What the card describes as a feeling
The state is two things being mixed until they work: feeling and judgement, wanting and waiting, one person's pace and another's. Someone reading as Temperance is adjusting rather than declaring.
This can be dissatisfying to read if you were hoping for intensity. What the card offers instead is sustainability, which is a less exciting quality and the one that determines whether anything lasts.
Upright
Upright the reading is patient, moderate feeling that is finding its own level. Compatibility being worked out in practice. Attraction is present and is not being allowed to run the situation.
Healing appears here as well, in the sense of something recovering slowly and correctly. Where a connection has been damaged, this card describes repair that is actually taking place rather than being asserted.
Reversed
Reversed the balance has gone. One reading is excess, feeling pushed past what the situation can carry, or a person swinging between hot and cold. Another is impatience: forcing a pace that will not hold.
The quieter reversal is a mismatch of tempo, two people wanting the same thing at different speeds, which is one of the most ordinary reasons connections fail and one of the least discussed.
Outside romance
At work this reads as a colleague comfortable with you at a professional temperature and uninterested in more. In a friendship it marks affection that has settled into a workable shape after some adjustment. In families it often describes a relative who has made peace with who you are rather than who they wanted, which is a real achievement and rarely announced.
What a feelings position can and cannot tell you
The feelings slot is a modern convention laid over an older practice that asked about situations. What the deck supplies is a quality of feeling, and the person it is attributed to is supplied by the reader alone.
Nothing in that mechanism can reach into another person. The card gives you a description; you provide the subject. Taking the result as fact turns a reflective exercise into a substitute for asking, and a substitute is all it can ever be.
Temperance suggests letting a pace be what it is and checking whether your own expectations are calibrated to it. If they are not, saying so is the adjustment the card describes.
Questions people ask about this
Does Temperance mean weak feelings?
It means moderate ones. The restraint is deliberate, and a moderate feeling that lasts is not the same as a small one.
What does Temperance reversed mean as feelings?
Excess, swinging between extremes, or two people wanting the same thing at incompatible speeds.
Is Temperance good for a relationship question?
It is usually read as favourable and unhurried. It says nothing about duration, which no card can.