tradition names it without much sympathy. Also read for a fall from a public position, which the card treats as the risk that comes with the parade.

Upright: victory, recognition, confidence, good news, progress

Reversed: lack of recognition, ego, private success, fall from grace

• What am I minimising that deserves to be called a win?
• Whose recognition am I actually after?