What the card describes as a feeling
The state is attachment that has hooks in it. Desire, obsession, dependency, or simply not being able to stop thinking about someone. It is intense and readers who want intensity to mean love should be careful here.
The chains in the traditional image are loose enough to remove. The tradition's point is that the person could leave and does not, which makes this a card about choice disguised as helplessness.
Upright
Upright the reading is powerful physical attraction, fixation, or an attachment that persists against the person's own assessment of it. Feeling of this kind is real and is not a good guide to anything.
It can also be simpler and less bleak: strong desire in a situation where the person feels they should not want it, for reasons of circumstance rather than character. The card does not distinguish an unhealthy bond from a forbidden one.
Reversed
Reversed the hold is loosening. The common reading is recognition, someone seeing the pattern for what it is and beginning to detach, which is usually painful rather than triumphant.
The other is a bond tightening in secret, denial deepening. A third handling is release already achieved, the feeling now looked back on. What the surrounding cards describe, escape or entrenchment, decides between them.
Outside romance
In a friendship this can be a dynamic neither person enjoys and both keep returning to. At work it fits a colleague whose interest in you is tied to what you provide them, which they may not have examined. In a family it often describes an obligation felt as love, where the tie is real and the resentment underneath it is too.
What a feelings position can and cannot tell you
The feelings position is a modern reading habit rather than an old one, and it asks the deck to describe an interior. What it can actually deliver is a quality; the reader is the one deciding whose interior it belongs to.
That step is unverifiable, so a card cannot tell you what a person feels about you. It offers a shape and you attach a name. Treated as evidence it becomes a way of avoiding a question, and with this card that avoidance is often the whole reason for the reading.
The Devil's suggestion is to name the thing you are getting from the situation, precisely. Compulsion survives on being unexamined, and the examination is something you do rather than something the deck does.
Questions people ask about this
Does the Devil mean someone is obsessed with me?
It describes compulsive attachment as a quality. Attaching it to a named person is the reader's step, not the card's.
Is the Devil ever a good card for feelings?
It marks intensity, which some people want. Intensity under this card comes with poor judgement attached, and the tradition does not read it as love.
What does the Devil reversed mean here?
Usually a hold loosening and a pattern being recognised, sometimes the opposite, with denial deepening instead.