What does The Fool mean in love?

Early, unguarded attraction. A relationship with no defined shape yet, and that is the appeal rather than a problem to be solved. The card is associated with the period before the terms have been agreed, when neither person is managing an impression.

If partnered, it asks you to meet each other as strangers again rather than as a settled arrangement. That is not a criticism of the arrangement. It is a specific suggestion: the tradition reads The Fool in a long relationship as an invitation to be surprised by somebody you have already decided you know.

Where it is genuinely cautionary is about pace against information. The Fool describes moving before you have much to go on, which is a real and normal way to begin something, and is also how people end up a long way in before finding out anything important. The card does not say the feeling is wrong. It says you are early.

As somebody's feelings, it reads as interest that is present, unguarded and not yet committed to a shape, which is a different thing from either indifference or intent.

A genuine new chapter, entered without a plan. Say yes before you feel ready. The card favours beginner energy: curiosity over expertise, movement over analysis, faith that the ground will meet your foot.

What it asks for specifically is the willingness to be visibly inexperienced. The Fool does not reward the person who waits until they can do the thing competently and then arrives looking as though they always could. It rewards starting in public, badly, and letting that be the situation.

It is also the card most associated with not needing the outcome to justify the decision. Where other cards ask what a step will produce, this one asks whether you would take it anyway.

Recklessness dressed up as spontaneity, or the opposite, standing at the edge and refusing to move. Ask which one it is. Reversed, The Fool also points to a leap taken to escape something rather than to reach something, which is the version that most often gets mistaken for courage.

The distinction the tradition draws is about what is behind you. A step taken towards something unknown is the card upright. A step taken away from something known is the same movement with a different engine, and it tends to arrive somewhere similar to where it left.

Also read as potential kept permanently in reserve: the plan described often and never begun, protected from failure by never being tested.

Upright: new beginnings, innocence, spontaneity, faith, free spirit, potential

Reversed: recklessness, naivety, hesitation, poor judgement, inertia, avoidance

• What would I start today if nobody were keeping score?
• Where am I calling caution wisdom when it is actually fear?
• What am I carrying that I could put down before the next step?