What the card describes as a feeling
The state is shock. Not sadness accumulating, but a structure of assumptions giving way at once, which produces a distinctive kind of disorientation that people rarely describe accurately while inside it.
What falls in this card is usually something that was already unsound. That is the tradition's consolation and it is a cold one, because the collapse happens on its own schedule and not on anyone's terms.
Upright
Upright the reading is a sudden change in how the person feels, often triggered by something they learned. Anger, shock, or a realisation arriving all at once. Whatever the feeling was, it is not that any more.
Liberation is a legitimate reading of it too. Some illusions are exhausting to maintain, and their collapse is felt as relief, though rarely at first.
Reversed
Reversed the collapse is delayed, resisted, or already past. One reading is a person who can see the structure failing and is propping it up, dreading the moment more than the event.
Another is upheaval avoided, the crisis postponed rather than survived. The third is recovery: the shock has happened and what is felt now is the slow rebuilding, which is a different card in practice from the fall itself.
Outside romance
In a friendship this is the moment one person learns something that changes the record retrospectively. At work it can be a colleague whose view of you altered abruptly after a single event. Within a family it frequently marks a revelation that reorganises how a relative understands years of history, and their feeling towards you is now a reaction to that rather than to you.
What a feelings position can and cannot tell you
Reading a card as a person's feelings is a modern positional practice, not something the older tradition did. The deck returns a quality and the reader assigns the person, which is the only place the specificity comes from.
Consequently this cannot tell you what someone feels about you or that something has happened. It describes a kind of upheaval; you decide whose. Used as information it replaces the question you could ask, and a shock read into someone's silence is usually the reader's own invention.
What the Tower suggests is to find out what actually happened before responding to what you imagine happened. That is asking, not drawing.
Questions people ask about this
Does the Tower mean a breakup?
It describes sudden upheaval in what someone feels or believes. Whether that becomes a break is not something the card states.
Is the Tower always bad in a feelings position?
It is disruptive rather than simply bad. What collapses under it is usually something that was already unsound, though that is little comfort at the time.
What does the Tower reversed mean as feelings?
A collapse being resisted, one postponed rather than survived, or the rebuilding after it has already happened.