I don't know what it is, but I really do not like this card. When I first got this deck a few weeks ago, I sifted through all the cards and made note of the ones I liked most and least (a habbit picked up from Froud's Faeries). The moment I saw this card, just six cards into my perusing, I knew it would be my least favorite.
Truth be told, there is only one lovers' card that I DO like, and that's from legend: the Arthurian tarot, but that's another study all together.
I recognize that this card is supposed to symbolize utter trust and comfort shared with another person. I understand the apparent beauty in this, and that the reason for their nakedness is in their lack of fear of being exposed, and in the naturalness of this state, but while I understand all this on an intellectual level, I can't grasp it emotionally.
Their nakedness makes me uncomfortable (maybe I'm too caught up in victorian ideas of modesty --- I've been accused of that before!), like I am intruding on their privacy. I don't like the way he has his eyes closed, his face leaning towards hers, but she stares past him, off into the distance: that's not equality of devotion or direction. I don't like the division of roles symbolised behind them, the little house in the distance on her side, and the farmer's fields on his. I know, the cards are set in a more traditional time, and I'm not even a feminist, really --- heck, I'm a Capricorn and a hierophant, rooted in tradition, but it irks me. Maybe I'm just looking for things to critisize in this card.
Jessica Macbeth, in the companion book for the Faeries' Oracle, notes that those cards we have the most adverse reaction to represent those aspects of ourselves we are least able to admit, examine, see, or understand, so I suppose I should be looking at this card with less critisism towards it, and more on myself: maybe I'm uncomfortable with that level of trust given to another person?