A Very Different Venus

11.15.14


As far as the interpersonal-relationship vibe in the air is concerned, our week ahead couldn't feel more different than the couple which preceded it.

Tomorrow (Sun Nov 16), Venus leaves Scorpio and enters Sagittarius, where she'll stay through the second week of December… reinvigorating the fire element's present strength, and forming trines to both Uranus in Aries (Nov 26) and Jupiter in Leo (Dec 4).

But first, before meeting up with Uranus and Jupiter, Venus will collide by square with Neptune in Pisces this coming Thursday (Nov 20)—and that comes with a whole other set of issues than what we've most recently contended with. A Venus-Neptune square heightens our potential to gloss over bedeviling details, ignore red-flags, and/or interpret a situation based on what we wish to be true… all in order to preserve the shiny happy blissful feelings of relational unity.

Venus-Neptune aspects magnify our romantic and idealistic tendencies, which we often experience pleasantly, as an overtone that softens our disagreeable edges and opens our heart to greater compassion for others' feelings and circumstances. And that all sounds pretty nice. Taken to its logical extreme, however, such a Venus-Neptune influence can also inspire us to sacrifice our own interests on behalf of someone else, to deny the faults or failures in another person, and/or to delude ourselves about the less-lovely realities of an interpersonal dynamic.

Even on its own, Venus in Sagittarius is already eager enough to hurriedly downplay certain inconvenient particulars which might trip up the relational ease, in favor of moving forward together based on shared big-picture values. Sagittarius is able to so readily troop on with its trademark optimism, in large part because it proudly claims to 'not sweat the small stuff'… and, as such, is quick to paint its understanding of complex situations in broad generalizing strokes, an interpretive act that can also minimize the significance of a 'smaller' concern somebody else may find quite important.

In some circumstances, there is obviously great value in Venus-in-Sagittarius's focus on the broader perspective of 'what really matters' in a relationship—e.g., we truly care about each other, we want the same things out of life, we have a similar philosophic worldview. At the same time, that same wide-lens focus may blind us to certain cumbersome specifics which require our mindful attention… as if to suggest any party who insists on slowly-and-carefully unpacking a problematic dynamic is merely wasting time being petty, splitting hairs or making mountains out of molehills, as opposed to diligently clearing things up.

This week's Venus-Neptune square, then, bears the promising capacity to help us move past any recent interpersonal tough-spots, providing us some perspective-expanding distance from our own woundedness (and the frightening feelings it instinctively conjures), and allowing us to more sympathetically feel into the other person's wounded soul. It's a reminder that we all must keep looking ahead—no matter the hurt that's been caused (perhaps on all sides?) from our prior exchanges—if we intend to continue pursuing as-yet-unmaterialized goals which await us further down the road, instead of sinking in the quicksand of righteous emotion we refuse to let go.

Yet, the Venus-Neptune square also brings a very real danger: that those of us who cannot or will not endure the sustained confrontation with uncomfortable or painful truths which must be processed, if we hope to relate to each other on a genuinely intimate and real level, will rush through the process, skipping critical steps and proceeding onward in relationship (or not in relationship, as the case may be) without acknowledging what hasn't in fact been worked out. What I'm calling a 'danger' may, in the immediate experience of it, actually feel rather good. That's the intoxicating hazard when Neptune is involved. Our pain-sensors become anesthetized to the aggravating dynamics, courtesy of a moment's 'good feelings'… and we're only too happy to keep ourselves drugged with relentless optimism, granting the benefit-of-the-doubt to culpable perpetrators while repudiating our own culpability and/or victimhood.

A relationship which develops atop an unsteady foundation, of course, risks future catastrophes once a storm hits, the ground shakes, or more weight is heaped upon its structure. And if we hurry through the handling of details, skip steps, or willfully disregard possible structural perils, we're doing just that: leaving rotten planks, unreliable support beams, or empty spaces undergirding our interpersonal satisfaction. That's like living on the water's edge in hurricane country, praying the elements won't destroy what we know they eventually will.

As I said at the beginning, this whole Venus-in-Sagittarius/Venus-square-Neptune energy is remarkably different than the Venus vibe we've just come from… namely, a conjunction of Venus and Saturn in Scorpio, which formed to exactitude last week (and which I wrote about toward the end of my last article). Not only is Venus in Scorpio extremely consumed with (if not obsessed by) all the very complicating and emotionally-intense angles that Venus in Sagittarius would just as soon glide right over, but, conjoined with Saturn, her job is to ensure we've responsibly attended to the serious business of relationship-building with our fullest due-diligence. That's why some relationships end due to these Venus-Saturn pressures, if they cannot withstand a reality-check encounter with the 'serious business'. And when problems are ignored under Venus-Saturn, they only anchor themselves more firmly into the relationship's foundation, crystallizing into a form much more difficult to overcome.

Saturn will be entering Sagittarius in just a little over a month from now (on Dec 23)… and will not only transit the same zodiac-zone where this week's Venus-Neptune square occurs during the year ahead, but actually stations (or appears to stand still, while switching from direct to retrograde motion) within a fraction of a degree of this exact placement in mid-March 2015. In fact, Saturn remains inside this one-degree orb through much of February, March, and April of next year, and returns again in early November. This suggests we can almost surely expect to see, sometime in the months to come, any corrective consequences or rightful ramifications from having avoided problems, dodged the sobering truth, and/or fallen short of our due-diligence in our interpersonal dealings… even as, in this current moment, our lapse-in-accountability may have felt like the easiest or most pleasant way to move forward.