What does Temperance mean in love?

Harmony built through adjustment rather than luck. Two different people making a workable third thing, which is a better description of most long relationships than compatibility is.

The card is warm about difference. It does not describe two people who want the same things; it describes two who want different things and have found a proportion that works, and it treats that as an achievement rather than a compromise.

Reversed, extremes: hot then cold, all or nothing, intensity alternating with distance. The pattern is exhausting to be inside and is usually not deliberate on anybody's part. It is also the card for a reconciliation that is being attempted too fast after something serious.

As somebody's feelings, it reads as settled, warm and measured. Not dramatic, and the tradition is quite clear that dramatic and durable are different qualities.

Moderation, blending, patient recalibration. Find the middle without making it a compromise nobody wants. Healing follows here, and it follows slowly.

It is one of the best cards to draw after any of the deck's harsher trumps, because it describes the period afterwards: the recovery, the adjustment, the slow work of getting a life back into proportion. The Tower knocks something down and Temperance is what happens over the following year.

In an advice position it favours a small adjustment repeated over a large correction made once. It is a poor card for decisive action and an excellent one for anything that has been oscillating between extremes.

Excess or imbalance. Overcorrection. Impatience with a process that only works at its own pace. It can also mean two things being forced together that genuinely do not mix.

Overcorrection is the reading most worth watching for, because it looks like progress. Somebody who was working too much and is now not working at all has not found the middle; they have found the other end, and the card reversed is often describing the second swing rather than the first.

The last reading is the harshest and is occasionally correct. Not everything blends, and a great deal of effort gets spent proving otherwise before the conclusion arrives anyway.

Upright: balance, moderation, patience, blending, healing, proportion

Reversed: excess, imbalance, impatience, overcorrection, discord

• Where am I at an extreme that a small adjustment would fix?
• What two things in my life need blending rather than choosing between?
• What am I rushing that only works slowly?